Give It a Rest

Contemplation, by Steve Henderson

Propers: The Second Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 9), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We closed the office for Memorial Day. I took advantage of this the night before by staying out a bit too late, playing old games with new friends. Come the morrow, I slept in, walked the dogs, lifted weights, finished a book, accomplished some few household chores, and watched a bit of Band of Brothers. I felt rested. I felt human. I felt as though I had observed a sabbath.

More than perhaps anything else—more than Kashrut Law, or circumcision, or attendance at the Temple—sabbath observance defined the people of God throughout the Hebrew Bible. One day out of seven, from sundown to sundown, Israelites were to cease from their labors; to take the time to rest and read and study and pray. And not just the rich, mind you, but the poor, the enslaved, the foreigner; even beasts of burden; even the land itself was to lie fallow, to rest and recuperate, every seventh year.

And the reason given for this in the Book of Deuteronomy is that the Israelites were to remember that they had been slaves liberated from their bondage—thus were they to liberate others. The ancient Israelites did keep slaves, some 3000 years ago, largely people who sold themselves into bondage over debt. Yet these were to be manumitted every seventh year. And whilst they dwelt in their master’s house, they were furthermore to be fed and clothed and seated along with the family. Few today would treat their employees half so well.

I do not say this in order to justify any form of human bondage, but to point out once again that the corpus of the Scriptures call for freedom, for liberation, for setting the captive free. And that’s what sabbath observance sought on every seventh day. Leisure, not laziness, is what makes us truly human. Leisure is time set aside for us to think and dream and be. Leisure is the font whence all our higher functions flow: philosophy, law, religion, science, music, art, and ethics. And that used to be sole purview of the richest of the rich.

Hunter-gatherers may have had a fair amount of time upon their hands, but they had little in the way of safety or security. For that one requires civilization, and specialization. But once those city walls go up, divisions start to form. The excess produced by the masses make the guys at the top into kings. The many labor whilst the precious few relax. And they justify their privilege at the peak via divine right or superior breeding or excellence in battle. Leisure, then, is traditionally both the reward and responsibility of the upper class.

Such was common in the time of Christ as well. Ancient Romans famously thought that any sort of labor, any real kind of job, was akin to prostitution, to selling your body for coin. The truly wealthy elite would never deign to stoop to work. How gauche. They had slaves for that. Rather, they used the riches reaped from their plantations to host dinner parties and building projects and to raise up Legions for conquest—investing, as it were, in pillage.

The sabbath Law of Israel is as remarkable as it’s unique. Here was dignity democratized, leisure for the laity. Everyone got a day off, to do with as they pleased, to be more than just a beast of burden, more than simply some machine. On the sabbath you could be, and not just merely do: a regular reminder that your worth is both inalienable and innate. So is the worth of an animal. So is the worth of the land. You are worthy, not because of what you do, but due to whose you are: you are a child of God.

The sabbath, then, may be construed as our first labor law, something that in time would give rise to world-altering rights, for women, for children, for the young and the old and the poor. Eight hours of labor, eight hours of rest, and eight to do as we please, right? Everybody’s working for the weekend, after all. Alas, the outer world encroaches, does it not? Postmodern society demands the dissolution of any division betwixt the professional and the private. You must either produce or consume, with no space left in between. They want to make us work all the time; and they want to make us buy things all the time.

It is in this context, of liberation, of human dignity, that the Pharisees question Christ’s conduct in our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus and His merry crew are going along through the grainfields, when His disciples start to glean and eat the grain. Now, this is according to the Law. Sojourners have a legal right, laid out both in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy, to take small amounts of food from fields, left behind precisely for that purpose; the way that certain modern cities plant fruit trees for the homeless and hungry.

At the same time, however, Exodus forbids reaping on the sabbath. Now, does gathering grain with your hand count as reaping? Does the one law in Exodus outdo the other two? The Pharisees, who strive scrupulously to keep every religious law by their own pietistic interpretation, certainly seem to think so. Jesus, to their eye, is not keeping the sabbath. Ergo, Jesus must be breaking the Law. This sort of disagreement and debate over Scripture, mind you, is of a form common to both Greeks and Jews alike in Jesus’ day.

“Have you not read,” Jesus begins, a stinging sort of slap to the bookish, “what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was High Priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave some to his companions.” Here Jesus uses Scripture to debate a point of Law. David ate the sacred sabbath bread that was offered unto the Lord.

Jesus here is equating His actions, providing food to His companions on the sabbath, with those of King David, basically challenging the Pharisees, “Would you then condemn David?” He is also implicitly identifying Himself with the Davidic royal line. “The sabbath was made for man,” He continues, “and not man for the sabbath. Thus the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” Again, this is elliptical, skirting along the scandalous.

“Son of Man” can simply mean a common human being. The sabbath was intended to liberate mankind, not to constrain us, not to condemn. It is for our good. Yet at the same time, “Son of Man” is also a loaded term, popularized by the Prophet Daniel, referring to the coming cosmic Messiah, divinity descending in the likeness of a man. Jesus, in other words, speaks here in terms both human and divine, His classic double entendre.

Even when He seems to name the wrong High Priest—for it was actually Ahimelech, Abiathar’s father, in the story as we have it—this appears to be a subtle dig upon the Pharisees, for Abiathar was the last priest of his line, banished for denying Solomon, the son of David. “Son of David”—now where have we heard that before?

Jesus then pushes the point: “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” This again is legal debate, for indeed most rabbis considered healing on the sabbath to be questionable, unless a life is at stake. You can save life on the sabbath. Moreover, in the Books of Maccabees, sabbath observance is set aside by necessity in times of war, for both individual and national survival. So it may be considered lawful even to kill upon the sabbath. Both to heal and to harm are matters of life and death.

To help a person, in other words, to cure a person, is to Christ the same as saving a life. And to have an opportunity to aid your neighbor in their need, and not to take it, is akin to taking a life. Remember, Jesus likewise calls anger at one’s brother a form of murder. He who is faithful in little will be faithful also in much. Similarly, smaller harms shall lead to greater. Good is good, regardless of the size. Heal a man, save a man, free a man: such things are not simply permissible on the sabbath; they are the reason for the sabbath.

For Christians the sabbath is not a certain day, nor do we have a set list of restrictions for its observance. Guidelines might be handy, though, perhaps to silence one’s phone for 24 hours? Rather, our sabbath observance occurs any time that we cease from our labors, pull back from the fever of life, and remember that we are children of God, every single one of us. Christ has come to liberate from sin and death and hell every creature in the cosmos! And we have a foretaste of this feast whenever we stop, and pray, and heal those in need.

You are more than anything you can do. The sabbath’s our reminder Jesus died and rose for you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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