“Healing on the Sabbath” - Luke 6: 1-16

 Often when I teach folks about the Ten Commandments, people use them as a checklist. Of course I haven’t murdered anyone. Or coveted what my neighbor had. Or took the Lord’s name in vein. But then we get to number four and people will go silent. Honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. 

Sabbath is a hard concept to grasp in our world, where you are always on and available. I remember at my first appointment, I wanted to be as transparent as possible. So on Fridays people received a reply saying that I will reply to their email the first thing the next day, Saturday. Some folks didn’t take that well. When we email - we want a reply. When we call - we want someone to answer. When we text - we expect an immediate reply. 

And into this world of hurry and constantly being available, God gave us the gift of the Sabbath. A time to delight. Rejoice in God. To savor a day unlike any other day. To be reminded that our worth doesn’t lie in what we produce, but in simply being a child of God. 

We, here and now today, are not the only ones who need Sabbath. People in Jesus’s time did as well. It was scriptural. Tracing back to Exodus: “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.” And repeated in Deuteronomy - Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

This Scripture was supposed to point the Israelites back to Egypt - to the fact that God reduced them from a time of slavery, where there wasn’t time to rest and delight. Where their worth was tied to production alone. But over time the Pharisees started to add to the commandment. A generous reading is that they were trying to add boundaries around the Sabbath by giving people rules to follow that pointed out what they could and could not do. 

But the result, even if it was well intentioned, was that the delight started to slip out of the Sabbath. It became more about the rules than about honoring God. 

Enter Jesus. He is going through the grain fields and some of the disciples were picking grain and eating it after rubbing it in their hands. And the Pharisees saw them, calling them out for “producing” by picking and eating something at the same time. In modern terms, this could be like going to the grocery store and cooking a big meal. It wasn’t allowed in the eyes of the Pharisees. 

To which Jesus calked to mind this story from 1 Samuel. A Scripture that everyone from Jesus, to the Pharisees, to his disciples would have known, about David. David was hungry and needed bread, but all the priest had was holy bread - bread that had been consecrated to the Lord and was not to be eaten by just anyone. This was breaking the law. And he shared it with others. 

Jesus called it out - David, King of Israel, had broken the law. But instead of asking the Pharisees what they thought about that or asking them to speak out against David, he simply let the story stand on its own with one addition - The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. 

Jesus came with a unique understanding of Sabbath because he was the Lord of the Sabbath - the Messiah, even if others could not recognize it. He came not to make the Word of God, or the celebration of Sabbath, a burden, but instead to open up our hearts to the meaning of the Kingdom of Heaven. In other words, when the Pharisees were getting bogged down in the details, Jesus is trying to point them to the bigger picture - the purpose and heart of Sabbath in the first place. 

But incase they missed what Jesus was trying to say, he was given the opportunity to expand his point not much later. There was a man seeking healing on the Sabbath the the Pharisees are watching to see if Jesus is going to step out of line. But Jesus knew exactly what was stirring in their spirits, so he asked them a question - “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?”

What a reversal! This man wasn’t someone to be exploited to catch Jesus in a trap - he was a child of God. Why did it matter what day he was seeking healing on? The Sabbath was for doing what was good and not to perpetuate harm for the sake of human rules. 

Of course the religious leaders weren’t happy with that at all. 

Because the overarching spirit of the Sabbath had been lost in the details. The Spirit of the Sabbath was to honor God. Did it honor God more to let this child of God continue to suffer one more day, just so the law wasn’t violated? Or was it better to bring healing for the glory and honor of God, right here and right now?

I wonder what that would look like, here and now today to honor God by keeping the Sabbath? I have to admit, I never really understood the argument that everything should be closed so that people could go to church, because I grew up in a family where that simply couldn’t be a reality. My grandmother was a nurse. My mom was a pharmacist who worked Sundays so people could get the medications they needed. That argument simply wasn’t part of my reality. 

I think a better frame of thinking would be, what am I doing this day to honor God? How am I delighting in God’s goodness? How am I sharing the love of God with others?

And sometimes that means being open to what God puts right in our path. Many of you are aware that I prepared leading up to renewal leave in July for well over a year. I had a plan. I had deposits paid at retreat centers. Then COVID happened and everything that was planned had to change. But what opened up instead was this invitation to delight in God. To simply be loved. To love others. To play and rejoice. And it was exactly the invitation I needed. 

Sabbath is an opportunity to remember who we are at our deepest core. To remember that we are children of God. And because of that, we honor God, who loves us more than any other. 

So I ask again - what are you doing in your Sabbath that honors God? And how has it changed over the years? Because if its just about the rules, we will always do the same thing out of fear of breaking them. But if its about responding to the Spirit of God, things will change from time to time.

I invite you to think this week and pray around how you honor God by keeping the Sabbath and how that invites you to live into the other six days of Creation. Amen.