Jesus healed out of compassion, but he grounded his arguments for healing in liberation.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the thirteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel (Luke 13:10-17), in which Jesus healed a woman in a synagogue on the Sabbath day. The healing itself is reasonably straightforward. Luke described the woman as having been afflicted by a spirit that had bent her over for eighteen years. Jesus called her over, laid a hand upon her, and she stood up straight.
Often these stories appear in the gospels because somebody objects, and that’s the case here. The leader of the synagogue said to Jesus that there are six days in the week in which to do work, and one day in which to rest and to honor God. That is, indeed, one of the Ten Commandments.
now let it be understood that in first century Judaism there was a clear understanding that care and compassion, works of care and compassion, were consistent with the Sabbath day. In particular, acts which saved human life were not just allowed but encouraged, whatever day of the week it might happen to be.
Jesus could have argued from that that healing this woman on the Sabbath day was consistent with the understanding that doing good for human beings was allowed, was permitted, was encouraged on the Sabbath. Jesus approached it from a very different angle, however.
Another thing that was permitted on the Sabbath was to untie domestic animals so that they could get to their food and their water. To leave animals tied up for the twenty-four hours of the Sabbath, that would have been cruel. It would have been inhumane.
Jesus said this woman has been bound by this spirit for eighteen years. Is it not consistent with the Sabbath, is it not consistent with the grace of God, to free her from what has confined her, whatever day of the week it might be? Is not the Sabbath a time to set people free?
And everybody, including the leader of the synagogue, approved of his words.
it is always time to provide deliverance to people.
It is important to understand what deliverance looks like to them. Not everybody who is bent over considers themselves bound; not everybody who has a disability wants to be “freed” from it. Oh, yes, they would like to be liberated from pain, and I’m sure they would like to be liberated from the casual disregard so many people show to disabled people.
But it’s not just folks with disabilities. It’s folks who are oppressed for one reason or another: whether it be out of poverty, whether it be because of a mental illness, whether it be because they’re homeless, whether it be because they have the wrong gender, or the wrong affections, whether they have the wrong skin color, or the wrong heritage.
We need to free people — we need to make sure all people are free from these kinds of bonds. There is no need to retain the shackles of prejudice for any time or any space, especially our houses of worship.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Thank you, everyone, for the time to take a sabbatical this year. I needed it more than I thought I did – and I thought I needed it pretty badly! I return to the office and the pulpit with a lot more energy than I had in January, and with a good deal more joy in the ministry and in the work. Mahalo nui loa!
I will schedule a time for a presentation fairly soon. One of my sabbatical activities, one I had not planned but which became deeply refreshing, was photography. I credit Pelehonuamea with providing ample opportunity for dramatic pictures and for offering the blessings of one of earth’s thin places. During these three months I marked over 1,000 pictures as worth sharing. I promise that I’ll make the slide show shorter. Much shorter.
I found it more difficult than I’d anticipated to prepare a publishable manuscript of stories (Jonathan Roach warned me about this). It took me some time to read them and to make decisions. In the coming months I’ll work on editing the texts for a printed format.
I also didn’t get to all the Hawaiian Islands. As I tried to plan the last trip to Maui and Moloka’i, I ran into a medical appointment which had been scheduled months ahead and would be difficult to delay. Instead, I plan to visit those islands during my vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Sabbath rest is one of the commandments, one of the “Big Ten,” if you will. It applied not only to people, but to also to domestic animals in their care. The ancient law of Israel even gave rest to the land every seven years. Rest is a sacred thing.
Thank you again for help me connect with sacred rest.
In peace,
Pastor Eric
PS: I hope you enjoy the video below which covers my sabbatical time (and a little beyond).
Last Sunday I preached about sabbath, but I’m not quite done yet.
Sabbath, my friends, is one of God’s great gifts to us. It’s one that people disregard too much. The ethic of work’s value in the United States is pervasive and compelling. We get praised for hard work – though I note that the hardest working people in the world don’t get much pay with the praise.
We pay the price in working tired, in bringing work concerns home to burden family, in loss of nurturing time with family and friends. We learn new skills at work, it’s true. We learn other skills in the midst of loved ones, skills we don’t learn on the sales floor or in the office. All work, no play makes Jack not a dull boy, but a man unpracticed in love. All work, no play makes Jill not a dull girl, but a woman untrained in empathy.
Sabbath time fosters physical rest, social nourishment, and the refreshment of prayer.
This seems like a good time to announce that I will be taking a three-month sabbatical from February 1, 2025, to April 30, 2025. The Church Council has approved the time and the project, and the Board of Deacons is seeking a minister to provide pastoral care while I’m gone. In accordance with my call agreement, I am committed to serve you the next three years following the sabbatical.
I’ll say more in the coming months about the plans I’ve made for the time. At this moment, I simply want to say mahalo. Mahalo for planning for pastoral renewal. Mahalo for the integrity of our lay leaders. Mahalo for your care for me.
I hope and pray that you find your times of sabbath, too.
We’re not far into the Gospel of Mark, and Jesus has run into trouble. Things went so well in chapter one. Jesus’ success in healing people actually began to overwhelm him, so that he stayed out in the country where there was more room.
In chapter two, Mark began to describe the theological debates. It’s one thing to heal the body, said some critics, but how can you forgive sin? Others asked about Jesus’ habit of eating with tax collectors and sinners – he even summoned a tax collector to join him in his travels. They wanted him and his disciples to be ascetics, to leave aside even such comfort as regular meals. And they wanted him to adhere to a rigid standard of sabbath observance.
Plucking grain on the sabbath? No good. If you hadn’t taken care of it the day before, you need to wait until you get somewhere that somebody who had properly prepared can give you food. Although it’s funny: the fourth century Talmudactually includes guidance that plucking and eating grain was fine as long as you did it without a utensil.
Healing on the sabbath? Well, that’s a fuzzier question. Midwives could assist with births on the Sabbath, according to the third century collection of rabbinic wisdom called the Mishnah. You could wash an injury “in the usual way” and “if he is healed, he is healed.” In this case from Mark, Jesus didn’t do any of the things that would normally be inappropriate to the Sabbath. He didn’t put oil on the man’s hand. He didn’t touch him. He didn’t even gesture to him. Jesus didn’t do any of the things that would constitute work on the Sabbath.
But he also didn’t fit the image of some of his contemporaries in religious leadership who knew what a teacher and healer should be like.
Jesus frequently didn’t fit the image of what a teacher and healer should be like.
But he did know his Bible.
The Sabbath commandment is distinct among the Ten Commandments. Unlike most of the others, it was explained. God didn’t bother justifying the commandments against murder or theft or false witness. The Sabbath, though, got a long explanation. You just heard it read from the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy.
Just to keep you on your toes, there’s a different explanation in Exodus twenty, which also lists the Ten Commandments. There, the reason for the Sabbath is to imitate God, who rested after six days creating. Here in Deuteronomy five, the reason is to celebrate the freedom God had won for the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt.
Slaves don’t get days off. Slaves don’t rest. Free people do.
Jesus probably drew on both these texts to inform his theology of Sabbath. He believed that the power of God was present and accessible to human beings. He believed that his followers could preach and teach and comfort and heal. He promised them the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit when he was no longer at arm’s reach. Like God, you can do great things. Like God, you can rest.
Jesus also declared a new freedom to his followers. Though some were definitely hoping he would free them from Roman domination, he made it clear that they could also find freedom from the burdens of ritual impurity, shame, and sin. “Which is easier,” he asked people earlier in chapter two: “to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’?”
Forgiveness, he said, should be easy, both to offer and to receive.
That’s what it means for the Sabbath to be made for human beings: that in it we find the freedom to live well with God, and to bring God’s grace to those around us. D. Mark Davis writes at his blog, LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “The idea that ‘humanity was made for the Sabbath’ continues to be a wildly popular theology that God created the law and humanity needs to live up to it or else we are lost. In that theology, God is chiefly known as holy, and humans have to achieve a certain level of holiness – through following laws or practicing purity rituals – to be acceptable to God.
“The alternative theology, which Jesus poses here, is that ‘the Sabbath was made for humanity.’ In that sense, God is chiefly known as love and the laws and purity rituals are for humanity’s own good. Or, even better, they offer ways that humanity can respond to God’s grace with gratitude.”
It is tempting to take Jesus’ opponents here and have them represent all first century Pharisees, or even worse, all first century Jews, or worst of all, all Jews. They didn’t. They don’t. Jesus had good relationships with some Pharisees clear to the end of his earthly ministry. They kept inviting him to dinner.
And that keeps us from something far more important. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “The question this story asks is not, ‘What was wrong with 1st century Judaism?’ but rather, ‘What have we — here and now — ossified at our peril? What mortal, broken thing have we deified instead of love? Who or what have we stopped seeing because our eyes have been blinded by our own best intentions?
“‘What are we clinging to that is not God?’”
We live in a society obsessed with productivity. Later this year our ballot choices will be substantially guided by our notion of which candidate will get more accomplished while in office. Who will lower inflation? Who will increase Gross Domestic Product? Who will perform the economic gymnastic trick of getting employment, compensation levels, and interest rates just right?
The answer to that one, by the way, is nobody, because no one person in any one office can do all that.
Who will tell us, though, that outproducing other nations increases the rate at which we run through our resources? Who will tell us that more is not always better? Who will tell us that in Christ there is freedom from that productivity race as well as from sin, and death, and political oppression?
Who will tell us that if you build your nest all night with materials you can’t identify pushed into places you can’t be certain of, your nest won’t hold up?
We weren’t made to run an eternal treadmill. No were we made to follow arbitrary guidelines of what rest is, when it should be, or what it shouldn’t be. We weren’t made for the Sabbath.
The Sabbath was made for us, for our rest, for our well-being, for our freedom.
The Sabbath was made for us.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric frequently improvises while preaching. Sometimes he does it intentionally.
Jesus regarded the law as a gift of God for the benefit of human beings – which meant he interpreted it from that point of view.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the end of the second chapter and the beginning of the third chapter of Mark’s Gospel (Mark 2:23-3:6). The stories that Mark told here described the beginning of Jesus’ conflict with some of the religious authorities of his day.
In the first story, Mark told about Jesus’ disciples gathering grain while passing near fields on the Sabbath. Plucking grain was considered doing work; work was, of course, forbidden on the Sabbath. In the second story, while in a synagogue Jesus healed a man with a withered hand. That time, those who disapproved looked on silently and condemningly. Jesus asked them if it was lawful to do good on the Sabbath, and they said nothing.
In response to that first criticism about plucking grain, Jesus said something quite fascinating. He said that the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath. That is, the Sabbath is a gift for people.
The gift of a day off in the ancient world was not a universally held value. Not every culture said that people deserved some “down time,” but the ancient Hebrews, under the commandment of God, they did believe it. It was one of the things that distinguished them in the first century from the Greeks and Romans who surrounded them.
To violate the Sabbath was not just to commit some arcane religious kind of offense, it was also to deny one’s kinship with an occupied people. It was also to set at risk the people’s commitment to God. “Why do you do what is not lawful on the sabbath?”
But if the Sabbath was made for the benefit of humankind, said Jesus, then we need to look at what benefits humankind as we evaluate whether an action is appropriate to the Sabbath or not. And it was fairly well established in rabbinic schools of thought at the time that there were things that were work that you could do on the Sabbath. You could bring an animal to water. You could pull an animal out of a ditch. Midwives were allowed to do their work on the Sabbath because that delivery of a new child into the world — labor — that contributed to the life and well-being of the individual and of the community.
So yes, said Jesus, they need this food to sustain them, and because the Sabbath was made for them, there is no question that they can eat. There is no question that a man in pain can be healed. There is no question but that one can do good, one can preserve life, one can heal, one can love on the Sabbath.
As we evaluate our own legal structures, our own customs that are not enshrined in law, let us ask that question at every venture: Are we making these laws, are we keeping these customs, for the benefit of human beings? Or have we set them up in ways that cause people pain, hardship, even oppression, even death.
The Sabbath was made for humankind so that people could have rest and renewal. All our laws should be addressed towards human needs, so that we can have rest and renewal and a community of love.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below; I’d love to hear from you.
