Keeping Sabbath Rest

Mark 2:23-3:6

“Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

Let me first today tell you about my Grandad Pruden. He was a stickler for Sunday Sabbath observance. So he’d go to church twice a Sunday coming to us on Sunday lunchtime for his lunch. If I dared go out with my friends on Sunday afternoon, he’d have a right go at me and if my poor Dad dared to read a Sunday paper to read about the day before’s football he’d be lectured at too. You did nothing but church on Sunday. I didn’t get very far telling him he shouldn’t read Monday’s paper because that was put together on a Sunday and people were working on a Sunday to bring him the snooker he was enjoying watching on a Sunday afternoon on the television!

Let me secondly tell you about every hairdresser I’ve had since I’ve been a minister. They say “doing anything nice at the weekend?” ! It’s the norm not to work for most people on a Sunday, it’s a day for relaxing, doing and family. And we’ve come here!

The Sabbath has been an important point in the religious life since our beginning. God rested on the seventh day of creation. He told Adam and Eve to only work six days. In the Old Testament, land rests in order to make it more profitable for planting on. The Jews saw observing the Sabbath as a requirement of God. Orthodox Jews say there are 39 categories of things you mustn’t do on the Sabbath. The Orthodox union website is great fun! Here’s two – you can’t finish anything. Well I procrastinate most days don’t you? This includes completing any useful article, even where no other category of work is involved. It includes all forms of repairs and adjustments.

You can’t cut or tear paper in any way. To take a very mundane example, one may not tear toilet paper on the Sabbath. Religious Jews therefore only use pre-cut paper. Oh dear, I started reading long articles last night on line called “toilet paper and Shabbat.” I’ll not go further!  Putting the finishing touch on any article is also in this category.

Thus, for example, one may not put new laces into shoes. Any form of adjustment comes under this heading. Thus, one may not wind a clock or set a watch. Blowing up a balloon or water wings also comes under this category.

The same is true of setting the sails on a boat. For this reason, the Sanhedrin forbade the riding of small boats on the Sabbath.

 (One may, however, ride a large ship piloted by non-Jews, as long as they do not embark or disembark on the Sabbath.) There is a special rabbinic enactment that swimming is not permitted on the Sabbath. 

Then one that my wife would just struggle with! No sewing. This includes all forms of sewing and needlework. Pasting, taping and stapling paper are also included. Thus, one may not seal an envelope nor attach a postage stamp on the Sabbath. Fastening something with a safety pin, however, is permitted, since this is only a temporary fastening. So that’s okay then!

Go and look up the 37 others!

The Pharisees who enforced this stuff weren’t horrible. They simply didn’t want God’s people to stray. How dreadful must it have been for Jesus’ followers to rest on the Sabbath after the crucifixion. What were those women thinking waiting to be able to go to the tomb on the Sunday morning? Can you understand why some of the Jews found Jesus to be a rebel and even a heretic? For the disciples of Jesus to pick ears of corn on the Sabbath as they walked along was a form of reaping and, therefore, forbidden on the Sabbath. And it had to be challenged. But Jesus challenges piety over pity here.

So, we have our text: Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; 28so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” Why go to church on our Sabbath? For ritual or to uphold religiosity or to find genuine Sabbath rest?

Of course, Victorians were strict about Sabbath observance, my Grandad being the tail end of them. In A Century of the Scottish People 1830 – 1950 it says ''To natives and foreigners alike, the Scottish Victorian sabbath was the outward and visible sign of the Church's inward and spiritual sway.

''A universal stillness fell over Glasgow and Edinburgh (except in the unredeemed slums) at the time of divine service, and pervaded small towns and villages from dawn to dusk.

 The Church complained of sabbath breakers: a Glasgow minister, for example, informed the Board of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway when they first proposed Sunday trains in 1842 that they were 'infidels, scoffers, men of unholy lives, the enemies of all righteousness, moral suicides, sinners against light, traitors to their country, robbers and murderers.'

What is Jesus saying in this passage early in Mark’s Gospel?

He encourages Sabbath rest. We all need that. We need time to find God and be with him. We need a day (and today for many that isn’t Sunday) to be human beings rather than human doers. The gift of rest and recuperation is a holy thing given by God from the beginning of time, such is its importance, with Sabbath rest having the further blessing of consciously resting in God and turning aside from whatever our normal routine might be. I like what one preacher's website says “notice that in our hyper-productive, always-on culture, we often conceive of rest and recovery days only in service of further productivity. Take some time to rest so you can work harder, our society says. Rise and grind, and only rest so you can rise earlier and grind harder.

But in scripture, if we take a moment to examine God’s priorities, sabbath is an art and a science and a pleasure for its own sake. God does not rest on the seventh day for the purpose of getting right back to work on the eighth day. God rests on the seventh day and commands us to follow God’s example because sabbath has inherent value completely apart from work. Sabbath has a kind of beautiful purposelessness that makes it holy.” We do the Sabbath in order to remember we are God’s people and we are cherished by him, even if we only remember it once a week! But it isn’t about being holier than thou or super pious. Which brings us again to our text: The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” Remember some of the loveliest hymn verses ever written:

O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love!

With that deep hush subduing all
Our words and works that drown
The tender whisper of Thy call,
As noiseless let Thy blessing fall
As fell Thy manna down.

For the disciples of Jesus to pick ears of corn on the Sabbath as they walked along was a form of reaping and, therefore, forbidden on the Sabbath. Jesus, however, gave priority to the disciples’ hunger over a strict interpretation of the Sabbath Law. Jesus was always person centred, not law centred.

The needs and well-being of the human person carried much greater weight with him than strict observance of a particular law, even a law as sacred as the Sabbath law. For Jesus, all law, including religious law, is at the service of the total well-being of people and when it works against their well-being he says well, it deserves to be ignored. Jesus’ understanding of the religious law of his time was always shaped by his compassion for those in greatest need.

He embodied God’s gracious presence, which made him master of the Sabbath and of all religious law. To walk in the way of Jesus is always to give greater priority to the total well being of people than to the laws of the institution! Have we silly Sabbath observance laws in church today stopping us from being alive and relevant and available to those in need around us? Discuss! There’s another sermon to preach one day about Jesus getting angry and the man with the withered hand who would have been ignored by the so-called religious people because he just happened to have need on the wrong day!

So how dear friends of this benefice and of the Methodist church here do we became truly Sabbath resters? Encounter must change us. We don’t tut at the world because we are better than those out there, we pause to be renewed to meet need even on a Sunday afternoon. We celebrate Eucharist, communion at the end of this service, so I’d like to challenge you on this Sabbath sharing together with some words from a really powerful book by Walter Bruggemann called “Sabbath as Resistance.”

“I have come to think that the moment of giving the bread of Eucharist as gift is the quintessential centre of the notion of Sabbath rest in Christian tradition. It is gift! We receive in gratitude. Imagine having a sacrament named “thanks”! We are on the receiving end, without accomplishment, achievement, or qualification. It is a gift, and we are grateful! That moment of gift is a peaceable alternative that many who are “weary and heavy-laden, cumbered with a load of care” receive gladly.

The offer of free gift, might let us learn enough to halt the dramatic anti-neighbourliness to which our society is madly and uncritically committed.”

Friends, having found Sabbath rest, having the gift of renewal in you in the sacrament what will you do next? Does observing Sabbath make a difference? I hope so. The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so, the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”