Deliverance on the Sabbeth

Sermon preached at 11am Coral Mattins at St Mary the Virgin, Lapworth on Sunday 22nd August 2010. The sermon was also preached at the 8.30am Eucharist (shortened) and at 3pm evensong at St Michael’s Baddesley Clinton.
Trinity 12, Proper 16, Year C

Readings: Ps 103: 1-8 Is 58: 9b-14 Luke 13: 10-17


Our family have just come back from a holiday on the west coast of France, and very nice it was too; a real opportunity to rest and relax and catch up with ourselves. And the holiday was particularly welcome because it came at the end of a very intense six month period which has involved a house move and a very steep learning curve on being responsible for two parishes. So it was very lovely to go away with the family and to enjoy the food and the wine and countryside and sunshine and the beaches. It was also lovely to catch up properly with the Dawson family, who we traditionally go on holiday with.
And one of the things that I love about holiday is having the time and energy to get involved in things that I normally would not get involved in at all. For example, at one point we found that all the adults joined in one of the children’s games, a game called “guard”, which is a rather sophisticated version of hide and seek. In the car we listened to an audio book called “the book thief”. One of the Dawson teenagers was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy (in English!), and I became very interested in this. And I found these new experiences very refreshing, renewing and enlivening. It reminded me of the importance of rest in our daily lives and especially of the importance of the Sabbath, the day of rest. And we got two rather contrasting takes on the Sabbath in our scripture readings today.
The Jewish-Christian tradition tells us that from the very creation of the world, God set aside one day of the week to be holy, and to be a day of rest. In the Genesis account of creation God made the world in six days, and on the seventh day he rested. In the Ten Commandments he similarly asked his people to observe the seventh day, Saturday, as the Sabbath Day, a day of rest, holy to the Lord. It was a day especially when the Jewish people were asked to remember the Passover, when Moses lead them out of Egypt, through the Red Sea and delivered them from Pharaoh’s army. The keeping of the Sabbath on a Saturday was always an important part of the covenant, the deal between God and his people, and of the Jewish Law, but in the sixth century BC, when the Jewish nation was in exile in Babylon is became a crucially important part of the Jewish identity. Observing the Sabbath became and important part of what it meant to be a Jew. The reading that we heard today from Isaiah was probably written just after this period, as the nation was seeking to re-establish itself in Jerusalem following release from exile. In the reading it is clear that keeping of the Sabbath is central to the covenant. Through Isaiah, God gives various teachings on how the Sabbath should be observed. As is typical of Isaiah, the great wisdom of these commands from God are presented in a most beautiful and poetic way. The two final verses of this passage are worthy of much reflection and meditation in their own right. I have been reading these teachings of v13 in different translations of the bible, and it is quite striking how different the different translations are. Brief translations of the Hebrew seem to struggle to pin down what God is saying here. The gist of it seems to be that the Sabbath a day when you should:
- not pursue your own pleasure, but rather the pleasure of God
- not pursue your own interests, but rather the interests of God
- not pursue you won affairs, but rather the business of God
- not focus on human words and tittle-tattle, but rather on the word of God
And this is surely very good guidance, not just for the Jewish observance of the Sabbath on a Saturday, but also the Christian observance our holy day on a Sunday.
By the time of Jesus, observance of the Sabbath had become very central to Jewish identity. It had become bound up with lot of very detailed rules and regulations about what Jews could and could not do on the Sabbath, how far they could walk, what tasks were allowed and what were forbidden. The notion of a day for God’s purposes rather than human purposes had become somewhat obscured by all these rules, and Jesus kicked out against them. The story we heard today is one of three stories in Luke’s gospel where Jesus performed healing miracles on the Sabbath (also 6: 6-11 and 14: 1-6). On all three occasions this was controversial; healing was a task not allowed on the Sabbath. And what does Jesus say? How does he justify himself? Well in today’s story he says, “It is legitimate on the Sabbath to take an ox or an ass to water, how much more appropriate is it to deliver a woman from the power of Satan?” It seems that the Sabbath is a particularly appropriate day for good to triumph over evil, for healing to triumph over decay, for life to triumph over death.
And perhaps this is why, in the life of the early church, Sunday, rather than Saturday came to be observed as the holy day of God. Sunday is the day of our Lord’s resurrection. It is the day when Jesus conquered death and hell. It is the first day of the week, which is the start of creation, but it is also the eighth day, the beginning of a new creation, of the restoration and renewal that comes about through Christ’s death and resurrection, through Christianity and the Church. So it is very appropriate that in the Church we observe Sunday as God’s holy day. Sunday is a particularly appropriate day for Christians to celebrate the Eucharist, in which we remember the great Passover of Jesus in his death and resurrection, just as the Jews remember the Passover of their deliverance on a Saturday. It is a good day to live out the teachings of Isaiah:
- not pursue your own pleasure, but rather the pleasure of God
- not pursue your own interests, but rather the interests of God
- not pursue you won affairs, but rather the business of God
- not focus on human words or title-tattle, but rather on the word of God
And perhaps this pricks our conscience a bit? Perhaps we are guilty of treating Sunday like any other day? Perhaps on Sundays we should be doing less, resting more, worshiping more and devoting our attention more to our families and close friends. Well probably this is true, but we must not be too hard on ourselves as individuals because it is the whole of society that is called to live the Sabbath, not just the churchy few. When the 10 commandments were given it was made very clear that the Sabbath meant rest for work for all, including children, servants, animals and even foreigners living among the Israelites. This means we also have to try and help all of society to live the Sabbath well and to enjoy a day of rest. Now in this country we know that with Sunday trading and the like, the tide has rather flowed against this in recent years, but if we all play our own part, faithfully in front of God, who knows, perhaps the tide will change again, perhaps sooner than we think. Amen, let it be.