Lord of the Sabbath

Introduction

Deuteronomy 5:15 ESV

You shall 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.

Psalm 19:14 BCP1928:P

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be alway acceptable in thy sight, * O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

Growing up, one of the ways the Gospel was often presented in relation to the Jewish religion was in terms of liberation from strict adherence to rules and laws. I expect many of you had a similar experience, or have heard the Gospel explained this way.

I understand where this view comes from, and it certainly is the case that Jesus does release us from the Law as a burden that we cannot bear. It is true that we predominantly Gentile Christians are no longer under the law of circumcision of the flesh, or of dietary laws concerning clean and unclean animals. We are no longer bound to travel to Jerusalem in order to truly worship the LORD our God.

So there is truth that the Gospel brings liberation and inclusion — before Christ, none of us would have been allowed an intimate audience before God, except that we fully converted and accepted the law of circumcision. After Christ’s resurrection from the dead and the coming of the Spirit, we are now welcomed to call God not just LORD but “Our Father.”

Having said this, I think modern Christians often take that liberation further than we ought to. As a result of the Gospel news that Jesus has died, is risen, and will come again, is the Law utterly void so that we have no obligation? Recent confirmands, feel free to answer that one out loud.

As Anglicans, we profess three pillars of the faith in preparing for confirmation: the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. The Creed is the faith we confess — “Creed” comes from “Credo” meaning, “I believe.” The Lord’s Prayer is the special prayer that Jesus as the supreme Rabbi taught to his disciples, which includes everyone who has been baptized and seeks to own their faith. The Commandments teach us God’s desire for right relationships, justice, mutual respect, and orderly conduct.

I want to stress that Anglicans are not unique in this regard — other Protestant denominations which have kept the Confirmation rite, and Catechism with it, have a similar view of these three articles of faith. What is different, in my experience, is that often the Protestant discomfort with anything smacking of a works based salvation relegates the Commandments to something slightly more authoritative than moral advice, especially when it comes to something like the Sabbath Day.

The Sabbath

If you were like me and grew up in a tradition that emphasized leaving behind burdensome customs, traditions, and rules, one of the oddities about New Testament life in ancient Judea is the Sabbath day. The overwhelming impression I got about the Sabbath growing up was that it was a burdensome requirement that the Gospel liberates us from. Judging from my conversations with others who grew up in predominantly Evangelical Protestant Christianity, this was not a unique experience. A quick search on a popular internet search engine quickly yields links to treatises on why the Sabbath is not binding on Christians.

Today, I want us to examine Jesus’s teaching on the Sabbath, and why the Sabbath is not only something God still expects us to observe, but that he intends the Sabbath as a gift for us.

In today’s Gospel, we hear about Jesus and his disciples walking through grainfields on the Sabbath. As they go, the disciples are plucking the heads of grain off the wheat. In Matthew’s account of this episode, we are explicitly told that they are doing this because they are hungry, so this isn’t some kind of idle behavior like our kids might do walking in tall grass. It is a purposeful act, with the intent of getting something to eat.

The Pharisees see them doing this and protest to Jesus, accusing them of “doing work” on the Sabbath. They say to Jesus: “Look! Why do they do on the Sabbath what is not authorized?” What is interesting is what the Pharisees decide to hold up as the violation against the Sabbath.

I was taught that the Sabbath was a time of no work at all, that Jews should not leave their private dwellings at all, except to go to Synagogue. So it has always surprised me that the charge against Jesus and the disciples is not about them “walking in the standing grain.” No, what the Pharisees see as a violation is the disciples plucking off the heads of grain. Luke tells us that they rubbed the grain in their hands, to remove the husk, and then that they ate the grain.

I was curious about what the specific regulations about the Sabbath were, and found through researching the topic that there are actually 39 categories of work that are prohibited. Among these categories are several related to agricultural operations, including “reaping” and “threshing.” It is likely that these are the specific categories of work that the Pharisees are saying the disciples are guilty of.

So, in their eyes, the Pharisees had what seemed to be an entirely legitimate complaint against Jesus’s disciples. They were plucking the heads of grain off the wheat — in other words, they were “reaping.” They then rubbed the heads of grain together to separate the edible parts of the grain from the inedible parts — in essence, they were “threshing” the grain at a small scale.

David and the Bread of the Presence

Jesus responds to the Pharisees. He doesn’t protest that the “work” done was small in scale, or that the Pharisees should be more gracious. Instead, he brings up a story from King David’s time on the run from King Saul, before David was accepted as King over Israel.

In that story, King David and his men enter Nob, a city of Levites in the land of Benjamin. David tells the priest Ahimelech that he has been sent on a mission and needs supplies for he and his men. The priest tells David that the only bread that he has on hand is the Bread of the Presence, holy bread that according to levitical ordinance found in the twenty-fourth chapter of Leviticus belonged to the Levites. By strict interpretation, David and his men were not allowed to eat it.

And yet, David is not punished by God for this strict breach of the Law. David and his men eat of the sacred bread and are not judged for it. David is continually spared and strengthened by the LORD. Jesus uses this story as a way to show that the ordinances of God are intended to restrain wickedness, not impede mercy and goodness. The priest showed mercy and goodness to David by offering the bread that “belonged to the Levites.” In the same way, Jesus, as the Rabbi to the disciples, showed mercy and goodness to the disciples by not restraining them from gleaning on the Sabbath, and continued to do so by defending them against the Pharisee’s accusation.

Why does Jesus appeal to a story of David in response to the accusation of the Pharisees? This encounter takes place early in his ministry, and the crowds were unsure of who Jesus was, they just knew that he healed them and taught with authority. Referencing David’s time on the run from Saul as a parallel to his walking in the grainfields on the Sabbath ought to have suggested to the Pharisees that Jesus was asserting his royal descent and highlighting that he was the true King rather than the usurper Herod.

There’s an additional detail that has caused some confusion among readers — Mark has Jesus as saying the matter of David and the show bread happened “in the time of Abiathar” whereas the story in Samuel names Ahimelech as the priest who helped David. Since we believe Scripture to be both inspired and inerrant, we have to reject the idea that this is a mistake on either Mark’s or Jesus’s part, or a fudging of the Scriptural witness. It is important that Jesus says “in the time of Abiathar” and doesn’t say it was Abiathar who helped David directly.

My take on this is that Jesus brings Abiathar into the story as a way of highlighting his own role as the true High Priest of Israel. It is notable that the Pharisees don’t accuse Jesus himself of working on the Sabbath, and yet Jesus chooses a story from David’s life where David was included in technical law-breaking. If we’re going solely by the surface of the text, Jesus connects himself to a story where he is not obviously “present” so to speak, since he is not accused or guilty while David technically is in violation of the Law.

My opinion is that Jesus references the “time of Abiathar” both to highlight his connection to the man of God showing mercy and goodness to the people of God, and to parallel that, just as David did these things “in the time of Abiathar,” the disciples are working in the time of a new High Priest, though one rejected and unrecognized by the Temple officials.

The Sabbath was Made for Man

After telling this story, Jesus proclaims that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Another way of reading the Greek is that “the Sabbath exists because of man, man does not exist because of the Sabbath.” Either way, Jesus’s point is that God intended the Sabbath as a help and an aid for humanity, not as a burden or ruler over us.

This brings us to the verse I read at the beginning, which is from Deuteronomy’s account of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are told to Israel twice in the Torah, first at Mount Sinai in Exodus, and second to the generation after the Exodus on the other side of the Jordan across from Jericho.

In Exodus, the commandment for the Sabbath has as its explanation that God made the heaven and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh, and for this reason God sanctified the Sabbath day. In Deuteronomy the commandment is linked to God’s liberation of Israel from slavery in Egypt. It is in remembrance of God’s goodness and mercy to his people by taking them out of Egypt “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm” that the people of Israel are to honor the Sabbath.

The Sabbath, apart from these remembrances — that God did mighty works to bring all things into existence and to free Israel from slavery — is just another day. This is in essence what Jesus is teaching the Pharisees, that it does no good to abide by prohibitions to work if the point of that enforced rest is missed.

Think of the effort involved in the Pharisee’s scrutiny of Jesus and the disciples! One of the categories of work, the largest and the broadest, is “carrying.” One of the sources I found saw “carrying” as the archetypal labor because it recalled the work the Israelites did in Egypt. In their zeal to catch Jesus in the wrong, or find fault in his disciples, the Pharisees carried a burden of suspicion and cynicism. Instead of carrying literal bricks for Pharaoh, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, or Caesar, the Pharisees were carrying spiritual millstones for the adversary himself.

Jesus then proclaims himself as “lord even of the Sabbath,” using the Son of Man imagery from Daniel. Let’s be clear here: he doesn’t assert his lordship over the Sabbath as a way of invalidating the good commandment of God. He doesn’t overturn the Sabbath as just a part of the civic law of Israel. Instead, he does so to say that God alone is the arbiter of what is a work of mercy, goodness, and life and what is a prohibited work on the Sabbath. He reclaims the authority that the Pharisees granted themselves, and uses it to reorient his disciples and any who would follow him to find the true rest of God.

Remember the Sabbath

The fourth commandment is “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy.” There is no indication that this commandment is void, as some mistakenly proclaim. However, the Sabbath, along with the rest of the Law, is transformed by the Gospel. Whereas the Pharisees understood perfect Law keeping as the thing that would bring God’s favor back to Israel, we know that not only can we not perfectly keep the Law by ourselves, but doing so does nothing to overturn past offenses. We need the grace, love, redemption, and restoration of God found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Some will say that “Jesus is our Sabbath Rest” as a way of saying that Sabbath-keeping is not applicable to Christians. It is correct that Jesus is our rest from the burdens laid on us by the world, the flesh, and the devil. And yet, this does not invalidate the call for Christians to “remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy.”

Jesus himself observed the Sabbath, even in his death. The Lord of the Sabbath saw that it was good to rest on the Sabbath day, even from the powerful work of Resurrection. Creation rested and waited for the Son of Man to fully unite Kingship and Priestly authority in taking on his resurrected body. After the Resurrection, we know that Christians continued to keep the Sabbath, since there are mentions of attending the synagogue in Acts.

The call to Sabbath, to understand that God desires rest for his creatures, is not overturned. What is changed is the way in which the Pharisees oversaw the Sabbath, turning it into a new kind of burden, a slavery to calendars and traditions. With this in mind, how then do we Sabbath, as Christians in twenty-first century Opelika, AL?

I will preface my advice by saying that I do not have this all figured out. I find that our culture is very much antagonistic towards a day of rest. A cruel irony that I’m sure anyone involved in corporate America knows all too well is that we often hear people bemoan the amount of work they have to do but in nearly the next breath make every excuse for why they can’t take a break.

First, Christians in our current day and context keep Sabbath by regularly attending worship services. Principally, this is whatever service is available to you on Sunday which is faithful to the Gospel as understood “everywhere, at all times, by everyone.” If the Eucharist is available, we should seek to participate in it. If for some reason it is not, then we should engage in corporate liturgy with fellow Christians which emphasizes repentance, giving praise to God in the psalms, hearing the word of God in Scripture, and making petition to God for ourselves and others.

We live in a broken world with broken systems, and there are faithful Christians who because of vocation are unable to attend many usual Sunday morning service offerings. I want to stress - I do not accuse them of sinning. I do encourage them to find some kind of faithful worship service they can regularly attend, and to make arrangement with a good and godly minister of the Gospel to receive communion regularly. The person who attends evening prayer every day of the week even though they can’t make Sunday worship due to work is no less faithful than the person who can be found at every service on a Sunday morning.

Second, we can keep Sabbath in our context by daily refusing to be drug into the prevailing culture of filling every waking moment with work. In a corporate setting, this means that we accept we may not advance as quickly or as high as the so-called “hard worker” who clocks out well after the sun goes down. In other settings, it means that we reject the tendency to fill every moment of our day with tasks and activities just for the sake of being productive. Do work and don’t be idle, but when you find a clear space in your calendar for the day, consciously take a few moments to rest in the presence of God and pray, thanking him for the moment of respite.

Finally, we practice Sabbath by encouraging rest for others. One of the reasons I greatly enjoy our Hospitality Hours on Sunday is that I am increasingly convicted that we should avoid creating a market or demand that requires others to work on Sundays. There will always be jobs and services which are needed daily due to the way our economy works, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for us to exacerbate the situation. And lest anyone be prone to scrupulosity about this, I only suggest waiting until the early afternoon to do business on Sundays, not a perfect abstention. And again, I’m by no means perfect at this, I am striving along in this difficult terrain with all of you.

If we keep these three principles in mind, regularly attending worship, rejecting the culture of work as our overall purpose and salvation, and encouraging rest for others, then we will be well on our way to faithful Sabbath-keeping. You will notice that these principles can be applied generally to every day of the calendar, not just Sunday. This is intentional — the intent of God is that we would ultimately rest in him. The picture we have of life after Jesus returns is one where we no longer need to work to survive. So it seems right that we should allow for Sabbath reminders every day of our lives.

May we remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy, for the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Amen.