The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our Lord seems to have a habit of performing miracles on the Sabbath day. It may seem at first glance that He does so solely for the purpose of irking the Pharisees and religious leaders of the Jews. And to be sure, there may be some truth there. But Christ is never arbitrary in His actions. He doesn’t do things in the Scriptures, nor in our own lives, simply because He can. The Omnipotent One always has a reason for what He does. So, why perform miracles on the Sabbath?

First, we need to observe the kind of miracles that our Lord was doing on the Sabbath. Just to stick with the instances in St. Luke’s Gospel, our Lord cast out an unclean spirit in Capernaum’s Synagogue on the Sabbath and then immediately heals Simon Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever in chapter 4. He heals a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath in chapter 6. In chapter 13, He heals a crippled woman on the Sabbath. And, of course, in our Gospel text, He heals the man with dropsy on the Sabbath. Note what all of these Sabbath miracles have in common—they are all healing miracles. So it is that our Lord does not perform miracles merely for their own sake on the Sabbath. When He performs miracles on the Sabbath, they are for the purpose of bringing healing to someone who is suffering in body, mind, or spirit. Remember this point because we will come back to it.

But first, why do the Pharisees and others make such a big deal of our Lord healing on the Sabbath? You remember the Third Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy. What you may or may not remember is that when He gave the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, the Lord elaborated on this one, explaining why this commandment matters. He said:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it (Exodus 20:8-11).

So it is that Sabbath rest is built into the very fabric of creation. It is at the heart and center of how the Lord made the world to function. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. He made light and darkness, sea and dry land. He made plants and animals. And finally, as the crown jewel of His creation, He made man. And what does God think about all of these things when He has made them? Behold, it was good. It was good. And finally after He has created man, He says: Behold, it was very good. This, then, is the true Sabbath rest for which man was made—namely that he was made to live in the goodness of God’s creation—to enjoy its beauty and to share in the work of spreading creation’s goodness to the ends of the earth. This is Sabbath rest—to live in harmony with God, receiving from Him all good things by grace and participating in the goodness of creation by doing what He has given us to do.

The Pharisees didn’t understand the Sabbath this way. For them, it was a law—a legalistic thing which must be observed perfectly. And so, they put rules and regulations around the Sabbath—how far one could walk and exactly what did and did not constitute “work” on the Sabbath. So it was that when a man who was in need would come before them on the Sabbath, they couldn’t see the human being before them—only their rules and regulations. And so, they watched Jesus closely on the Sabbath to see whether or not He was a rule-breaker.

This is the problem with man-made rules and traditions. It’s not that they are bad, it’s that we so easily forget what they are for and conflate them with God’s laws. This is what Eve did when being tempted by Satan in the garden. She told the serpent that God said not only to refrain from eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she said that He even said that we should not touch it, lest we die. Of course, God had said nothing about touching the Tree. To be sure, it was probably wise to refrain from touching it—that wasn’t the problem. It’s when human laws are confused with divine laws that nothing good results.

This is how we ought to view our own practices in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, especially around worship. The congregations in our synod generally worship in a certain way. We commit ourselves to the practice of only using synodically approved resources and we generally restrict ourselves to singing hymns that are in our synod’s hymnals. There are reasons that we do this—and good ones at that. We have agreed to walk together as a synod, and some level of uniformity in worship and practice helps to ensure that we remain on the same page theologically. There is real value in this. But we must be careful to ensure that our human rules are not conflated with divine laws. There are plenty of Christian church bodies who do not use Lutheran Service Book on Sunday mornings. And they do not sin in doing so. Christianity is not a religion of legalism; it is a religion of grace.

And this is what is so hard for humans to wrap their minds around. We want to know what the rules and boundaries are, and we want to have clear expectations of what is required of us. But in the end, we need to recognize that rules and regulations are not the primary way in which God desires to deal with us. God cares about your heart. And faith is, first and foremost, an internal matter. When we reduce faith to a matter of externals, we miss the point.

And so, it would be easy for us to reduce the meaning of the Third Commandment to: Go to church and pay attention. And let’s be fair, if every Christian actually did that regularly, it would be hugely beneficial. But keeping the Third Commandment isn’t a simple matter of going to church so we can check off that box for the week. It’s about our attitude toward preaching and God’s Word—that we would hold it sacred and gladly hear it and learn it. Cultivating that attitude within our hearts is the most important aspect of the Third Commandment—much more so than signing my name in the Record of Fellowship pad to indicate that I was at church. What I mean to say is this: It is so easy to fall into legalism and thus to miss the gift of true Sabbath rest that Christ desires to give.

So, back to our question. Why does Jesus heal on the Sabbath? He heals on the Sabbath day because healing, goodness, and wholeness are inherently part of what Sabbath means. There is only one answer to our Lord’s question, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” (Luke 14:3b)—and the answer is “Yes!” For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, and He desires that all men would be saved and come to receive His gift of healing. Christ heals on the Sabbath because true Sabbath rest cannot be brought about by human effort—it is a gift of God.

So, no, Christ was not sinning when He performed works of healing on the Sabbath. For “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, man was made to be at rest and at peace with God. Legalism is nothing more than humanity’s pitiful attempt to scratch and claw its way up to God. And such will never work. Our only hope is a God who freely gives His grace to us. Our only hope is a Man who perfectly observed the commandments and who suffered in our place so that the debt we owe because of sin might be paid.

So, thanks be to God that our Lord Jesus Christ has done just this for us. He sees the man with dropsy, and He offers Him the gift of healing. He sees you, laden with sin, and He offers you the gift of healing through the forgiveness of sins. For Christ is the one who has borne our sins and iniquities to the cross. He died on Good Friday with the weight of the world on His shoulders so that He might enter the true Sabbath rest prepared for man from the foundation of the world. This is the rest of which St. Paul speaks that remains for God’s people (Hebrews 4). For Christ, as Man, has entered into God’s eternal rest. And by His gifts of grace, He offers you, too, a place in that true rest.

Not only is it lawful for Christ to heal on the Sabbath, it is necessary that He do so. For this, dear friends in Christ, is how we are saved.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.