Rest for the Soul

Intro

My favorite historical figure from the Civil Rights movement is little hardly a footnote in most history books, but to me, she embodies the kind of faith I want to have. Mother Pollard was an elderly Black woman in Montgomery Alabama during the Montomgery Bus Boycott that lasted from December 1955 to December 1956. She became a matriarchal figure during the boycotts on account of her participation and bold faith in the face of injustice.

So the Black community in Montgomery organized this boycott to protest the segregation in the public transportation system. Even though African Americans made up 75% of the riders of public transportation, they basically had no rights in comparison with white passengers. African Americans couldn’t be hired as drivers.

Through the network of Black churches, the community organized and boycotted the bus system. They refused to ride. They knew this would cripple the city’s transportation economy. This also crippled the economy in downtown Montgomery, because the Black community was no longer shopping there. By crippling the economy, they knew they could bring the city government to the table in negotiations to end segregation in the transportation system. Brilliant.

So if you wanted to participate in the boycott, that meant you couldn’t use the buses anymore. So you either had to walk, or more likely than not, you had to rely on a carpool system. This heavily impacted women in particular, who, if they were keeping the home and raising kids, were responsible for getting around to do the shopping and the chores.

In fact, the mass meetings to organize this boycott were predominantly attended by women. One pastor of the movement described these women walking down the streets in protest, saying they stride like queens. And God’s chosen women of valor certainly are queens, are they not?

Mother Pollard was the queen of queens, ok?

Because of her age, everyone wanted her to drop out of the boycott. Everyone told her she should ride the bus, the strain of walking everywhere could seriously injure her or even kill her. Yet, whenever people told her to take it easy, she would say back in reply, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” Her words became an anthem for the movement.

See Mother Pollard had discovered a secret. Though her body was tired on account of her age, though her feet were tired and her hands were calloused by working under gross injustice her whole life, her soul had rest. How did she do it? I suspect her secret is one that many of us would like to learn.

Do you know what it means to be tired? I don’t just mean droopy eyes or tired feet, I mean soul tired. I mean the kind of tired where it feels like you’re dead inside. I mean the kind of tired where there’s no tears left to cry. I mean the kind of tired where you’re barely making it and you wonder how much longer you can go on. Does anyone know that kind of tired?

I know you do. And you know what? God knows too. He knows your soul is tired. He knows. And if you’ll listen to him speak through his word, he’ll tell you why your soul is tired and how you can find rest.

See, our text tonight is going to give us Mother Pollard’s secret. Is it possible to have rest for the soul, even if we’ve been beaten up and our bodies are worn down? Yes, if we will receive the Sabbath rest that Jesus offers to us.

This is a rich text for us. I want to draw three aspects of this passage to your attention this evening. The Purpose of Sabbath Rest; How we’ve Ruined Sabbath Rest, and the Threat of Sabbath Rest.

The Purpose of Sabbath Rest

Now, why did I jump from saying “rest” to “Sabbath rest”? In the Bible, the words “Sabbath” and “rest” are synonymous. You can’t talk about rest unless its with reference to Sabbath. We can’t get a grip on the power of this passage unless we understand that connection. So what is the Sabbath, and what is its purpose?

I’m going to skip ahead in our passage a bit. Look at verse 27. This statement by Jesus is profound. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” What was Jesus saying?

The implication here is that whatever the Sabbath is, it must benefit human beings. It must be good for us. And if that is the case, then the Sabbath must not be observed in ways that harm us. This is the underlying tension of the passage. If the Sabbath is good for us, then it must not be observed in ways that are harmful. As we’ll see in a moment, the Sabbath had become, and often still is, practiced in ways that are harmful to us.

It’s difficult to summarize the substance of the Sabbath in one point here, because the Sabbath is really all over the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. So, I’m going to do my best by showing you three reasons why God gave us the Sabbath, and these all come from Exodus 20, when God gave the 10 commandments, which included the command to observe the Sabbath.

You have these verses in your worship guide.

The Sabbath is a day of devotion and worship to God. This is one day set aside that is made holy by our worship. Our rest begins with enjoying God as our Lord and our Creator. We work hard for six days, we attend do our needs for six days, but the seventh day belongs to God. It is a day of rest given to God, where we enjoy focused time in his presence. This six days of labor and one day of rest is patterned after Creation. Just as God labored for six days and rested, we honor him by setting aside one day to rest from our labors in order to worship him.

In the Old Testament, the Sabbath was to occur every Saturday. In the New Testament, Christians moved the Sabbath to Sunday to honor the day that Jesus was raised from the dead. But throughout Scripture, this is the pattern. One day set aside, given to the Lord for worship.

The second purpose for the Sabbath is that as we enjoy God, we’ll find rest. Verse 10, “On this day you shall not do any work…” Most of what we call rest, the Bible would call gluttony. Our excessive and indulgent use of entertainment, food, drink, goes beyond what God prescribes as rest for us.

God’s prescription for rest is intimately linked to worshipping him with other people. It is God’s intention that we rest as we make time for family, for God’s people, and for doing works of mercy and justice in our community.

3. It’s not just us as individuals who find rest. Our society is intended to find rest. If God’s people are really resting in him, then everyone else should experience that rest, even if they’re not worshipping God themselves! The family rests. Workers rest. Refugees and immigrants find rest within our care. Even the animals rest on the sabbath.

God’s sabbath rest is meant to resist exploitation and economic anxiety. We respect each other enough not to make excessive demands. We make sure everyone is paid enough to take a real day off. We make time for each other rather than treating people as tools for our own gain.

Do you get it? I wish I could say more. But can you see how, even briefly, this Sabbath was intended as a gift from God? Sabbath rest was given for our good. Rest is a gift. And that rest was to begin on one day each week, but that one day is meant to shape our whole lives, so that we could live fulfilled, purposeful, balanced lives. God is so kind to give us a weekly renewal as individuals, and as communities.

So what happened?

The Ways We’ve Ruined Sabbath Rest

Come back to our main text with me. Our passage consists of two scenes. They both take place on a Sabbath day. They both show us how we’ve ruined God’s Sabbath rest.

In the first scene, Jesus picks some basic heads of grain from the field to feed his disciples with. In the second, he heals a man with a crippled hand. In both cases, a group known as the Pharisees, they were some of the religious leaders of the time, they get upset with Jesus because he’s breaking their rules.

This probably strikes us as odd. What was Jesus doing that was so severe? Isn’t feeding and healing people a good thing? Why are the Pharisees trying to stop him then?

Think of it like this. Have any of you attended to a party that you weren’t wanted at? I have.

One time, in college, I went to a party with some of my buddies that we had been invited to the previous week. Little did I know that over the course of the week, this party would become a birthday party for several people, including my ex girlfriend. Yikes.

So me and my friends, we show up at the party, and right away I learn whats going on. Ok, I know I’m not wanted, but my friends are having a good time. So I go, and just kind of hide in the corner. I felt like such a loser. But it gets better. Better for you, not for me.

About 20 minutes into the party, the record scratches, the music stops, the lights get on. The party host gets on the mic and he says, “If your name is Ben Hein you need to get the ___ out of the party.” It didn’t take long before everyone there learned who Ben Hein was and all eyes were fixed on me. Man. It was bad. I won’t finish the story. But trust me. You don’t want to be the person that the music stops for to be kicked out of the party.

The Sabbath is meant to be a party where we worship the Lord together. It’s God’s party where we enjoy him and find rest for our bodies and our souls. And the pharisees, as religious leaders, were meant to be the hosts. But what they had done was they had come up with all of these extra rules about the Sabbath that were impossible to keep.

In fact, the Pharisees had developed 39 categories of things you could not do. And within those 39 categories, there were over 1,500 requirements you had to keep on the Sabbath. Can you imagine?

And these rules made the Sabbath a complete drag. You had to obsess over not breaking their rules. You couldn’t enjoy God’s rest anymore. They made it so nobody felt wanted at God’s party.

How did Jesus feel about what they were doing? He was outright angry. The word here for anger in verse 5 could be translated rage, or even wrath. This word is most commonly used in the New Testament with reference to God’s wrath and judgement. He might not be making whips and flipping tables as he does elsewhere, but make no mistake, Jesus is furious here. Why?

Because the Pharisees had taken this good gift from God and turned it into an instrument for harm. Beloved, I’ve made this point several times these last months, and I’m going to make it again, because it’s all over Scripture. I know many of you have been hurt by religious authorities in churches. You need to know that God sees what has happened to you and he takes your side. Few things make our God more furious than when religious authorities take his good gifts and twist them for harmful ends.

Where were the Pharisees doing this? Were they malicious? Did they know they were making everyone miserable? I don’t think so. At least, not most of them.

See, the Pharisees were operating out of a way of thinking that you and I often share. The Pharisees believed that God’s favor had to be earned. Even though God had said his rest was a gift, they didn’t believe it. So they created an entire social system where rest was no longer a gift, but something that had to be controlled, that had to be measured, that had to be earned. So they could justify the harm of their actions because they believed they had godly motives.

Is this passage beginning to hit closer to home yet? It might look different for us today, but Religious or not, we have taken the God’s good gift of rest and we’ve ruined it by turning it into a mechanism of harm. We don’t know how to rest because we think we have to earn it. And we don’t want to let anyone else rest because we think they haven’t earned it. So we create social, religious, and economic systems that prevent us from receiving and enjoying the gift of rest that God simply wants to give to us.

Now rest, soul rest, feels like a fantasy to most of us.

Consider the disciples here for a moment. Don’t you think they had gotten used to getting kicked around by the Pharisees?

Look at how the Pharisees make a big deal out of what the disciples are doing. Picking a few pieces of grain woah woah woah, look at how unfaithful they are! How could Jesus have disciples like that!?

Can you imagine living life around people that want nothing more than to keep you down by exaggerating your faults and making you feel miserable?

Oh see, some of you don’t have to imagine that. You’re always on guard. You can never catch a break. Your boss takes advantage of you. Your landlord manipulates you. Your spouse, or your partner, is constantly putting you down. Rest, real rest, has been completely ruined for you.

This whole notion of rest sounds like a joke. You’re apathetic at the very thought. You feel like you need to guard what little control you have. Maybe you’re so guarded that giving yourself to God, or committing yourself to other people in a church, that feels too dangerous. Surely someone is going to take advantage of you.

If you feel that this evening then I need you to focus on what Jesus says here. We aren’t made to work for God’s rest, the God’s rest is given as a gift to be received by us.

As the Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus has the authority to reinterpret God’s rest for us in a way that we can hear and receive. He strips the pharisees of their power, he cuts through all of their religious noise, and he declares that God’s rest has now come to us through him. Jesus is our rest. Jesus, the God who takes our side in a world that beats us down, he is our rest. Jesus, the God who knows we’re too tired to come to him, so he came to us. Jesus, who knows that our heart has been broken so many times we can’t trust nobody anymore, he pursues us until we’re ready to give ourselves to him.

Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath, is our rest. And that makes rest a threat.

The Threat of Sabbath Rest

Let’s consider how God’s rest is a threat - and how that’s actually a good thing for us.

Look at verse 6. After Jesus heals the man with the withered hand, it says that the Pharisees went out and plotted with the Herodians to kill Jesus. Now, you need to understand how wild this is. The Pharisees, as we’ve seen, are these ultra conservative guardians of tradition. They don’t want anything to change. Their religious identity had to be protected by all these extra laws they created.

The Herodians were the exact opposite. So, Judea, the region where Jesus’ ministry took place, was under control of Rome. Rome had colonized much of Europe and the Middle East. Rome controlled these areas not just through governing laws, but also by forcing their culture and their religion on people they colonized. The Herodians were a Jewish group who loved ROman culture. They wanted to assimilate. They were the cultural progressives who loved the ideas of sexual freedom and self fulfillment that Rome promised.

So the Pharisees and the Herodians, they hated each other. You could say they were like modern day political Conservatives and Progressives, but that’s not quite right. For these groups, it was more than politics, it was culture, it was ethnic heritage, it was religious identity.

Yet, despite their hatred for each other, there was one force that was powerful enough to make them allies. What was it? Their shared hatred of Jesus.

Let’s recall what we’ve observed in Mark’s gospel these last several weeks. After declaring the good news of his kingdom, Jesus immediately set to work bringing people to himself. And who is it that Jesus gathers into his kingdom?

Working class fishermen. The demon possessed. The sick. The poor. The unclean. The beaten down. As we saw with Levi, Jesus even has space in his kingdom for wealthy oppressors who are tired of living in sin . In other words, Jesus is gathering a kingdom from the weary masses of the world so they can enjoy God’s promised rest.

And that is a threat. It is a threat to everyone whose heart is so stubborn that they want to hold onto their power and control rather than surrendering themselves to King Jesus. Maybe that’s you today. If you’re here today and the Lord is convicting you of your sin, your manipulation, your abusive control, Jesus extends himself to you, but you need to repent. There is a place for you in his kingdom, but you need to ask Jesus to change your heart. You can’t live in his kingdom as someone who is willingly harming other people.

But Jesus is also a threat to the man with the withered hand, not because his heart is stubborn, but because his heart was broken. Jesus told this man to stand up in front of everyone and stretch out his hand. The humiliation that this man feared most is possibly in front of him. He had to make a choice. Should he back down and guard himself as he’s always done? Should he keep trying to make it on his own? Or does he risk being publicly humiliated in order to believe that everything he had heard about Jesus was true?

Look at verse 5. Jesus put this question before the Pharisees: “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?”

With this piercing question, Jesus ties his fate to the man with the bad hand. And, he ties himself to every one of us here whose soul is cast down by the burdens of this life. Jesus has done good for us in the face of the world’s evils. In fact, he was willing to save our lives even if it mean the world would kill him for it.

Jesus was killed at the hands of the Pharisees and Herodians so that, through resurrection, he would defeat sin, death, and evil as the Lord of the Sabbath. Though the world’s trials may not end, though our bodies may lose their strength, the rest our souls crave is given to us in Jesus. He gives us himself, so we can rest in his presence and his love. And that is a rest that can never be taken from us.

This is the secret to Mother Pollard’s soul rest. She knew, like the man with the withered hand knew, that faith requires risk, believing that Jesus is worthy of trust when no other hope can be trusted.

Rest for the soul might sound foolish, it might even sound impossible. But have you asked Jesus for the rest that he promises? Have you risked it all to trust in him?