Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Series C)
Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost September 2, 2007
Luke 14:1-14
We have a concept in our legal code called entrapment. It protects a person from being solicited by law enforcement officers to commit a crime for which they can then be arrested. Crimes must be committed on the initiation of the criminal, not the police. But you don’t have to be a lawyer or a worker of the civil government to know this penal code law. Entrapment is a game that we play, that we love to play, and sadly it is often with those whom we love the most. Like an exterminator of household rodents we set forth verbal and emotional traps that give rise to words that cause pain and sorrow, destruction and ruin to our fellow neighbor. Tragically, in the process of our sinful words and deeds we soon realize that we too have been entrapped in a game of cat and mouse, and we are no longer the cat, but the mouse. We are in bondage to our self-centered and egotistical ways. We are dying to live. As the liturgy reminds us, “If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
The Pharisees in the Gospel lesson today are playing this sinful game of entrapment. They have deceived themselves through a history of legalism into a false understanding of the Sabbath. Keep in mind however that this is not the first time they have played this game of entrapment. This was not the first time they had argued with Jesus over the proper observance of the Sabbath. On at least seven different occasions Jesus had “violated” their Sabbath traditions. On the Sabbath day He had cast out a demon, healed the fever of Simon’s mother-in-law, allowed His disciples to pluck grain, healed a lame man, healed a man with a paralyzed hand, delivered a crippled woman who was afflicted by a demon, and healed a man born blind. Given this litany of encounters with Jesus on the meaning and purpose of the Sabbath one wonders why on earth did the Pharisees think that one more bit of evidence was necessary. To this question, no answer is given. What we do know is that their whole scheme of entrapping Jesus backfired.
Notice how our text describes the character of the Pharisees and their understanding of the Sabbath. It says, “They watched him closely.” Well yes. This is true. But the force of the word here conveys much more than a couple of Pharisees reclining a table with hand held binoculars watching His every move. More to the point is that the Pharisees were lurking, they were observing with malicious intent to see what Jesus would do to the man with dropsy. The Pharisees thought that if He does not help him, He could be charged with being unmerciful and neglecting to help others. But if He does help him, then He is irreverent and in violation of the Sabbath, and therefore can be charged with disobeying God and His Word.
For you see, the main thing for the Pharisees in their observance of the Sabbath was that a person be idle, that they must not work. They even regarded the doing of necessary works of love on the Sabbath, such as healing a sick person, as a great violation of the Sabbath. If they appeared in the synagogue with open ears but deaf hearts, heard readings from the Law and the Prophets, recited some prayers, and abstained from all daily work, they believed they kept, in the best way, the Third Commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” To this day, Orthodox Judaism concerns itself with such legalistic categories. For example, when Senator Joseph Lieberman, a practicing Orthodox Jew, was running for Vice President, questions were raised about how his observance would affect his ability to perform in such a high office—when on the Sabbath, strictly speaking, even turning out a light switch was considered to be work that was forbidden by these laws.
Lest we think, however, that it is only the Pharisaical Jew who tends toward legalism, we should remember that all of us are born under the law, corrupted by sin and constantly attempting to justify our existence before God and our neighbor. As one author put it, “We want constant recognition of ourselves because it is vitally necessary. We need confirmation and renewal. If it is lacking, we try to regain it or even to coerce it. We want to produce something which others will say gives pleasure and ought to be recognized, so that it is rewarded by a glance or a word, and thus finds an answer.”[1]
And so, we fancy legalistic lines and man-made markers as we watch carefully, as we evaluate on the basis of our own in house moral code who is in, and who is out. So we think that if we can clearly define what is forbidden and we follow all the rules we then have nothing to confess, nothing to be forgiven for. But what ends up really happening is that we are left with a false sense of security, a carnal, fleshly security. So, all I have to do to follow the Third Commandment is not go to work on Sunday? Go to church once a week, perhaps I can miss a few Sundays if I count up all the Advent midweek services I attended. As I long as I sit idle, don’t mow the lawn, don’t clean the house, then I’m in the clear right? The question that we must answer is why did God create the Sabbath? Surely it was not to indulge the legalistic whispers of the Old Adam.
The Sabbath was intended to be a blessing, not a burden. Above everything else, it is a weekly sign that our Lord loves us, His people, and wants to draw us into an ever-closer relationship with Himself. To observe the Sabbath is to remember as Luther reminds us, that we “should not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.” The Psalmist entitling his prophetic words, “A Song for the Sabbath” extols the Word of God as the most precious gift, teaching us that though man will upon this earth grow weary, he will find in Christ and His finished work upon the cross, an eternal Sabbath, a peace and comfort which endures forever. The Psalmist writes, “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre. For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy.”
This Christ, whose work has made us glad, who causes our hearts to sing for joy and whose work brought death for Himself, but life for all, He is our Sabbath rest. He is Lord of the Sabbath, not by might and sheer power, but by humility and weakness. He sits not upon a kingly throne, but hangs upon a cursed tree for all to see. This Jesus who was delivered up for our transgressions and raised for our justification, He is our Sabbath rest. By His blood He erases and puts to rest all the questions that plague us in this earthly life. What do I really expect from life? Am I eagerly expectant to see what tremendous opportunities may still come my way? Or am I old and tired, looking ahead to nothing but death after a longer or shorter barren stretch of increasing loneliness and physical infirmity? Or am I worried about the state of my country, the wars that never seem to cease, and the nights that I flood my bed with tears about the broken past, the painful present, and the expectations I fear I will not fulfill in the future. Whatever it may be, the expectant hope of happiness or depressing dread, it is all changed, canceled, prevented, and transformed by Christ, our Sabbath rest, who makes all things new.
Of course it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath. The Sabbath was and never will be God’s day off. It was and continues to be the day of rest for those who are in Christ. Our Sabbath never ends, for in Christ all days are the same, every sunrise is a reminder that death is dead and Jesus lives. The work is done. And so, this Sabbath day and every day remember the testimony of Christ’s Spirit, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. Blessed indeed, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors.”
In the Name of the Father and the +Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen
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[1] Oswald Bayer, Living By Faith: Justification and Sanctification, (Lutheran Quarterly Books, Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 2