Finding Healing on the Sabbath
Notes
Transcript
As our days and weeks grow more frantic and over whelmed it becomes increasingly clear that we need a way to step out of the rat race and the monotony of daily life. To mark the days the weeks and the months of our life not by how much we have consumed or how much we have accomplished.
The bible offers a means to accomplish these goals. That means is the sabbath. For Christians our sabbath is Sunday, a day set aside for worship, for restoration and for rest.
But of course when I say sabbath you don’t think of that as necessarily a joyful thing. It might sound old fashioned to you, weird and foreign.
Sabbath as described in Little house in the big woods.
When your Grandpa was a boy, Laura, Sunday did not begin on Sunday morning, as it does now. It began at sundown on Saturday night. Then everyone stopped every kind of work or play.
Supper was solemn. After supper, Grandpa’s father read aloud a chapter of the Bible, while everyone sat straight and still in his chair. Then they all knelt down, and their father said a long prayer. When he said, “Amen,” they got up from their knees and each took a candle and went to bed. They must go straight to bed, with no playing, laughing, or even talking.
Sunday morning they ate a cold breakfast, because nothing could be cooked on Sunday. Then they all dressed in their best clothes and walked to church. They walked because hitching up the horses was work, and no work could be done on Sunday.
They must walk slowly and solemnly, looking straight ahead. They must not joke or laugh, or even smile. Grandpa and his two brothers walked ahead, and their father and mother walked behind them.
In church, Grandpa and his brothers must sit perfectly still for two long hours and listen to the sermon. They dared not fidget on the hard bench. They dared not swing their feet. They dared not turn their heads to look at the windows or the walls or the ceiling of the church. They must sit perfectly motionless, and never for one instant take their eyes from the preacher.
When church was over, they walked slowly home. They might talk on the way, but they must not talk loudly and they must never laugh or smile. At home they ate a cold dinner which had been cooked the day before. Then all the long afternoon they must sit in a row on a bench and study their catechism, until at least the sun went down and Sunday was over.
Now in this description you get the sense that Laura’s grandfather did not enjoy his family’s sabbath keeping practices. There were lots of rules and very little joy.
Still they were trying to honor the lord’s day as it is described in Isaiah 58.
“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
The mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Now it sounds to me like from Laura’s perspective there was very little joy in their sabbath! My opinion is that many of the rules that they followed to keep the day holy failed to allow them to find their Joy in the Lord.
But few make those mistakes in this day and age. In this day and age Sunday becomes another day to get things done. To catch up on the work of the week. To squeeze out that last little bit of productivity and prep our houses and our children for the work of the week ahead.
Or it becomes a day to indulge, to catch up on sleep, to catch up on TV and other mindless entertainments. Either way that day is consumed and we enter the week exhausted, bread dead and “living for the weekend” In a world of Chronic productivity and chronic stress. Our failure to sabbath well results sickness and brokenness in the place of healing and joy.
Today we are going to watch as Jesus heals a man on the sabbath and through the lens of that sign we will see how we can find rest for our souls and how to avoid turning the day of the Lord into a day of despair.
Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath,
Setting: John brings us and Jesus Back to Jerusalem. This time for an unknown feast.. all we know about the day is that it is the sabbath. Jesus is near the temple near a pool that is fed by two springs of water.. Around the pool was a roofed porch where the sick and the lame lay and received some small amount of care from compassionate persons in community of Jerusalem. As we read the Text here we can Imagine Jesus walking to through the crowds invalids that surround the pool. and for some reason we find that he stops in front of this nameless man. A man who had been paralyzed for 38 years.. Jesus looks at him and asks him, “ do you want to get well?”
The man answers Jesus’ question with an excuse rather than an answer. -
He is not healed he said because he hasn’t the ability to be healed. It is a catch 22, a completely hopeless situation, To be healed I have to be able to move quickly, and if I was able to move quickly I wouldn’t need to be healed.
This isn’t just an excuse- This also shows us what the man believes about God. The man is superstitious. The waters of the pool were likely stirred by a rush of water from the springs that fed them. but the superstition was that these waters were cause by an angel that came to heal.. Only the first person who was able to get into the water. This was not a fact.. But it was something that he likely believed. And in light of this belief we see that This man saw God as one who demanded the impossible. A God who promises to heal only the lame that can walk is not a God of Grace but of works.
Now Jesus Responds to his Excuse with a command that changes his life. But perhaps not his heart.
The man obeys Jesus, he picks up his mat and walks away. Maybe there was gratitude, maybe there was celebration, if so John chooses not to tell us about it he jumps immediately to the next part of our story..
At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”
But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”
So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”
The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.
“Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.
And now we are told that this was the sabbath and we see that because it was the sabbath a moment that was joyful has become fraught with difficulty. _ You see command that Jesus told the man- Take up your bed and Walk. Was a command that led the man to break- not one of God’s laws for keeping the sabbath but one of the 39 rules for sabbath keeping that were taught by the pharisees and religious leaders in Jerusalem. They created them to keep the people far far away from any chance of sinning. Don’t want to accidentally work on the sabbath. Then just don’t pick anything up on the sabbath. Problem solved! But they took these made of rules as seriously or more seriously than God’s guidelines for sabbath keeping.
This was a lot like Laura’s ingal wilder’s great grandparents. They too removed the Joy from sabbath observance in an attempt to keep the letter of the law.
Now the paraplegic now healed cowtows to these religious types very quickly by telling them who told him to carry his mat as quickly as possible before making himself scarce. This shows us that his superstition extended far past the colonnades of the pool of Bethesda as he ignores the evidence of Jesus’ power right before him to trust these false teachers to have the keys to kingdom. And that is the last sad word that we hear from him.
But the plot is really just beginning. Because now the religious leaders confront Jesus for his failure to keep the sabbath. After all he did heal a man and command him to carry his mat. - Hardly the careful and circumspect sabbath behavior that they expected from a teacher on the sabbath.
But their accusation towards Jesus doesn’t end as expected.
Rather than saying he was sorry or arguing that it was okay for the man to pick up his bed since he wasn’t employed as mover- and it wasn’t there for “work” for him. All things that they might have expected Jesus to do- Jesus does the one thing that they should have seen coming but didn’t. he challenges them to see the sabbath in a different light and himself as well.
He reminds them that god works on the sabbath- after all God sustains all of creation every day. he allows us to live and move and breath. day in and day out. We have a fancy theological term for it, “The providence of God.”
But the psalmist says it better: of creation when he says.
When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
Which is a slick argument that works for God- but then Jesus shocked and challenged them by applying it to himself as well.
He tells them that he is one with the father! That he is literally sharing in the work of sustaining creation, and giving life to all things.. a very small part of which was giving that man back his ability to walk!
The rest of Jesus’ speech in Chapter 5 Invites us to see how much Jesus shares with the Father. He is given authority to give Life, to take it away, To judge and to forgive. To even call the dead to Life again.
For the pharisees this line of reasoning could only be blasphemy worthy of death as they fixate not on the wonder of the healing but the superstitions that Jesus had broken in the process. They were so fixated on those 39 rules that they made up to keep God happy that they missed God standing right in front of them!
And that brings us full circle. Here we see an incredible failure to keep the sabbath in these men, their attitudes and accusations. They had an opportunity to find great delight in the lord and joy in the sabbath. God was present with them like never before! But they had put the cart before the horse and were unable to see the lord of life in their midst.
We too can get so caught up in what we should do that we for get why we are doing it. or more importantly who we are doing with. Jesus invites us to believe and to follow him. To find rest and delight for our weary souls.
But the times are a changing and we have found new ways of doing things poorly. We have made an Idol of productivity and a status symbol from exhaustion!
So my friends..Do you ever feel like you are carrying the world on your shoulders? Do you ever feel like if you ever stop being busy the whole thing might might come crashing around you? If so you have likely forgotten that it is God who sustains you and all of creation. He invites you not to earn your rest or to earn his favor. but to simply stop and see that he has come to you. For those of you who can’t stop going he speaks to you as he spoke to the paralyzed man. Would you like to lay down? And we when we breathlessly answer. Oh Lord I will stop and rest as soon as I have finished this todo list. He responds, with a simple and yet incredibly difficult answer.. That sounds as impossible as the words he said to the Paralyzed man. Stop your worry and works and rest with me! He calls us to find rest. not in the works that we have finished but in the work that he has finished.
Because Jesus is the lamb of God who carried the weight of the world and far worse the weight of our sins to the cross. There he made it possible for us to be with him and he with us. This is the goal of our sabbath worship. The answer to the dreaded tyranny and monotony of our days and weeks. Jesus, the one who heals us, redeems us and who loves us invites us to find a day to feast in his love and his presence. To delight in the Lord here together and throughout the week ahead.
As we close today please ask yourself-are you approaching your relationship with God like the paralyzed man who believed God only helps those who help themselves? Is your faith paralyzed by disappointment and disbelief? Or is your faith a small and starved thing? Have the idols and cares of the world kept you form finding rest in Christ.
If your answer to either of these questions is yes then I would encourage you to take seriously the call to sabbath rest. Let your soul find peace not in your accomplishments or your plans but in the endless sufficency of Jesus’ Love for you!