if you honor (the
Sabbath), not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your
own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride
upon the heights of the earth (Is. 58)
Keep the Sabbath holy. This notion dips
in and out of Jesus’s ministry, showing up particularly at times of conflict.
Keeping the Sabbath holy was, to Jesus and his contemporaries, not simply a
matter of having a day-off from work; to keep Sabbath was how the Jews
understood their life with God: their obligation to define time in a particular
way that reflected the act of God in creation, and God’s deliverance of Israel
from their slavery to the Egyptians. To break the Sabbath was akin to rupturing
the order of things. It was to fall back into a kind of slavery.
The version of the Ten Commandments
in Deuteronomy directly links the Sabbath with liberation from bondage: ‘You
shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your
God brought you out thence with a mighty hand an outstretched arm; therefore
the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day‘ [Deuteronomy 5.15].
Under this description, Israel is liberated from bondage into bonds with its
God. These are bonds, however, that do not tie them down but that make them at
home with God and each other. Left to themselves, without the bond of Sabbath,
the people looked for gods to enslave themselves to. But if they lived under
the law, in the kind of society that refuses the idol of productivity and the
compulsive need to be a success story, then they will preserve the freedom God
has given them. In other words, freedom for Israel was not automatic and certainly
not a birthright. It could not be taken for granted. It depended on how people
related to each other, what sort of community they had their lives in.
Jesus unquestionably believed this:
he thought the whole point and purpose of the Sabbath and the Torah in general was,
and always had been, to enshrine and maintain a certain way of living together
which he called love. It was not the case that Jesus placed love in opposition
to law; rather through his teaching, his life with others, and even in his
death, the obligations expressed through keeping the Sabbath were the ways in
which he showed how we can abide in relationships with other people, and with
our God. For love is a sign of those enduring fidelities which give us stability
and identity. True freedom, Jesus taught, is found through being grounded and
connected with God and others. When we lose Sabbath and its bonds of fidelity
and stability, we become adrift as people, making secure our lives to whatever
passes these days as solid: our possessions, our work, perhaps even our passing
interest in God.
Are we a people without Sabbath,
without, that is, fidelity and stability as religious believers? Sociologist
Richard Sennett refers to our age as one of ‘fleeting forms of association’ whereby
strong social ties like loyalty and long-term connection have ceased to be
compelling. "No long term",
Sennett continues, means keep moving, don't commit yourself, and don't
sacrifice.[i]
Instead of friendships, we have
transactions of products and people; instead of rest, we have entertainment;
instead of freedom, we are in bondage to our own determined self-sufficiency. We
become bent over like the women healed by Jesus in today’s gospel, unable to
stand erect as members of a stable community bound together in love. The
enslavement the women experienced was like a demonic burden that limited not
only mobility, but her freedom to live and share in the life of others. In
releasing her, Jesus showed us and his detractors the shape of life with God,
the promise of his enduring care.
The Sabbath is a sign that none of us
are ultimately slaves, neither of work nor of any human being nor even of God.
The Sabbath is a sign of the dignity of every human being whom God has called
to share his life. The erosion of fidelity to friendship, rest, and stability
bear witness to a society that does not recognize this ultimate shared dignity.
We go on producing and consuming without interruption. The vision of Jesus
gestures towards something else; he points to our liberation, where, in the
words of Isaiah, we shall take delight in
the LORD.
Our freedom is ultimately what it
means for us to live into the space God opens up for us; a space where we can
share friendship and be healed of our broken hopes, our ruined relationships,
and the rest of our ‘fleeting forms of
association’. We were made for stability; we were created for joy. To keep the
Sabbath and to do so as an expression of holiness, is to embrace our purpose
and destiny as a people defined by our bonds. The gift God gives through the
Sabbath is the basis for our freedom; to abide with him is the beginning of our
liberation from our slavery to patterns of life that restrict human wellbeing.
When we are free, we can, like the healed woman, stand secure as a member of a
community shaped by love, and under a God who in Christ, has called us into new
life.
[i] Richard Sennett, The
Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism
(W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 24–25.
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