Luke 13:10-17
In our Bible Study this past Wednesday, we reflected on the fact that our mainstream Christian culture has become far removed from anything resembling the practice of Sabbath. Some of you reflected that you’ve seen the shift in your own lifetime, recalling a time not too long ago that stores were closed on Sunday and most extracurriculars took place on Friday night or Saturday. You remembered a time when folks didn’t worry much about being able to get to church on Sunday morning, because there was little else to do at that time of day. It was a time set aside, a day when only the most necessary chores were done before piling in the car or walking down the road to the church. It may have been a rule in your household, or in some places an ordinance that limited certain activity on the Lord’s Day.
For Jewish people of Jesus’s time, and for many observant Jews today, the Sabbath is a day set apart even beyond our memories of closed shops and simple Sunday afternoons. The Sabbath is a full 24 hour period around which the entire week revolves, a day during which no flames are ignited and no labor is done, not even by animals. The places one might go are limited by where you can go on foot, carrying nothing but the clothes on your back. For Jesus and his contemporaries, this would be limited mostly to the home and the synagogue. As a wandering teacher, Jesus is reliably found in the synagogue of whatever town he happens to be in on the Sabbath, reading scripture aloud and reflecting on it in conversation with other Jews.
Among what was likely a crowd of congregants, both locals observing the Sabbath and followers of Jesus craning to hear his latest sermon, a woman appears for whom the journey to the synagogue was likely challenging. She is disabled by a spirit that is causing her to be permanently bent over and unable to straighten. For eighteen years her view has been mostly the ground or the floor or her own feet. She is hindered, her perspective limited and her daily existence impacted by this ailment. She cannot enjoy face-to-face interactions with her community, her ability to work is limited by her disability, and her safety in travel is at risk.
We do not know if she was simply there to keep the Sabbath or if she was looking for Jesus, and she does not initiate their interaction. Jesus sees her and stops mid-sermon to center her, removing any barriers between her and her healing. Jesus meets her where she is and pronounces freedom over her, laying hands on her and raising her up to her full height. Her response to this miracle is to immediately begin praising God, recognizing the source of her healing and filling her first moments of liberation with thanksgiving.
Her joy is full-bodied and full-throated, making a scene and causing a stir in the synagogue. The leader of the synagogue does not address her directly, but he discourages the crowd from following in her footsteps. This man of faith understands the healing work of Jesus to be a labor forbidden on the day of rest, a transgression. While Jesus will elsewhere model rest, here he reminds the worried synagogue leader and everyone in the crowd of another important aspect of the Sabbath practice.
There are two definitions of Sabbath that work in tandem to form the complex mosaic of practices that persist in many Jewish communities to this very day. Sabbath is both a recognition of God’s own rest on the final day of creation and a day intended to be set aside in remembrance of the freedom from bondage in Egypt that God has made possible for the Israelites. Keeping the Sabbath day means both relinquishing work and practicing active holiness by centering God’s saving work in the world. In either case, the Sabbath is an exercise in freedom, and on this particular day in the synagogue Jesus is acting as a liberator.
Jesus is being consistent with the scriptures of his people and with his own teachings, also freeing all present from a narrow view of what is possible on the Sabbath, what rest and liberation can look like- including the synagogue leader, if he is willing to soften his heart enough to receive it. When Jesus chooses to liberate the disabled woman from the ailment that plagues her on that particular day, we are invited alongside the synagogue leader to examine the meaning and intent behind our structures, practices, and rules. Some rules are only useful if we remember why they were made in the first place. In the case of the Sabbath, all the specifics of what is to be done and avoided ultimately point back to the twofold meaning of the day. The sabbath is not a day of rest if it is not also a day of healing and liberation.
What might this mean for our own practice of Sabbath, whether we designate Sunday as our day of rest and liberation or another day of our week? What are our duties, our responsibilities as people who have been commanded to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy?
I had a professor in seminary who shared one way she chose to keep the spirit of the sabbath, as well as the tradition. She noticed that the ways she was choosing to rest on her day off were allowing her to labor less, but only at the expense of others who were working on her behalf. Eating out at restaurants meant contributing to an atmosphere of chaos and demand. Going shopping with friends put her in a consumer state of mind, leading to waste and accumulation for its own sake and more work for the underpaid employees of the shops. Driving around on her day off made her more tired and less attentive to those around her, and led to even more spending and consuming. Where is the rest in that? Where is the liberation? So my professor sat down with her family, and they chose a day of their week- not Sunday, in a pastor’s household The Lord’s Day isn’t the easiest day to prioritize simplicity. They chose a day, and they agreed that on that day they would not shop, would not eat in restaurants or order takeout, and they would not travel unnecessarily. It took some planning, and preparation, and a big adjustment of expectations. But they found something that worked for them, a way to honor the Spirit of the Sabbath as well as the tradition. They worked hard to keep the rhythm, and when they fell short they had compassion for themselves and thanked God for another opportunity to try again. And with the newfound simplicity and true rest, they discovered that there was room for the kind of freedom work they always tried to support but rarely found time for themselves. Volunteering, civic engagement, mutual aid were no longer crowded out of their lives. Their eyes were opened to the many types of bondage still disabling their neighbors, and they sought out opportunities to break those bonds where they could.
We do not all have the power to heal the physical and mental and emotional ailments of our neighbors. Many of us have enough on our plates keeping up with our own bodies. But just as sickness takes many forms, so does healing. Just as oppression takes many forms, so does freedom. As people of God, we are to remember the sabbath, and to keep it holy. We are to remember liberation, and keep our rest Holy. How do you practice?
Mother A Writes 