Mark 2:23– 3:6
“Sabbath Work”
March 25, 2012 - Fifth Sunday in Lent

         “So why don’t you keep the Sabbath?” was the question to me as I spoke to a college class in Nebraska. I was talking about the Covenant Church. I explained our history out of Lutheran pietism, particularly emphasizing that we base our doctrine and practice firmly on the Bible. But at a Seventh Day Adventist school, Union College, it raised the question of whether the Bible did or did not teach Christians to observe Saturdays as the Sabbath.

         Like for the Pharisees in our text, the issue of just how the Sabbath is kept took precedence over every other spiritual matter. It didn’t matter whether I had a living relationship with Christ as Savior or that I was committed to Scripture as God’s Word. All that counted for those students was whether or not I worshipped on Saturday rather than Sunday. For the Pharisees it didn’t matter that Jesus was a prophet and a healer. All that counted for them was how He and His disciples kept the Sabbath.

         There’s actually some excuse for both those students and the Pharisees. You can make a case that God’s command to keep the Sabbath was the most important of all the commandments. Turn over to Exodus 20 verse 8 and you will discover that, out of the Ten Commandments, the one about the Sabbath had the longest explanation. When writing His Law on stone, God devoted the most space to the Sabbath.

         If you read that explanation of the Sabbath, you will see that it is the one commandment which God connects with the very order of creation. God Himself took a Sabbath on the seventh day. So He asks and invites human beings to do the same.

         In Exodus 31:12, after giving directions for building the Tabernacle, consecrating priests, and keeping holy festivals, God comes back to that one Law, the Sabbath. Then after all the bad business with the golden calf and the breaking of the tablets, Moses came back down the mountain a second time with new stone tablets. He assembled the people in Exodus 35 and started explaining God’s directions, beginning with the Sabbath.

         The idea of Sabbath and rest is intimately woven into the Bible’s understanding of salvation. A scripture that became a modern proverb is lifted from Isaiah 48:22 and 57:20 and 21, “There is no rest for the wicked.” In I Kings 8:56, Solomon praised God for giving His people rest. He repeats that thought in Psalm 127:2, saying that the Lord gives sleep or rest to those He loves.

         Turn over to Mark 4:26 and you see Jesus Himself teaching this in a little parable about the Kingdom of God. He compares the Kingdom to seed planted in the ground by a man. Then in verse 27, He says, “Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows.” We rest while God takes care of things.

         Historically, the Christian Church understood that Jewish Sabbath keeping on Saturdays was transferred to Sundays. That was the day Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus kept the last Sabbath of the old creation by resting in His Tomb. On Easter Sunday, He began a new creation by rising from the dead, marking Sundays forever as special and holy, the day to remember how we are saved. So Christians worshipped and rested on Sunday.

         Sabbath rest is the way God’s people have always acknowledged that both our life and our new life in Christ does not depend on ourselves. By stopping our work and resting for one day in seven, we demonstrate, both to ourselves and to the world, that ultimately everything depends on what God does, not on what we do. As Paul said in Ephesians 2:8, “It is by grace you have been saved—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works…” Sabbath is the practical way we show that we believe in grace.

         Despite its importance in Scripture, the contemporary practice of Sabbath by American Christians is a mess. Jewish writer Abraham Joshua Heschel said the Sabbath was like a temple constructed not of stone and wood, but out of time. By observing a day of rest, God’s people create a holy space in time in which to gather and worship Him. But if that’s the case, for most of us, the temple has cracks in the foundation and is falling down.

         Reacting against just the sort of legalism the Pharisees display in our text, most of us have no clear concept or plan for what Sabbath looks like, other than perhaps coming to church. We may have vague memories or have heard stories about rules previous generations followed, things like not working, not shopping, not going to movies on Sundays. One of our friends in graduate school visited a new church and was invited home by a family for Sunday dinner. She recalls the shock on their faces when she took her leave by saying she needed to get home and grade some papers. For them that was a violation of the Sabbath.

         But all that is practically gone for us, and I include myself in that indictment. We will leave here today and some of us go to work, others out shopping, others home to study, and still others to do laundry or yard work, all the chores we don’t have time for on weekdays. We really can’t imagine living any other way.

         So we might hope when we come to a text like the one for today, that what it boils down to do is that Jesus demonstrated and taught that we don’t really need to worry about the Sabbath. It was all just a bunch of Old Testament legalism and Pharisaic tradition, and it’s got nothing much to do with us. Right?

         Let’s examine our understanding of Sabbath by looking at just what happened here as Jesus encountered the Pharisees in two different controversies about the Sabbath. Let’s focus first on what the expectation was for the Sabbath. The primary rule for that day was that there was to be no work of any kind. That was the expectation.

         In Mark 2:23, Jesus’ disciples violated the Sabbath expectation as they passed through a field of grain. They plucked ripe wheat and rolled it in their hands to remove the shucks and eat the whole grains. Here’s a text for every proponent of raw organic food, but it didn’t make the Pharisees happy. In verse 24, they saw that act of rolling grain between the palms as the equivalent of threshing, the laborious work of farmers who separate wheat from chaff. It violated the expectation that one not work on the Sabbath.

         Jesus first answer to the Pharisees is something along the lines that there are exceptions. In verses 25 and 26, in response to their nitpicking about grain picking, Jesus came up with a fairly obscure little incident about David and his men in the Old Testament. It’s so obscure that Mark and even some Old Testament writers aren’t clear about the name of the high priest involved.

         While on the run from Saul, David and his men were low on provisions. They stopped just outside Jerusalem at a holy place where there was an altar on which the priests placed fresh bread each day as an offering to God. At the end of the day, the holy bread was to be eaten only by the priest and his family. But the high priest made an exception for David and his men in their dire straights and let them eat that consecrated bread.

         It looks like Jesus claimed a similar exception for His own disciples. Yes, technically they should not be doing what they’re doing. Yes, it really is working on the Sabbath, and the expectation is not to work on the Sabbath. But for whatever reasons, Jesus and His disciples are an exception to the expectation.

         If Jesus had just left it at that, it would not have been much of a challenge to the Pharisees’ expectations. They themselves were really good at this business of making exceptions. You may know the one they made about your ox falling into a pit on the Sabbath. It’s O.K. to do the work to pull it out.

         Some commentators think the Pharisees might have been upset with the disciples because they were also traveling through those fields. According to tradition it was against the expectation to walk more than a thousand yards from your home on a Sabbath. But some of the Pharisees created exceptions by carrying pieces of personal property. They’d walk a thousand yards and put down a pot or some other household item and say, “Here is my new home.” So they could walk another thousand yards, and so on.

         But Jesus didn’t just find a Scriptural exception clause. If that’s all He said, then His point wouldn’t be any more profound than the rabbis who kept establishing new homes as they traveled on the Sabbath. It’s almost as if verses 25 and 26 about David and the holy bread are Jesus saying, “Look, I can play that game too.” But with verse 27, Jesus totally changes the game.

         In verse 27, Jesus quits the whole business of looking for exceptions to the expectation and moves right to the heart of the nature of the Sabbath. It’s not about creating a bunch of legal expectations and then struggling to make them work by finding exceptions when you need them, it’s about an exultation in a gift from God. “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.”

         Even though Jesus was a brilliant student of Scripture, even though He could easily have bandied expectations and exceptions back and forth all day, He wanted the Pharisees, and He wants us, to grasp what Sabbath is truly about. It’s not about human beings trying to cram their lives into regulations surrounding a day of the week by finding the exceptions which will allow us to do what we have to do in spite of the expectation. It’s about discovering the exultation and joy which results when we realize that God has given us the grace to rest in what He has done.

         So when we come to verse 28 and find Jesus declaring, “So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath,” it’s not about the boss saying that He doesn’t have to obey the rules. If that were what Jesus was up to do, He wouldn’t be any better than some politician who plumps for law and order or family values, while he’s secretly taking bribes or keeping a string of mistresses. Jesus is not saying that He’s Lord of the Sabbath so that He can make an exception for Himself and His disciples.

         Jesus said that He, the Son of Man, is Lord of the Sabbath, to clue them and us into where real Sabbath, real rest, ultimately comes from. Don’t keep heaping up the expectations and then try to relieve them with exceptions. Instead, exult, rejoice in the free gift of grace, forgiveness, peace and rest in the Savior Jesus Christ.

         Expectation, exception, or exultation? Let’s apply that same analysis to the second part of the text. It’s Saturday again. This time Jesus fulfilled an expectation by going to worship in the synagogue on the Sabbath, like we’re expected to gather for worship on Sundays. And Mark tells us right away in chapter 3, verse 1 that there was a man there with a withered hand. We don’t know why, whether it was congenital or disease or accident. Luke tells us it was his right hand, so we do know it was a severe handicap.

         Verse 2 gives us the expectation of the Pharisees. Medicine was a profession. Healing was work. You don’t work on the Sabbath, so you don’t heal on the Sabbath. They wanted an excuse to accuse Jesus of something. Sabbath-breaking would be a good one.

         Jesus knew what they were thinking and went straight to it. In verse 3 He told the man to rise, to get up right where everyone could see him. This time, though, Jesus doesn’t even play the exception game. He could have. Over in Luke 14:5, in a similar situation, He talked about the exception I mentioned earlier, pulling an animal out of pit. Then He healed that person. But here He skips the exceptions and goes straight to the heart of Sabbath.

         “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” That’s what Jesus asked them in verse 4. Whatever expectations or exceptions surround this day, will you make it about life and goodness, or about evil and death? Mark tells us they had no answer. They were trapped. If they affirmed the obvious, then they would be giving Jesus the right to do what He was going to do.

         It must have been their stony silence which made Jesus angry, as it says at the beginning of verse 5. Faced with the truth about their attitude, they refused to budge. It “grieved” Jesus, we’re told. It’s a little lesson for us that it is good to be upset and angry at attitudes of hatred and injustice which keep people from being helped.

         Jesus, though, let His anger work out in compassion. He said “Stretch out your hand.” Faith is not just about what you say. The man’s faith was in what he did. He raised a shrunken, limp hand, maybe curled in on itself. And as he feebly stretched that misshapen and weak member toward Jesus he felt it begin to loosen, to fill with blood and life, to open up and reach farther than it every had before, until he was standing there with his hand out and completely open, raised to heaven, with joy in his heart and tears streaming down his face. Mark just says, “and his hand was restored.”

         That restored hand and redeemed man were not the expectation or the exception to a rule against healing on the Sabbath, but an exultation in what the Lord of the Sabbath can do when we trust in Him rather than in ourselves. It’s that exultation in God’s gift and salvation that is the heart and soul of the Sabbath.

         There’s bitter irony in verse 6. Jesus asked whether it was lawful to do good or evil on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill. The Pharisees who refused the good of healing or a life saved from disability that Saturday, went out the very same day to engage in an evil conspiracy to kill Jesus. Jesus had them pegged right. In all their Sabbath perfection, they were perfectly wrong.

         The difficult question remains of how Sabbath works out practically in our lives. It isn’t going to help us anymore than it did to Pharisees to start tightening up our rules, our expectations. That’s only takes us down the path of trying to find the exceptions, like work as an emergency or whether our job itself is some sort of exception like being pastor or a physician or just being forced by our employer to work on Sundays.

         Thinking about expectation and exception will only mess us up. The only place to land is in the exultation, in the clear message that rest from our labors and celebration of God’s salvation in Christ is a gift in which to rejoice, in which to exult. If we can with prayer and thought and humility craft a day or a time in our week in which there is that kind of exultation, that kind of celebration, then we may have a real Sabbath again.

         Sunday is still the best place to start. Leave work and chores at home and come away in the morning to do nothing productive. Worship has no product, no net worth, no tangible result. It’s simply a way to exult in what God is doing rather than in what we are doing. Leave expectations and exceptions at home, and come for the exultation. It’s a good start.

         Even spiritual work, spiritual discipline, can take a break on Sundays. One way to do a Lenten fast from some pleasure is to break that fast on Sunday, on the Sabbath. Take a rest from trying hard to refrain from whatever you gave up. If it’s chocolate, eat a small Hershey bar. If it’s television, watch an episode of “House” or whatever you’re missing. If it’s a sin, that’s different. Don’t go back to that. But let God bless you or give you joy in some other way. Maybe just take a nap and refuse to feel guilty about it.

         When you believe in Jesus Christ, you have the real, true, complete rest of eternal peace with God. Place your trust in Christ rather than in your own efforts. Find the life and the good that is His gift to you. Discover the exultation in the Sabbath and rest today in its joy because you are resting in Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath.

         Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj