If I’m honest, arguments about Sabbath-keeping haven’t really been particularly significant in my personal understanding of Christian discipleship. When I was 13 I began working on Sundays, starting off doing a daily paper round and then graduating to working in the papershop, starting at 5am and leaving just in time to make it to church for band practice before the morning service! And as a minister, ‘working’ on Sunday’s comes with the territory, as it does for many other professions from healthcare to the police to farming to retail…
I remember well the ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign of the late 1980s, as various Christian groups got very hot under the collar about the proposals to allow shops to open on Sunday, but most of the Christians I knew were just glad they could pop to the supermarket on the way home from church.
I did have some contacts in the Strict Baptists, who took an altogether different approach to keeping ‘The Lord’s Day’ - no TV, no work, and intriguingly no cooking. The wife, and of course it was always the wife, would have to get the food for Sunday cooked and prepared by midnight on Saturday, so that it could be heated through and served on Sunday lunchtime.
But the reality for most Christians I’ve encountered is that, although in theory we like the idea of there being a ‘day of rest’, Sunday isn’t it, because Sunday is the day we are all on rotas at church!
The shift of ‘The Lord’s Day’ from the Jewish Sabbath, which is celebrated on a Saturday, to the Christian Sunday, occurred fairly early in the Christian tradition, when many early Christians were also Jews. These early Jewish Christ-followers would observe the Saturday Sabbath, and then gather for worship on a Sunday. This set the practice for the day of Christian worship being a Sunday, and as Christianity shifted from being a Jewish sect to a Gentile religion, the theology of Sabbath shifted to Sunday as well, with Sunday becoming enshrined as the ‘day of rest’.
And despite various Christendom attempts to enshrine the idea of a Christian Sunday Sabbath in law, we are in reality a long way from the religious and cultural context behind our reading today from Luke’s gospel about the disputes Jesus had with the Pharisees over the keeping and breaking of the Sabbath.
And there’s something we need to be especially careful of here, as we read this text and those like it. All too easily we can find ourselves using it to reinforce anti-Semitic tropes, and in the week where we’ve marked Holocaust Memorial Day, the importance of avoiding such easy othering is especially visible.
You see, the point of this passage is NOT that the Sabbath is bad; and neither is it that the Jewish leaders are stiff and legalistic in their opposition to Jesus. It’s very easy, and very tempting, to read these stories of dispute over Sabbath-keeping as presenting the legalistic Pharisees on one side, and the libertarian Jesus on the other; and to then translate onto that dichotomy a narrative of legalistic Judaism versus the libertarian Gentile world.
But this is not about Gentiles versus Jews, even if that is the way Gentile Christians have often read it. This isn’t an inter-religious debate. It’s an intra-religious debate. This is a dialogue between Jews, over the true meaning of the Sabbath. Jesus and his disciples are Jewish, and their transgression of Sabbath laws is not some symbolic protest about Jewish legalism to be celebrated by the Gentile heirs of Christianity.
And, intriguingly, neither are the Pharisees the villains here that they are often made out to be. I’ve said before, and will say again, the Pharisees get an unnecessarily harsh time of it in the interpretive tradition of Christianity. In fact, I’ll go a bit further than this. I think the Pharisees are the Baptists of first century Judaism! What I mean by this is that in many ways they are seeking to do for Judaism what Baptists, and other nonconformist and protestant groups, have sought to do for Christianity.
Judaism in the first century was highly dependent on the Temple. Herod the Great had rebuilt and restored the Temple, and by the time of Jesus’ ministry it was more magnificent than it had been at any point since the Babylonians destroyed the first temple of Solomon, six centuries earlier. And whilst Judaism had already proved during the Babylonian exile and the early years of the return to the land that their faith could survive without a temple, the economic and social pull of Herod’s temple in Jerusalem had led to people increasingly looking to the priests and the sacrificial system as their primary route to divine encounter.
The Pharisees rebelled against this, and promoted a form of Jewish piety that didn’t need the priesthood and the temple to mediate between them and God. In many ways they were democratisers of religion, focussing instead on personal piety and devotion, and on the importance of taking personal responsibility for your soul’s state before God.
The echoes of this in the protestant reformation’s break with the priestly systems of medieval Roman Catholicism are striking. But, just as Baptists have often ended up idolising the Bible even as they claimed that the Bible freed them from idolatry, so the Pharisees’ attempt to offer a means and mode of devotional practice that could be followed by anyone, also became in its turn a form and means of oppression.
The issue at stake here, as we all know, the regulations surrounding the celebration of the Sabbath. What’s not quite so clear on first reading is why this matters so much? If it’s not just a pure addiction to legalism, why were the Pharisees so obsessed about keeping the Sabbath laws, and why were Jesus’ disciples so set on breaking them?
Well, the first thing to understand is that Sabbath-keeping was, and to an extent still remains, a transgressive act. Sabbath keeping was not about compliance, it was about rebellion. Sabbath keeping was one of the things that marked Judaism as distinct from the world around it, because it was a practice that, like the idea of Jubilee to which it is so closely tied, disrupted the economic regimes of oppression that otherwise were free to dominate humans without limit.
Then, as now, the economic systems of the world slept for no-one. If you were a land owner, it made no sense to give your workers a day off, when instead you could have them working seven days a week. And this is precisely what land-owners did. Labour was cheap, lives were cheap, and if you worked people to death by the time they were forty, it didn’t matter because you could simply work their children in their place.
The Jewish command to have a day off each week, was an act of economic resistance. And it spoke of God’s gracious intrusion into life, disrupting the systems of servitude that were otherwise free to oppress without restraint.
Like the Victorian labour laws, or the rise of the Trades Union movement, Sabbath was supposed to be a means of grace to those who were poor, and certainly not a means of obligation on those who were already otherwise oppressed. It guaranteed people a window of time so they could rest: on the seventh day because God rested on the seventh day. And so the Pharisees’ defence of it wasn’t some attempt to impose ridiculous regulations on people for the sake of it, it was a desire to protect something that made God’s grace real in the world, that brought freedom to those facing financial enslavement. It was an echo of the Exodus.
In which case, you might well ask, why was Jesus so set on disrupting it?
Well, here’s the thing. Even the best intentioned disruptions of the rhythms of oppression, can themselves function as tools of oppression if they become the end, rather than the means.
The Sabbath was good, and the Pharisees’ defence of it was good; but when the very thing that was supposed to defend the poor and the vulnerable became instead a reason to deny feeding the hungry or healing the sick, it had gone very wrong.
So Jesus isn’t opposed to the Sabbath, rather he wants to take it back to its original, God-given intent. Jesus isn’t challenging the Sabbath intrinsically, rather he’s highlighting the oppressive function that it has acquired.
Jesus says, ‘ The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath’. And in the person of Jesus we see God drawing near, and we realise that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, bringing healing and wholeness to any who need it; and any system which opposes that, however well-intentioned it may be, needs to be challenged.
The in-breaking kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven, should always be about the renewal of life, the giving of life to those in need. And meeting hunger and dispensing healing are essential characteristics of God’s presence. So any approach to Sabbath-keeping which takes it away from its emancipatory origins, prohibiting the life-giving good news of the kingdom to those who are vulnerable, is no longer fulfilling its original intent.
Well, where does this leave us?
We may not have a particular issue about Sundays, but I do wonder what traditions we may have that, whilst perfectly good in their intent and origin, can be in danger of becoming an end in themselves, rather than a means of grace.
My hope is that the suspension of all our activities during this last year of lockdown, provides us with an opportunity to reflect on our interrupted traditions, and to plan for a future where we don’t just carry on doing things, because we’ve always done them that way.
So much of what had seemed essential, unchallengeable, has had to stop. And I hope that as we plan for the reopening of society, our lives, and our church over the coming months, we won’t simply seek to regain the familiar, defaulting to our preferred rituals of living, worship, and service.
From our congregational life, to our compassionate engagement with the needs of the world, to our commercial activity, to our cultural impact; we need to hear the challenge to live and rebuild according to our values and vision, and not to assume that we must re-start things as they were when we closed them last March.
These four C-words: congregation, commerce, compassion, and culture, are a helpful way of us envisaging the life of our church; and the Deacons have been using them to think about how we can build a sustainable, effective, future for our church, where our congregational life, our commercial activity, our compassionate ministry, and our cultural impact work together to bring life and hope to being in the world, in the name of Christ.
At this afternoon’s church meeting, we’ll be spending some time reflecting together on our congregational life, one of these four strands, and thinking about how we can embody our values as Christ’s people, in ways that are true to our calling.
This requires courage, it necessitates risk, it calls us to
an openness to change, and to a prioritising of the values of the kingdom of
heaven.
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