Luke 6:1–11
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 30th May 2021
It doesn’t matter what you say, someone will contradict it. It doesn’t matter what you want to do, someone will oppose it. We live in an adversarial world. Wars are comonplace. We would have more of them, if it wasn’t for our Westminster system of government where there is a licenced opposition, whose job is to disagree. It’s not surprising then, that Jesus soon had enemies. Opposition began when he started visiting the homes of the wrong people. There was also suspicion of who he claiming to be, and what his political intentions were. But of all the many points of difference between him and the establishment, what got him in the most trouble was his attitude to the sabbath.
To understand this we need to think ourselves back into another age; we are not much given today to sabbath keeping. Our grandparents may have been, but it has all but vanished in our brave new world. But for the Jews in the first century it mattered big-time. It hadn’t always. Moses fourth commandment instructed the Israelites to keep holy the sabbath day. A day of worship and rest was to be part of their culture. But like a lot of what Moses laid down, it was neglected at times in their history. When Nehemiah became governor of Jerusalem after the Jews’ return from Babylon, he found the markets were just as busy on Saturdays as on any other day, so he closed the gates of the city on Friday evening and enacted other measures to stop the desecration of the sabbath.
But then Alexander the Great spread the culture of Greece across the known world. When he died—three hundred years before Jesus—the Greek empire was divided three ways. North was the kingdom of Antiochus, south the kingdom of Ptolemy. Israel was squeezed between them. In 167BC Antiochus IV captured Jerusalem, abolished the Jewish constitution, and imposed Greek law. Circumcision was prohibited. Any child found to be circumcised was hung, and its family and home destroyed. Sabbath-keeping was outlawed. Many Jews were happy to adopt the new culture. The king believed he was a manifestation of the Greek god, Zeus. Pigs were offered in sacrifice in the temple.
When imperial officers came to the town of Modin and called on the aged Mattathias to set an example and sacrifice to the Greek gods, Mattathias attacked the garrison and led those who were loyal to the law into the wilderness. His son, Judas Maccabaeus (the Hammer) led a successful war of liberation and ousted the Greeks. Thenceforth, circumcision and sabbath keeping grew hugely important as patriotic markers.
The Bible said you were not to work. But what was work? The rabbis developed a complex set of regulations as to what could and couldn’t be done on the sabbath. A person who ignored them could he labelled a “sinner”, or ostracized from the community. At times the death penalty was imposed. It is little wonder that Jesus’ free approach to the Sabbath was viewed with suspicion.
Before we look at the two incidents in our reading, I want to consider the meaning of the sabbath, and whether Christians should keep it, and if so, how? The first mention in the Bible is in the creation story right at the beginning of Genesis: God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh:
So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
We learn two things. Firstly, God made the seventh day holy. That means it was special, different from all the other days. Second, God blessed the seventh day. Blessing means happiness. God meant the sabbath day to be especially happy. It is happy as the day he completed his task and ceased from his labours. It tells us creation was good, intended for happiness, something to be celebrated. “Rest” means a break from labour, but not necessarily inactivity. “Rest” is recreation, enjoyment, doing what we are unable to do in our work days. We should think of holidays. A holiday is a holy day, a time for pleasure, for fun. All of this is part of the concept of sabbath. It is about fulfilment. God intends that we should join him in the enjoyment of his creation. Why are we alive? Is it to be the slave of the gods? We must work, to be sure, but there is also something to be looked forward to. At the end of our working period there is the time of joy and fulfilment. So, when Moses received the ten commandments from God at Mt Sinai the fourth was to keep holy the sabbath day and to do no work. (Exodus 20) Even the slaves and the animals were to rest. This made being a slave in Israel different to the surrounding nations. It is a startling thing that this law has become part of the culture of almost every nation on earth. There are seven days in the week, and the last is a day of rest. With all the clamour to get rid of everything from our Judeo-Christian past, it is noteworthy that no one has yet begun to agitate that a week should be four days, or eight days, or ten. Since the creation God has ordered our life in this sevenfold pattern. Humans are more than work machines; they are transcendent creatures, whose destiny is bound up with God’s purpose in creating a wonderful world. This is why part of our sabbath is given to worship. Most of our neighbours have abandoned this; they do not see any pleasure in the worship of God; they pity us that we should spoil our rest day with such boring activity. They will not make that mistake! But it is they who are mistaken. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” We were made to find our greatest enjoyment and fulfilment in knowing God. To miss out on that is to miss out on the purpose we are alive, to miss out on the most pleasurable thing possible. I am not saying that every church service will be a thrilling event; it is much deeper than that. But to be bored with your Creator is tragedy to end all tragedies. The coming kingdom will be peopled with people whose deepest joy is the enjoyment of God.
Sabbath is also about salvation. God found his chosen people in slavery in the kingdom of Egypt. He determines he will rescue them. Some ignorant people think the Bible supports slavery. Slavery is the opposite of what God means for his world. The Bible is a story of liberation. God leads them out and takes them to a land of milk and honey. He says to Moses, “I will go with you and I will give you rest.” (Exodus 33) That “rest” is salvation, happiness, and fulfilment. Canaan was to be their heaven. However, when the Israelites on their journey to the promised land rebelled again and again, God said they would never enter his rest, and so the promised land was never the glorious fulfilment it was intended to be. The “rest” of the people of God remained a thing of the future, and their weekly sabbath-keeping, besides being a continuing witness to the goodness of God’s creation, and his mercy in rescuing them from slavery, also pointed forward to the conclusion when the world would be as it was meant to be, and humans would find ultimate blessing and happiness. We should now be better able to understand Jesus’ falling out with the Jews of his time.
Did Jesus keep the law? Many Christians think he didn’t, but this cannot be correct. But didn’t he break the Sabbath? This depends on your definition of work. The two incidents we are looking at this morning land us in the middle of that debate.
In the first Jesus is hauled over the coals because his disciples were seen eating grain when they were passing through a wheat field on a sabbath day. To do that they had to pick the ears of wheat and then rub them in their hands to separate the grain from the chaff, and then blow away the chaff. Reaping, threshing, and winnowing were all prohibited on the sabbath.
Jesus answered his critics by pointing to the time David was escaping from Saul and took the holy bread from the sanctuary at Nob. It was to be eaten by the priests in a holy place, but David took it for himself and his men. Although there is no indication this happened on a sabbath, Jesus takes it as a precedent, justifying his own instruction to his disciples to satisfy their hunger with the ripe wheat. The rabbis would no doubt argue the point with him, but what is significant for us is that this is how he viewed it: “the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.” The “Son of Man” he speaks of here must be King David; that is how the Pharisees would have heard him. However, it was also his way of referring to himself. For those in the know he is also claiming for himself as the Messiah the authority to say what should and shouldn’t happen on the sabbath. Whichever way you take it, it points to an extraordinarily relaxed way of keeping the day of rest. He saw it this way, because, as he says in another place, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” For a Pharisee this would have been unthinkable.
I spoke at the beginning of the way Greek culture spread. Greeks believed in a kind of world-soul, a divine wisdom that accounts for the order in the universe. The Jews took up this idea and saw the divine wisdom as one and the same as Torah, the Law of Moses. They came to think that the whole order of the universe was encoded somehow in the Scriptures, as though the Bible was the blueprint of the universe, a giant DNA chain, if you could read the code. This meant that if you broke the law, you didn’t just displease God, you upset the running of the universe. Man was made for the law, not the law for man. Jesus saw the law rather as a gift of God to promote human happiness. For a Pharisee this was cosmic treason. Serious conflict was inevitable. According to Jesus, the sabbath was intended to be user-friendly. To load people down with regulations so the day became a burden was not God’s intention—it actually spoiled the day.
And there was another issue. On whose authority did the Pharisees lay down their detail of what could and couldn’t be done on the sabbath? “The tradition of the elders”, they would say. It is inevitable and right that any serious group will discuss what they think constitutes work. But on what authority did they bind it on the consciences of others? Jesus implied that only the king—the Son of Man—has that authority, and for those who knew his true identity, Jesus was claiming to be the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes work. To later Christians Paul would say, “Judge no one by their keeping of sabbaths!” People must decide for themselves. Only a lawful government can make rules for the sabbath that are binding on everyone. Within that framework—and our government has dismantled almost every restriction that used to exist—you, the individual have the freedom and responsibility to decide what you will do, but you must not make your decision a matter for judging others.
In the next incident things have escalated, the teachers of the law are monitoring Jesus’ activities to build a case against him. He is at synagogue on a sabbath day and there are hostile eyes watching. There is a man with a shriveled right hand. Perhaps he is a polio victim. Will Jesus heal him? Healing was forbidden when there was not an immediate threat to life. He could tell him to come back tomorrow—no reason why he should stir up unnecessary trouble. But he has a point to make, and fear of the authorities is not going to keep him quiet. He calls the man to stand out the front, and poses a question: “Which is lawful on the sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or destroy it?” He is appealing to his critics to ask themselves a hard question. “What are you doing on this sabbath morning? Are you not seeking ammunition to do away with me—to kill, no less? And I am about healing and restoring this man’s life. Which is lawful?” You cannot do nothing, you see. We are all doing something, even on the sabbath. Their work was murder, his was to give life. He tells the man to stretch out his hand, and it is restored.
Luke uses an important word here: “restored”. In Acts 3 he speaks of “the restoration of all things”; it was one way Jews spoke about the coming kingdom. Luke wants us to see that what Jesus did here is a foretaste of what he will one day do to the whole of God’s creation. And when better to do it than on the sabbath, the day that looks forward to the ultimate healing and restoration of all things.
Jesus announced that the kingdom of God was at hand: “Today this Scripture—the Scripture that speaks of the end of everything wrong—is fulfilled in your ears… This very day I am announcing “the acceptable year of the Lord.” God is about to set the world free from its slavery to all forms of evil, sickness, and even death. Healing on the sabbath for Jesus was totally appropriate, something he was almost compelled to do. It was the meaning of the sabbath.
Mark tells us that after this incident the Pharisees and Herodians began to plot his destruction. Once again, we run into the question what would become of the kingdom. Would it come irrespective of Israel’s rejection? Could there be a kingdom without the participation of the Jews? And if the final statement of humankind to the appearance of God in our world was the cross, what then?
Casting forward the New Testament makes clear that the kingdom actually came through the cross and resurrection—though not in the way expected, and not in the complete way it will come when Jesus returns. But it did come, and is here. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says that we who believe enter into God’s sabbath rest, though more remains for the future. (Hebrews 4) The promised blessings of the new age, forgiveness, peace with God, free access to the presence of God, the gift of the Holy Spirit all become ours when we surrender our lives to Jesus. In a very real way we enter into our rest—not when we die, but when we believe. “Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you are learn from me and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Eternal life begins now. Death is hardly death for one of God’s children. As Jesus said, “Whoever lives and believes in me, shall never die.” (John 11) That is why we must never say, “May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace!” because they do rest, And that rest is not the rest of lying peacefully in a grave; it is the rest of holiday, of joyful sharing with our Lord the life of heaven now, and the new universe when he comes again. The life of eternity begins today, if you will only call upon the Lord of the Sabbath as your Lord, your God, and welcome his gift of eternal life.