Sunday. Thing. Read it?
Luke 13:10-17; Hebrews 12:18-29; Psalm 103:1-8; Isaiah 58:9-14
How many of you really understand what the Sabbath is? It’s kind of a foreign concept for us in this day and age. For most people who work Monday through Friday, Saturday and Sunday aren’t days of rest they’re days of different work – errands, housework, lawn-work, and the like. They’re not days off as much as days doing different kinds of work. Things were a lot different for 1st Century Jews, and even for Orthodox Jews today.
The whole idea of Sabbath started out in Genesis 2:3 – “God blessed the seventh day [Saturday] and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” While the word isn’t yet used, the concept of resting because God rested started at creation. In fact, the root of the word Sabbath is the Hebrew word for “rest”. Moving forward, in Exodus 16:23, while the people are gathering manna, God says through Moses, “Tomorrow [the seventh day] is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord”. And later, “Today [the seventh day] is a Sabbath of the Lord… Six days you are to gather [manna], but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any.”
Then, in the giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, we get “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” In Deuteronomy, an additional clause is added: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”
So the idea of Sabbath is sound, a day of rest away from work. However, a problem arose in trying to determine what exactly is work! There are 39 things specified which one cannot do on Sabbath if you are an orthodox Jew some of which are planting, sifting, sewing, trapping, curing hide, lighting a fire, or carrying things certain distances. However, there is a commonly understand exemption – it’s not only ok to break a Sabbath law if human life is in danger, it is required. For example, if a woman is in labor, it’s ok to break Sabbath law.
That leaves us with these two basic thoughts. One: keeping the Sabbath is very important. Two: If a human life is in danger, it’s ok to break the Sabbath. This brings us to our Gospel lesson for today. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath (which curiously enough teaching isn’t work on the Sabbath if it involves things of God) and he saw a woman who was bent over and had been crippled in that way for eighteen years. She didn’t even approach him, Jesus just saw her, called her forward in the middle of the synagogue service and said “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Then he laid his hands on her, and she immediately straightened up healed and started praising God.
But of course, the head of the synagogue was mad because Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath. Jesus called him out on it, silencing him and his supporters, and delighting the people around him. But the thing is, the synagogue ruler missed something important. There’s a reasonable chance that, even though she was afflicted, the woman’s life was not in danger because of her physical condition. So, using that kind of thought, I might even argue that Jesus was in the wrong. But it’s always fairly obvious that Jesus doesn’t just look at the physical side of things, he looks into the heart as well. After eighteen years of suffering, I can imagine that this woman’s life was in danger on an eternal scale. She was afflicted by a spirit, the text tells us, and Jesus saved her life, something that is acceptable and even required to do on the Sabbath, even if it means breaking a few laws.
The synagogue ruler was too focused on the letter of Sabbath law to realize its own built-in exceptions. The woman had been given rest from her infirmity, and given her response as praising God, her life had been saved. Even though Jesus may have broken Sabbath law, and I’m fairly sure he didn’t, I really don’t think the formerly crippled woman cared. She was healed, and she was free.