Joshua 5:9a, 10-12; 2 Cor. 5:17-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11-32; Psalm 34
March 27, 2022
Larry Campbell
Mark 2:27
The Sabbath was made for us.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing to you, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.
What did Jesus mean when he said, “The Sabbath was made for us. We weren’t made for the Sabbath.”?
The translation of the Hebrew word, ‘Sabbath’ is ‘Rest’. For Christians, Sabbath, which in the Jewish tradition was on Saturday, was moved to Sunday, having something to do with ‘Resurrection’. When I was growing up, the Sabbath had another meaning. We just weren’t allow to do anything. We couldn’t play with friends, we certainly couldn’t play baseball or football.
I don’t know what observing Sabbath meant to my parents, which I think was part of the problem. It seemed that the faith into which I was born didn’t have a way of conveying to us that the Sabbath was made for us. It seemed that the Sabbath lorded it over us. It was the beginning of my disenchantment with the ‘rules’ of Christianity.
Walter Brueggemann, my favourite Old Testament scholar, has a take on Sabbath as resistance, some of which I want to talk about today.
When I was younger, I was always under the impression that Moses wrote the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures. I imagined he had a fair amount of time on his hands what with wandering around the wilderness for 40 years. But Old Testament scholars now believe that those first five books, traditionally attributed to Moses, were written during Israel’s time of exile in Babylon.
According to Bruegemann, the word Sabbath didn’t exist until the exile. It appears in what has come to be know as the 10 Commandments. There are a few versions of the Commandments that are virtually the same. However, the sections on the Sabbath are a little different. In the first version in Exodus 20, keeping the Sabbath is the longest section of these covenant statements. The reason given was,
“in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
In Exodus 31 what the people were told about the Sabbath had a little twist at the end,
“(The Sabbath is) a sign forever, between me and the people of Israel, that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day God rested and was refreshed.”
After the labour of creating the universe, apparently, God was just tired out from all that work, and needed to be refreshed. The writing suggests that the Sabbath calls us to live into the rhythm of creation; work and rest, work and rest. Walter Brueggemann, says,
“the busy society of commerce wants us to be depleted selves, because depleted selves make good consumers, good shoppers, and are easily administered. People who are “re-selved” through rest, have some energy and courage and authority and are not so easily managed.
“Sabbath is a refusal to live the way empire wants us to live, - as depleted Christ followers - so that our Christ-likeness has more energy to function as co-creators.”
Keeping the Sabbath became one of the identifying features of this people of faith. When they observed Sabbath seriously, what they were saying was,
“We will not have our lives occupied and defined by the trappings of empire.” “How do we dwell in the presence of the “Resting God”? What would be our behaviour if we were the full ‘selves’ the Creator intended us to be?”
Sabbath, to some degree, is what Lent is about. To be in Sabbath is to be in a posture of receptivity for receiving the gifts of rest – it requires us to slow down, to pause, to wait. Brueggemann says,
“We violate this principle at our peril. Our society is a model of systemic violation of the rhythms of creation. We operate out of fatigue and over-extendedness – we become cranky, inhospitable, and ungenerous.”
In the third version of the 10 Commandments, which we find in Deuteronomy, the section on keeping the Sabbath is the 2nd longest, the longest being the decree against idolatry. The reason given in this version of the covenant for keeping the Sabbath, was that the people were expected to,
“remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”
What was written about keeping the Sabbath had to do with social equality, attention to creation and even creature care. On the Sabbath not only were they told to stop working, stop acquiring, stop producing for empire, but all those for whom they were responsible were expected to be given rest as well.
While telling this story in Babylon, using the traditional story of deliverance from Egypt makes ‘Pharaoh’ a metaphor for what they might experience in exile. When Moses and Aaron asked for the people to be set free, Pharaoh not only said ‘no’, but he said to those acting as his work supervisors, “the people are not working hard enough. Stop giving them straw to make their bricks. Tell them they have to gather their own straw. And they have to make more bricks than before.”
Here he is demanding more production so he could acquire more wealth on the backs of these workers. Does this sound familiar? I know that if my 21 yr old self heard this while I was working at the lumber yard, it would have rung true for me.
With Pharaoh, Babylon, or what we know of Empire, we are given a vocabulary, of sorts, to help us identify the impact this world has on us, or those we know, and especially those we don’t know...
- those who experience the struggle of making ends meet from a job that doesn’t pay a living wage,
- or people who work for companies that expect a higher commitment to the company, than to family or faith,
- or people who work for companies that expect a work ethic that gives its workers little or no time for rest.
I'm not just talking about the poor and disenfranchised, although they are often the most victimized. I’m also talking about the well-off young Christian who because of society’s seductiveness, finds they are as trapped as a camel trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle. Often there is a perceived powerlessness to do what seems to be the right thing to do.
In closing, I want to go back to a lecture on “Sabbath” with Walter Brueggemann. There was a Question and Answer section after he spoke. One of the participants was obviously in a work situation where the boss for whom he worked couldn’t have cared less for his employee’s faith commitments. He asked, “what if you are a slave, and your master doesn’t want or care for you to participate in “Sabbath”?” After a long moment, with a look of, what seemed to be compassion for this young man, Brueggemann answered, “we need to depart Pharaoh’s regime.”
We all know how difficult that would be for anyone with bills to pay and mouths to feed. But that’s what he said. Then he looked up at everyone else and said, “we need (in the ways we are able) to quit co-operating with a system of productivity and acquisitiveness, by needing less, or wanting less, or not allowing our culture to create more hunger for us.”
I wish my parents had been taught this. This is the conversation we needed to have while they imposed Sabbath rules on me. I may have had a different understanding of the ‘rest’ into which God was inviting me.
Maybe not.
But maybe.