Pew Sheet 2nd June 2024

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

(Readings: Deuteronomy 5:12-15; 2 Corinthians 4:5-12; and Mark 2:23-3:6)

In our reading from Deuteronomy, we see the origins of the ‘Sabbath’ which was instituted so that the people, their servants, their livestock, and even the foreigners living amongst them might enjoy a day of rest at a time when the working week for most people was an unbroken cycle of hard physical labour in which there was no distinction between one day and the next. The passage says nothing about going to church or to the synagogue to pray – because there were no churches or synagogues then, just the semi-permanent tabernacle or ‘Tent of Meeting’ which travelled with the Israelites during their sojourn in the wilderness, though it was always erected outside the camp, and few could go inside it, except for Moses, Joshua his assistant, Aaron the priest, and the Levites who attended upon God there.

The Sabbath was first and foremost a day of rest, ordained by God for the health and wellbeing of the people and their animals, and not primarily as a religious ordinance. It was in resting that they honoured God, because it was an indication to the nations around them, that they, unlike their neighbours did not have to work seven days a week as most did, because they knew and trusted that God would provide for them, and that God had given them the greatest and most precious of gifts for the time: opportunity for leisure, for rest, and yes, to reflect and give thanks to him for his loving kindness (or ‘hesed) and bountiful provision, so that they did not have to work every day of the week like their neighbours.

By Jesus’ time, that which had been intended as a precious gift had become a religious duty with its attendant list of do’s and don’ts which many of us might remember from our own childhoods. Instead of lifting the burden for one day of the week, the religious authorities had instead turned it into another burden by imposing so many rules and regulations upon it. These perverted the Sabbath from a free gift divinely given, to a duty which had to be observed. It turned God’s gift of loving kindness into something which had to be earned, and paid for by an overscrupulous observation of petty man-made rules which sucked much of the joy out of it. Jesus would have none of this, however. In healing the man with the shrivelled hand, he reminded his detractors that the Sabbath had quite literally been given for the healing and the welfare of all, and that those who argued otherwise knew much less about God than they claimed, which is why of course, they determined there and then, that he would have to die, and they would have to kill him!