the inclusive lord of the sabbath

So where to start then?

Since beginning this Blog yesterday, I've had a number of messages, texts & emails asking me why I think the Scriptures are so important. Underneath this I hear the stories lots of us who are gay know of having the Bible weaponised and used against us.

That's an incredibly unlovely thing. It hurts.

But it's also not how things are meant to be. The Bible is meant to be an amazing, life-giving Gift that shows us who God is and what God is like. So perhaps I will begin here.

And I think I will try and explain what I mean by looking at how Jesus uses the Scriptures. Because Jesus reminds us - again and again - that the Bible shows us wonderfully what kind of God we worship. And if we forget to look for our God as we read the Scriptures, or make God too close to ourselves in all of this, we end up with something - well, as I said, unlovely.

Here goes. Head first. Diving in.

Let’s look at how Jesus deals with Torah, the Old Testament Law, and see what place he gives it as it shows us who God is and what God is like.

Jesus is clear about the place of the Torah, the Law. “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish but to fulfil them.” That’s Sermon on the Mount stuff. Yet in Mark 2.23-27, as his disciples pick grain on the Sabbath (which the Pharisees hold to be a breaking of the Law), Jesus defends his disciples with two strokes. A reference to King David and his followers comes first - a reference sort of making himself equal with David, a thing that would not sit well with the Pharisees. And then, even worse, Jesus produces such a deep interpretation of the Fourth Commandment that the Pharisees are in danger of losing it completely.

Matthew & Luke echo the explanation, “the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath”; but Mark alone adds this crucial extra comment:

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

As he discusses the Command, Jesus does not simply repeat words off a page (“don’t work on the Sabbath”) or define the words everyone knows (“and by work we mean…”) as the Pharisees tended to do. He went to the heart of those words. Here he asks: What is the Command about? 

There are two versions of this Command in the Torah, and they give us slightly differing emphases. Perhaps Jesus in Mark has his eye on Deuteronomy:

Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labour 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 male or female servant, nor your ox, or donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest as you do. 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. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.

First we note that the whole social order is included in the benefits of this Command - the father of the clan, his children, his servants, men and women, those outside the clan visiting, foreigners, and the beasts within their care. The sabbath is not a restriction but a blessing - for everyone. Children and slaves are granted a full share of humanity as they enjoy the sabbath rest of God’s free people. 

Back in Exodus, in that version of the Command, fresh from escaping Pharaoh, Moses reminds the people of the context of God’s creation. The sabbath is about rest. In Deuteronomy, with years between that escape and the imminent entry into the Promised Land, Moses reminds God’s people of who they were and who they are to be. It’s as if God, through Moses, shows his people a different side of his grace - a different gift for a different day.

The Sabbath is for everyone - because God’s people used to be slaves. They used to live in a land where there was a hierarchy of humanity, with a man who claimed to be like God at the top, powerful men beneath him, angry and brutal men beneath those, and at the bottom - God’s people. Slaves. And at the very base of the pile, the women and the children of slaves. 

As Moses re-iterates this Command he says: this isn’t Godly. This was not how God ordered life. Everyone is made in God’s image. Even the foreigner who doesn’t know God. So the sabbath is for everyone. “The Sabbath is the great social leveller,” as Sean Gladding says in his terrific book on the Commands. It is given so that we might remember that we are all equally human, equally free, equally loved, equally made in God’s image, and in our freedom and love and made-in-God’s-image-ness we might never seek either to turn ourselves into Pharaohs or others into slaves ever again. 

It is a gift that rings out the love of God and the wonder of humanity. It is not a blind rule or a blanket restriction, and it is certainly not a power tool for the religious authorities to use as punishment over the weak.

How ugly that would be. How unlike God.

This is vital. 

This is one of the Ten Commandments, a foundational truth in the people of God, and so Jesus’ radical reaching into its heart is all the clearer: simply saying a rule “is so” does not "make it so” even when it is one of the Ten. This is not how God works. It is not who God is.

Again - repeating words off a page (any words off any page) is never enough. Such an act does not make us Evangelical. Words can be present and their meaning absent. Simply quoting stuff can actually make us opponents of God. Jesus opposes those who appear to be promoting the Fourth Command as he reveals them to know only the words, but have no clue at all as to what those words are about and why the Command is there. 

By itself, this should make us very careful about the speed with which we wish to impose other rules from elsewhere in the Torah.

And there’s more.

Because the Sabbath rule isn’t simply a Law thing. It’s a Creation Ordinance. 

I have already noted that the Exodus telling of the Commandments does not refer to slavery in Egypt. Its rationale for the Sabbath comes in these terms:

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 and made it holy.  

This is clearly an echo of the opening verses of Genesis 2:

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

The importance of this in our sexuality debates in the Church today comes whenever we raise any questions of equality, and especially whenever we look at any questions of equal marriage. Time and again the traditionalist argument uses words from the end of Genesis 2 (“That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife and they become one flesh”) as proof positive that Biblical marriage can only be heterosexual. But Jesus has taken words from the beginning of Genesis 2, as used in the context of the Fourth Command, and has made us sit up and understand something really important:

Words are gifts from God to people.

What kind of God gives gifts?

What kind of gifts does God give?

Texts - however fundamental we wish to make them - must be understood for the true purpose they serve. The Sabbath is made for man. That’s the kind of God we have.

The Sabbath is not an imposition of God’s order of life upon humanity, but a gift given to bless all humanity. It was made to bless people - all people - not to restrict us. It was made for us, we were not made for it. The command exists to help us - even though we trace it back to God’s rhythm of creation. Especially as we trace it back to this: for the sun, the moon, the dark, the light, the water, the sky, the animals, the plants, the garden and everything in all creation are God’s gifts for his children who in naming all these things show that they delight in the gifts given to them.

And if the Sabbath, a part of God’s Creation Order and one of the Ten Commandments, becomes a marker of God’s generous gifts, a beacon of the equality of all humanity, a sign of freedom from slavery and of the triumph of meaning over literalism, then how much more should all these truths be found in every other part of the story of God and his people?

Jesus knows the detail of the Scriptures, but never gets lost there. Rather he uses the detail to help us find again the bigger picture we so easily lose.

We only dare to read the Scriptures as if they might exclude people when we already find ourselves believing in a God who chooses to exclude. But Jesus declares himself Lord of the Sabbath so that the powerless are reminded that on every page God makes a different choice. 

He raises us up. It’s his default setting. 

And if ever - if ever - we use God’s word to exclude anyone, to make anyone feel less, to make ourselves into Pharaoh and others into slaves, then we need to tread very carefully. Because we are in danger of ending up with something less than lovely, when we should be using God's word to show everyone how amazingly wonderful and loving our God is.