Sermon — June 2, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Let’s go, my beloved, to meet the bride,” one 16th-century Hebrew hymn begins, “Let’s welcome the face of Shabbat. To greet Shabbat let’s go, let’s be gone, for she is the wellspring of blessing… Shake yourself free, rise from the dust, dress in your garments of splendor, my people.” And to this day, in synagogues all around the world, this song is sung on Friday at dusk, to welcome the arrival of the Sabbath day of rest on Saturday. The hymn captures the joy of a day of rest at the end of a long week of work. Who among us has wanted to sing, on a Friday afternoon, “Shake yourself free, rise from the dust!” It’s a liturgical TGIF, literally.
It reminds me of something my friend Meg used to say, more informally. Meg was doing a master’s degree in Jewish Studies when I was in seminary, and we ended up taking a bunch of classes together, including one with a discussion section that met early Friday afternoon, just a few hours before Shabbat began. I remember Meg leaving class one day as exams loomed over us and we were all studying hard, and saying goodbye—not with the traditional Shabbat Shalom, “Have a peaceful Shabbat,” but with a hopeful and joyous phrase that I will never forget: “Shabbat sh’almost!” Thank God it’s Friday.
But keeping the Sabbath isn’t always pure joy. I think of the story of the Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell, whose story is told in the movie Chariots of Fire. Going into the 1924 Olympics, Liddell was favored to win the 100 meter dash. But he ultimately refused to run because the heats for the 100 were being held on a Sunday, and as a good Scottish Presbyterian, he refused to violate the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy for something so frivolous as a footrace. The story has a happy ending—Liddell ended up winning the 400m race in Paris—but it’s a good example of the burden that observing the Sabbath can be in a world that doesn’t expect it.
You might think that we live in the best of both worlds. In our culture, many of us get two days off from work at the end of the week, not just one. We should have twice the TGIF joy as a 16th-century Jewish hymn writer. And at the same time, the days of wet-blanket Puritan restrictions are behind us. Shops and restaurants are open on Sundays. No one will scold you if they see you having fun on the Lord’s Day. And yet—I think we desperately need the Sabbath more than ever, these days.
The origins of the Sabbath stretch back to the beginning of time. On six days, God worked to create the universe; on the seventh day, God rested. And you, too, are to rest, God told the ancient Israelites. Not just the privileged who can afford to take the day of, or the especially devout who want to keep it holy; but everyone: you, your son, your daughter, your ox, your donkey; even the people from foreign lands living among you; even the people you have enslaved will rest, God tells them, because you remember that you were enslaved, and made to work without rest. (Deut. 5:14-15) And the descendants of those Israelites whom Pharaoh had enslaved vowed never again to give up the opportunity to rest.
The Jewish people were considered remarkable in the ancient world, in fact, for the custom of the Sabbath day. Ancient writers commented on this peculiar ethnic custom of taking a day off each work, something no other ancient people did. But the Sabbath was vital to Jewish life. Observing it is not just taking a day off from work. It’s taking a day off from work so that you can be with family, and community, and God. On the Sabbath, the people of God enter an alternate reality. They are free from the hierarchies of the everyday, in which their lives are determined by the boss’s instructions, or by the demands of productivity. And they enter a time of community and presence. “The Sabbath,” the great 20th-century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share.”
The Christian relationship to the Sabbath has always been complicated by Jesus’ own complicated relationship to the Sabbath, which is often misunderstood. Consider our two stories in Mark today. It may seem at first glance as if Jesus is rejecting the Sabbath entirely, flagrantly violating the Sabbath commandments. But this is only the case if you assume that the Pharisees are right about what is and isn’t allowed. Jesus’ disciples pluck some grain from the fields to eat; the Pharisees ask, “why are they doing what’s not lawful on the Sabbath?” (Mark 2:24) But this is begging the question. It’s not lawful on the Sabbath to work; but the commandment doesn’t explain what this means. Are the disciples working on the Sabbath? None of them are grain-pluckers by trade. The rabbinic tradition would later codify thirty-nine categories of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath, but in the centuries around Jesus’ life it was all still open for debate.
Could you require your employees to work on the Sabbath? Absolutely not, and Jesus doesn’t say you could. Should you go to the syngagogue, to read and pray on the Sabbath? Yes, and Jesus regularly did. Could you save a person’s life, even if it meant violating one of the other laws? Yes, and any Orthodox rabbi today would tell you that you are in fact commanded to break the Sabbath to save a life. Should you heal someone today who could be healed tomorrow? Well, that was where Jesus and the Pharisees are having their debate.
If you assume that Sabbath observance is narrow and defined, it might seem that Jesus is rejecting it. But if you recognize that the debate over the Sabbath was in fact very broad, it seems clearer that Jesus is just participating in that debate. For Jesus, the emphasis seems to be on the joy of the Sabbath, an invitation from God to rest and be restored, rather than a series of limits to be obeyed. To eat and to be healed are part of that Sabbath restoration and rest.
Plucking a bit of grain when you’re hungry and walking through a field, is not like working for Pharaoh seven days a week. It’s not even quite like working in your own field, if that’s what you do every day. To say to someone, “stretch out your hand,” and to heal them as they do, is not work. Not for Jesus. It’s not something that distracts people from the presence of God, that defiles a holy day. It’s something that points them to God, that shows them God’s miraculous presence in their midst.
“The Sabbath was made for humankind,” Jesus says, “not humankind for the sabbath.” (2:27) And so he embraces the Sabbath principle of rest, that builds up humankind, and he tends to lean in the direction of allowing anything that builds us up, rather than discouraging anything that could be work.
“The Sabbath was made for humankind.” The Sabbath was made for you. God has invited you to cease your work; to lay aside, for one day, the things that others are demanding of you, or that you’re demanding of yourself, and to take time to be with your community or family and with God, in a realm “where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share.”
Embracing the Sabbath today is not about going back to some imagined golden age, where everyone spent a day together in rest and prayer. We’ll probably never return to a world in which shops and restaurants are closed on Sundays, so retail and service workers can have a the day off, too. And in fact, we’re moving in the other direction. It’s hard to get that Sabbath rest when your work can buzz at you from your project, any time. And whether you have paid work or not, we all have “work” from which we need to rest, housework and volunteer work and the thousand small chores that we feel like we should do, and it’s hard to assert our freedom from them.
But Sabbath is good. Rest is good. And so, I want to invite you to think: What is your Sabbath time, and how can you observe it and keep it holy? Maybe for you it’s on Sunday morning, here, or on Saturday some time. Maybe it’s Friday family movie night, where you can order takeout and watch the same four movies over and over again. Maybe it’s the Wednesday-morning walking group where you have some time to reconnect with friends. Maybe it really is a day, a full day where you can put down the phone, and turn off the TV, and be present with the people around you. Or maybe for you, the Sabbath is a place, where you can go during the week and simply be, and not do. But in the end, the Sabbath is really an alternate reality, a way of being in which you are free to stop for a while and rest.
Wherever the Sabbath is, whenever the Sabbath is, God made it for you. And God’s inviting you to accept it. It can be very hard to unplug, to put down the list of todos, to stop working and let yourself rest. But if you can find that Sabbath place in your life, if you can “shake yourself free, [and] rise from the dust,” you just might find you look forward to it more than anything else, and when it approaches, you find yourself thinking: Shabbat sh’almost! The Sabbath is almost here.