WEek twelve of ordinary time
by Miranda Craig
Deuteronomy 5:12-15 NRSV
Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. 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.
Mark 2:27
Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath;
Shalom friends.
It’s the twelfth week of Ordinary Time, and I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling with Sabbath in a time with very little structure. Before the pandemic I had a bad habit of cramming my days full to overflowing, and my-oh-my, was a day of rest sweet at the end of a long week. Right now I do a little of this, a little of that, and a lot of relaxing. I’m not busy, but my work is never done. Other folks are busier now than they have ever been. Parents, agricultural workers, health care professionals, grocery store clerks, the list goes on.
When it’s inconvenient or I’m feeling particularly obstinate, I’m a little bothered by the fact that God commanded us to Sabbath. On the one hand, I love having a designated day to encounter God by removing distractions. (Also, naps!) On the other hand, I don’t love rules or commandments. Recently, though, I’ve found a lot of meaning in the fact that we are commanded to Sabbath, especially in the reasoning God gives in Deuteronomy.
The ten commandments, as given in Deuteronomy, remind us of the fundamental truth that God did not create us to be enslaved to labor. God delivered the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and then commanded them to rest on the seventh day, to keep it holy, and to allow others to rest on that day as well. We should not re-enslave ourselves or others to labor by working seven days a week.
For my Hebrew class in seminary we did an exegetical project on the Sabbath, and as I started reading about the historical and cultural context of Sabbath, I found that Israel’s neighbors believed that their gods created humans to act as slave laborers. The gods were tired of doing their own work and they wanted a break, so they created humans to do work for them so they could kick back and relax. Humans were not endowed with dignity, but existed purely for the convenience of their gods.
The pervasive belief at the time was also that anything created in the image of a god held some of the essence of that god. The Jewish creation story, then, was remarkable in that God created humans in God’s own image, essentially saying that they carry some of the divine essence. When God created the Sabbath, and then commanded humans to rest on the seventh day, it was another reminder that they share in God’s image and God’s rest. The LORD is not a god dependent on human labor in order to rest, nor are humans created as laborers but as image-bearers.
In the gospel of Mark, Jesus has to remind those who are using the Sabbath as a set of rules and restrictions, that the Sabbath is made for us. It is intended to set us free.
In a time when our relationship to work and rest can feel so disordered, the call to Sabbath is a reminder of our truest identity in God and God’s sovereignty over our work and our rest.
Collect:
God of work and rest, striving and ceasing,
you are sufficient without us, and yet you made us in your image and welcomed us into a rhythm of rest. Teach us to keep the Sabbath holy, resting and allowing others to rest, so that we may more clearly see your image in one another and the world may know your desire to free us from the work that so often imposes upon our lives.
We pray this in the name of Jesus, Amen.