Sabbath Stands Tall

You know the saying, ‘we make plans and God laughs’? I think we should also have the opposite - ‘God makes plans and we protest’. It’s a very common theme throughout the Bible, and I would suggest still today as well, that God says or does something, or calls a person to something, and the response is, ‘but… why? Not me? You’re not serious are you? You didn’t really mean that right?’.

Jeremiah follows in this grand tradition when God tells him he’s been called as a prophet. Echoing Moses from centuries earlier, Jeremiah tries to wriggle out of God’s call, pleading that he is too young and not a good speaker. But God has other ideas, so Jeremiah finds himself one of the most significant prophets of the Old Testament. Whatever Jeremiah’s plans were for himself, or thoughts about who he was and could be, God’s were bigger.

Fast forward about 600 years, and we find Jesus teaching in the synagogue on the sabbath. But whatever he is teaching takes a sudden backseat, paused in favour of interacting with a crippled woman who appears. I wonder if she came because she hoped for a miracle cure, or if she was wanting to hear Jesus speak. Perhaps as she approached, she was unnoticed or pushed aside by everyone else. Maybe being ignored was a standard part of her life. I wonder if she regularly came to the synagogue, or if this was a brave and unusual thing that she did that day. But whatever the details, she comes, Jesus sees her, and she is healed.

The immediate reaction is praise. The woman herself turns her joy towards God, and you can just imagine the response of the crowd of people around her. Wonder, shouting, necks craning to see, explaining and exclaiming to one another. Gasps, questions, shock. And the leader of the synagogue, trying to bring order to chaos, attempting to put everything back in place by insisting that what had just happened was against God’s law. “No, no, this isn’t right, don’t be excited - Jesus has done something wrong!”

And on the surface, he is right. After all, the ten commandments seem pretty clear. “For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work… For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.”

But unsurprisingly, Jesus has a different way of interpreting it. Not brushing the law aside, but reframing it in the light of God’s deep knowledge and love of each of us. Asking us to look with fresh eyes that are open to the possibility that God’s plans might be different to ours - bigger, bolder, freer.

Actually, what Jesus does is point out that we already interpret the law to some extent. Even those who like to be sticklers would stretch their reading of the commandment enough that they can care for their animals. After all, donkeys don’t know what day of the week it is, and still need food and water. So the attempt to use the law in protest of healing the woman on the sabbath is a misuse of God’s intentions. For compassion always wins over rigidity. And if we are willing to care for an animal on the sabbath, how much more should we care for a fellow human being?

What we find so easy to do with laws and regulations is to lose sight of the point of them existing in the first place. God has never been about rules for the sake of rules, but instead tries to guide and protect us crazy, argumentative, wayward people into fullness of life. The instruction to keep the Sabbath was meant as a gift. A day where we can let go of the drive to be busy busy busy all the time. A day when we don’t have to achieve, don’t have to prove ourselves, don’t have to do what we spend all our other days doing. It is not meant as a nitpicky ‘gotcha’ rule, but as a breath of fresh air. A pause. A chance to reorient to the fact that we are already beloved, and already possess the greatest thing we could strive for - to be God’s child.

In healing this woman on the Sabbath, Jesus is reminding everyone that cherishing each individual is what God is all about. He is bringing the Sabbath alive in a deeper way, creating life-changing restoration and new life, a life-sized dramatisation of what God intends for us to experience in a small way every week by resting in our belovedness.

If we think back to Jeremiah, protesting at God’s plans that he isn’t good enough, I think we often have this temptation ourselves too. How easy is it to disqualify ourselves from the idea of true rest? How easy to think that that is for other people, people who are less busy, less driven, less important, less needed. So often God makes plans, whether that is to provide a regular day of respite and renewal, or to call us to live into the truth of our belovedness, or to ask us reach out in love to those who need healing and wholeness in some way, and so often we protest at what God lays before us. “Oh no, not me. I’m too young, too old, too tired, too broken, not good enough.” But at the end of the day none of our excuses carry weight. God knows each of us before we are even formed in the womb. God sees past our reluctance and fears. God reaches out and offers us life at all times. We just need to turn up and accept it.

What we see in both Jeremiah’s call and the healing of this woman is that God’s plans are never limited by our hesitations or fears or the restrictions we put on ourselves, which means that our protests of “not me,” “not now,” or “not possible,” are never the final word.

The real question is whether we will risk setting down our excuses and step into the possibility that God sees in us. Whether we will dare to believe that we too are worth noticing, healing, and sending. We may make our plans, and God may laugh, but when God makes plans—and God always does—our invitation is to say yes with open hearts and open arms. To keep Sabbath is to enter into the truth that we are beloved, and then to live out of that belovedness with courage and joy. The woman who was healed didn’t just return quietly to her corner; instead she stood tall and praised God, a witness of Sabbath restoration to everyone who saw her.

So it is also our calling: to say yes, to be made whole, and then to walk out these doors praising God as people who, like Jeremiah and like that woman, embody God’s restoring work in our world.

Amen.

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17