Every week I have the sometimes challenging task of
taking scripture that is from a long time ago and trying to help make it
relevant to your lives today. Sometimes this is easy. Other times, like today,
we are reading about a concept—the Sabbath—that isn’t practiced as seriously, between
Jesus and the Pharisees, who are not around anymore, about an issue of
contention in the law that Christians mostly believe has been made irrelevant because
of Jesus anyway. So there’s that. I also read this week that only 8% of people
want their pastor to speak about social issues… so there goes that angle.
I mean, is it helpful to you if I just stand up and say,
“The law is pointless because of Jesus” and sit down? I can do that. It feels
tempting on annual meeting Sunday, actually. I can ignore this whole business of
what our country is doing to refugees and aliens right now—it doesn’t really
fit with the scripture and it’s in that territory where many of you want me to
refrain from comment. So ignoring that is awfully tempting too.
Sometimes
I hate preaching, because I’m forced to get up here and say something every
week and the only thing that truly, really, ultimately matters is the cross and
the empty tomb, but we get bored with that (as ridiculous as that is) and so
we’re always looking for connections to our lives. Sometimes the connections
are easy, sometimes they’re not, but the problem is I have to keep making them
and most of the time they aren’t of huge significance, so that when something
of truly enormous significance does happen it feels like just another thing—another
little connection, take it or leave it. Why’s
the pastor talking politics, anyway? If I say anything I’m preaching politics;
if I don’t I’m ignoring the repeated call of the Gospels to love God and love
our neighbor. So here I stand, and let’s get into the Sabbath and leave you
hanging for now about how I’m going to handle this whole mess.
These
Sabbath stories of Jesus and the Pharisees concern the law, specifically a very
important law that is included in the Ten Commandments: “Remember the Sabbath
and keep it holy.” Jesus, apparently exempt from the law, picks some grain on
the Sabbath then doubles down and heals on the Sabbath, definitely doing things
considered to be “work,” which is a big no-no to observant Jews. The law meant
no work on the Sabbath. None. As Christians it is tempting to say, “Well, Jesus
came and it’s all changed.” But it’s not that simple. Notice that Jesus didn’t
say, “The Sabbath is no more.” Instead he said, “The Son of Man is lord of Sabbath.”
The Son of Man can get away with things that we cannot.
Jesus didn’t give us a blank check for Sabbath
disobedience. Nevertheless, we have decided, for better or worse, that the
Sabbath is like a hundred or a thousand other little laws and requirements,
most in Old Testament but others even in the New Testament, that we simply do
not observe any longer. A.J. Jacobs tackled these in his book, Year of Living Biblically, where he
attempts to follow every law in the Bible over the course of a year; Rachel
Held Evans does something similar from a woman’s perspective in A Year of Biblical Womanhood. Both are
good books and both come to a similar conclusion—Jacobs from a secular Jewish
perspective and Evans from a Christian perspective—that following all these
laws is impractical but there is some real value in the philosophy of the law.
Christians, having realized this, have adapted a kind of
a la carte approach to the law. If it feels Jesus-y then it is good enough for
us, you might say. The problem with that approach is that it’s a very
subjective understanding of the law. After all, Jesus means very different things
to me than he does to you. This was why, for a long time, the church just told
you what to do, because, frankly, it’s easier that way. If you allow people to
start reasoning themselves they will become unnerved by things. For example, many
people have reasoned that if we stop observing one law we open up the whole
Bible to critique, which has birthed biblical literalists in droves over the
last century. Some of these people call themselves “Bible-believing Christians,”
as if there is another kind of Christian. Of course, biblical literalists
themselves always pick and choose, because I’ve yet to find one who doesn’t
combine polyester and cotton clothing (Leviticus 19:19) or eat a cheeseburger
(or anything else that combines meat and dairy, cf. Exodus 23:19), or, for you
who have farmed, you better not have planted two kinds of seed in the same
field (Leviticus 19:19, again).
But Christians do have laws we observe, and it’s not as
simple as saying, “Well, we don’t follow the laws of the Old Testament, but we
do follow the laws of the New Testament,” because the Old Testament includes
the Ten Commandments and many other laws we certainly try to follow, and the
New Testament includes laws we do not always follow, such as the law against a
woman appearing without a veil (1 Corinthians 11:6) or who can speak in public.
The
question is, “Are there any criteria I can reliably trust for what is a law
applicable to me and what is not?”
The
good news is that the answer is a resounding, “Yes,” and it all comes down to
that response that Jesus gives to the man seeking to justify himself—those commands
that lead us into the Good Samaritan, which lay bare our commitments as
Christian. Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your soul, strength,
and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). That’s what is
commanded of you before anything else. In fact, as far as Jesus is concerned these
two laws encompass all the law. Each command dovetails into a thousand
different little choices we make between what is right and what is wrong. Love
the Lord, your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s it. The question
is how each and every action we undertake as Christians achieves that end or not.
That’s how we tell if we are following the law. We ask ourselves: Are we loving
the Lord in what we are doing right now? Are we loving our neighbors as
ourselves by our current actions, thoughts, hopes and dreams, right now?
Draw
your own conclusions about what that means, but I will stake my claim that on
those commands rests the law and the prophets, because Jesus says exactly this.
Now, there is a third variety of law in the Bible and this is the variety that
Jesus seems to ignore, which is why we, as Christians, have done the same.
These are laws associated with the holiness code, especially in Leviticus and
Deuteronomy and parts of Exodus, though they appear in little bits and pieces
all over the Bible including even in the writings of Paul in the New Testament.
These laws were given to Israel to set the chosen people apart from the other
people who lived in and around the Promised Land. Every funny law you will find
in the Old Testament existed to serve this purpose, and there are some doozies!
These are the laws that non-believers like to throw in the face of Christians
to point out how absurd our Bible is. But every one of these laws that seems
absurd to us today served a purpose at one time. Israel needed to be set apart.
The laws appear cruel to us because we’re reading them in comfortable chairs in
warm, glowing living rooms in a world more astoundingly wonderful than they
could have imagined. Our concern is individualistic; the concern in the Old
Testament was 100% communal. The individual did not matter. The reason we don’t
need to follow these laws anymore is not because they were bad laws, but
because we are all one in Christ—Gentiles and Jews—and there is no more
otherness in one another. In Jesus all are welcomed to the party—we are all the
chosen people, because we are all members of the body of Christ.
So,
God does not care about the fabrics you wear or the food you eat except as it
pertains now to those two commandments: Love the Lord, your God; love your
neighbor as yourself. With that said, those commandments are all-encompassing,
which brings me back to the heart of what we face as a country today. By all
means do draw your own conclusions of what it means to love the Lord and to love
your neighbor as yourself. Just don’t tell me it doesn’t matter, because, after
Jesus came, it is the only thing that matters. We already have everything else
promised—resurrection, done; salvation, taken care of it; death, conquered. So
why on earth are we living in so much fear? What are we afraid of? What’s
worse: The remote possibility that maybe we will someday be oppressed, or
abandoning who we are and what we are about out of fear of that maybe-future?
If we’re assured eternity why are we so fearful of the present?
The
things that Jesus did on the Sabbath are telling. The very law that Jesus broke
was with the purpose of serving his fellow man. He fed; he healed. Even the law
that he superseded fit the law that he retained: Love your neighbor, for
goodness’ sake. We need to do better than we are, and I realize we are little
people a long way away from world and national events so it’s hard to know what
we can do, but it always begins with little people making little choices. Love
God. Love your neighbor. It isn’t hard. But it is. We know it is. The law
convicts us—and it should—not just today but today especially. We are guilty;
we are part of principalities and powers we cannot control but on whose behalf
we are guilty participants nonetheless. The law starts there—convicts us,
drives us to Jesus—and then Jesus gives us the same promise, followed by the
same obligation, over and over again. You are saved by the cross, by the empty
tomb, apart from what you do. So love God, love your
neighbor. Get back to work.
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