Healing on the Sabbath

Email this page

Download PDF

The Proclaimed Word

After the church service a little boy told the pastor, “When I grow up, I’m going to give you some money.”

“Well, thank you,” the pastor replied, “but why?”

“Because my daddy says you’re one of the poorest preachers we’ve ever had.”

Well, fathers, be careful what you say! And I hope I’m not like that preacher.

This is Father’s Day and we celebrate all our fathers and all fathers today.

You’re half of the reason why we’re all here! Thank you, Dad! Thank you, Mom!

As a father one of the things I discovered was that fathers of young children get very little rest. From the time a young baby comes into the home, it’s the midnight call of the hungry baby that rings out in the night.

It doesn’t improve a whole lot as time goes by. The business just moves more into the daylight hours…that is, until the teenage years. Then, it’s…yikes!

So when we hear the readings today, fathers and mothers both resonate with the idea of ‘taking a break’. “Give the seventh day to God,” says the Deuteronomist, “and encourage your family and anyone else for whom you’re responsible to do the same.”

One day in seven! What a great idea! And it seems to have been God’s idea from the very beginning. In fact, in the Genesis story God took a day off after six busy days of creation. Of course, we now know that this story was added to the Genesis text a good deal later than the rest of the text was written. But it still makes good sense.

The Sabbath was a gift from God given to the Israelites. The Deuteronomist declares: “Keep the Day of Rest as a reminder that Almighty God rescued you from servitude [in Egypt].” This was the collective memory of the Israelites and no one else. The Sabbath was a command to the Israelites, but the whole world can benefit from it.

One of the Ten Commandments says: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of your Sovereign God. You shall do no work—not you or your son or your daughter, nor any of your servants…not even your beasts of burden or your servants or even the stranger who is within your gates. God made the earth in six days and rested the seventh. Therefore the Holy One blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Exodus 20:8-11

Numbers 15 tells the story of a man who was collecting needed firewood on the Sabbath. The people brought him before Moses. It says, “The man must surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.” So they did just that!

I’m not recommending that we reinstitute that practice. I suspect that the Israelites may have misunderstood the Sabbath commandment, finding pain rather than pleasure in it. What else would account for such extreme reaction?

Of course, in those ancient times most people understood God as a vengeful judge, unloving and intolerant, who would condemn someone to death for an infraction of the rules, such as we find in our story found in Exodus 31.The prophets saw God differently, but they found it a hard task to convince the people of God’s love and God’s desire for their Good.

So it’s not surprising that the God of Jesus “desires mercy and not sacrifice,” as Jesus says, quoting the prophet Hosea (6:6). He said these words in defense of his disciples, who were being condemned for working on the Sabbath, stripping a few kernels of grain from the edges of the field, rubbing them together and then popping them in their mouths.

What else were they doing? Going around healing the sick and helping the poor. And there’s the rub!

The Religious Right of Jesus’ day were aghast! Harvesting grain on the Sabbath! But Jesus raised a fundamental question:
Was humanity created so they could observe the Sabbath? Or was the Sabbath appointed to serve humanity?

If humanity was created for the Sabbath, then God valued a day of the week more than the people who lived in all the other days of the week. If the Sabbath was made for humanity, then it served to give rest and recreation for humanity. It was—according to the meaning of the word—an intermission, a time of rest. The word ‘rest’ comes from restoration, being renewed. That sounds a lot like healing to me!

In fact, Jesus was so convinced that the Sabbath was made for humanity’s benefit that he went around healing on the Sabbath. He fully believed that ‘doing good was much better than doing evil’, that saving a life through healing was much more important than destroying the quality of life by neglecting the needy.

To prove his point, he took a man with a deformed hand and said, “Stand up here so everyone can see.” Then he said, “Hold out your hand!” Mark’s Gospel tells us “he held it out, and his hand was completely healed!”

Jesus proved that God is far more interested in your good health than your scrupulous adherence to ritual, custom and ordinance. In all things the Omnipotent Omnipresence seeks your Good, even when you don’t join in the hunt. That’s the message of Jesus, and our message today. It’s the message Jesus taught as he went on in the story, healing many, until they came around him on all sides.

Further, Jesus not only sought the healing of the sick, but he also sought to turn the sick into healers. Did he not send his disciples out two by two, starting with the twelve and then moving on to a much larger group? The rest of the story tells us “he appointed twelve, that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach, and to have power to heal the sick.”

In John’s Gospel he is recorded as saying we would do greater things than he did. Myrtle Fillmore, in her powerful Healing Letters said of Jesus: “We must think of the Lord as our own God-given Christ Mind, and of Jesus Christ as ever with us in the spiritual consciousness that he has established and that he has merged with [our collective] mind in order that we may be in touch with him and lay hold of him and build our lives according to his pattern.”

The Buddha wisely said, “Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.” It’s true; we are responsible for our own health and wellbeing. But when one finds health, healing and happiness, there’s the impulse to pass it on.

Thick Nat Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who has written several books comparing and combining the teachings of the Buddha and the Christ, was being interviewed by Ram Dass in the magazine Enquiring Mind (June 1996). He said:

“Happiness is not an individual matter. When you are able to bring relief, or bring back the smile to one person, not only that person profits, but you also profit. The deepest happiness you can have comes from that capacity to help relieve the suffering of others. So if we have the habit of being peace, then there is a natural tendency for us to go in the direction of service. Nothing compels us, except the joy of sharing peace, the joy of sharing freedom from afflictions, freedom from worries, freedom from craving, which are the true foundations for happiness.”

What better way to celebrate a day set aside for rest and contemplation on God than to bring happiness, relief and healing to another person! Only when all are restored to the Good that God desires for all of us can we finally rest totally from “the work of creation” that the writer of Hebrews talks about.

Until that day, we are encouraged to draw aside, as Jesus did, to find a quiet place to pray, to renew, to find peace and healing. Then, like Jesus, we are called to come back into the ‘hustle-and-bustle’ of life to share peace and healing with others.

As it says in A Course in Miracles: “From the oneness that we have attained, we call to all our brothers [and sisters], asking them to share our peace and consummate our joy.”

Healing…it’s for us, it’s for others. And that’s the truth!