Xchange - Discussion Notes

Sabbath Breaking

Three crucial features marked out the good Jew from the rest of the world: Curcumcision, Food Laws and Sabbath. Last week we looked at Jesus’ confrontation with a Pharisee over the food laws. This week the subject is Sabbath.

Jesus was stood in front of a man who was ill, and you can almost hear the curious thoughts of the lawyers and Pharisees – “is he going to break the law and heal this man?” So Jesus asks them a simple question, reminding them of the significance of the Sabbath.

The fate of this man was a tiny example of the current state of Israel: he was sick and needed healing. Israel needed a great Sabbath day. Sabbath was not simply concerned with putting your feet up and refusing to do anything. Sabbath was the day of liberation. It was release from labour, freedom from slavery, rest after suffering – not only for an individual but for a nation. Sabbath, of course, is the most appropriate day on which to heal this man. And Jesus is implying that the great Sabbath for which all Israel was desperately longing, was being fulfilled here and now in him.

The word for Sabbath is taken from a Hebrew verb which means, quite simply, to stop. In Psalm 46, we read ‘Be still and know that I am God’. More literally, it is ‘cease striving’ – or even more literally, ‘stop fussing’.

Specifically Sabbath means to stop and find afresh your co-ordinates, where you are in your walk with God. It is not simply a day of rest after work – it is rather the basis for all of your activity in the first place. Not just something that comes at the end – something which is present today and every day. (According to the writer to the Hebrews, God set aside a certain day, calling it ‘today’.) Sabbath is not simply concerned with Saturday or Sunday.

In fact, for Adam, Sabbath was not the end of the week. It was the beginning. It was the first full day that he lived. By the time we get to the New Testament, the most monumental earth-shattering day recorded in world history, was a Sabbath. Jesus enters the tomb on Good Friday. He emerges on Easter Sunday. The day in between was the Sabbath – the day to stop – the day when the world stood still. Sabbath is the day when God is seen to be at work.

In a workaholic, non-stop, carrot-and-stick world, stopping is no easy task. It takes enormous effort, when most people’s experience of life is of a ceaseless merry-go-round, or being stuck on a treadmill with someone else controlling the speed. We simply do not know how to stop. And if we do try it, we still tend to have our ipods running, our televisions on for a bit of ‘background noise’ (whatever that means!) our music still blaring. Even when we are trying to get our rest and relaxation, our workaholic 24-7 non-stop culture makes it virtually impossible to encounter God in genuine stillness.

But Sabbath is when we are reminded that we are not God, that everything does not depend upon our ceaseless activity. It is something that we celebrate every day, as every day we enter into what one Jewish Rabbi has described as ‘a palace in time’. One theologian claimed that to stop and celebrate Sabbath properly, is to enter into the time that God has for us. It is on Sabbath occasions that we see Jesus at work most clearly. No wonder it is one of the ten commandments.

Discussion Questions:

1: In what ways does our world dictate that as Christians, we should not celebrate Sabbath?
2: In his book ‘The Screwtape Letters’, C.S. Lewis uses the picture of a senior demon advising a junior demon on how to draw a believer away from Christ. “You must bring him to the point where he can practise self examination for an hour without realising any of those things about himself that are immediately obvious to anyone who has ever worked in the same office as him, or lived in the same house.” In what ways can we fool ourselves into thinking that we keep Sabbath, that we are genuinely listening to God, when in reality, we may be doing nothing of the sort?
3: In what ways might we keep Sabbath well today?

> Click here to return to programme.

Click here for the Bloomsbury News sheet - a complete list of this month's events at the church.