Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath (Lk. 13:10-17).
He encountered there a woman described as crippled by a spirit for 18
years such that she was “quite unable to stand up straight.” As Jesus
was known to do, he laid his hands on her and healed her from her
illness. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” This did not
please the leader of the synagogue who complained that Jesus had
violated the Sabbath. “There are six days on which work ought to be
done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”
It wasn’t that the leader of the synagouge was either hard-hearted or
legalistic. It is that he knew the importance of sabbath, of
disconnecting from work just long enough to be reminded of our humanity;
just long enough to be reminded that we are creatures who live in the
immensity of God’s love quite regardless of merit and not the creator
who is the ground of all being; just long enough to be reminded of who
we truly are, children of God, nothing less and nothing more. This is
not easy for us to do, which is why it requires vigilance and
discipline. The synagogue leader had a justifiable concern for that.
And so work is to be avoided on the sabbath. For one day a week,
that’s all, work is to be put aside to reclaim the place we hold in
God’s love for the creation. Jesus did not disagree.
What Jesus did do was have different perspective on what work was.
Instead of seeing healing as work as might a physician available for
hire, Jesus sees the cure of the woman’s ailment as a liberation from an
oppressive spirit. He compares what he has done for the woman to what
anyone would do for an animal, an ox or a donkey tied up so that it
could not reach life-giving water. This is not work; it is release from
what binds, which in a sabbath sense, is the opposite of work. This is
not a forgetting of who we really are; it is a reminder of our true
identity as free human beings, which is God’s beloved. This is not a
matter of discipline guarding us from what diminishes our humanity; it
is a matter of liberation setting us free to live our humanity fully.
So what sets us free is not work at all, even if we sometimes make the
synagogue leader’s mistake and think of it as such. Indeed, setting us
free is the whole intent of the sabbath. The life to which we aspire is
to be ever more set free until all our lives are lived as children of
God, perfectly free human beings, loving and beloved, always liberating
and never working at all. It is for every single day because sabbath is
not intended as a once-a-week suspension of the normal rules, but as
the way life has been intended to be lived from the very beginning.
What human beings ought to aspire to, it seems to me, is that when they
die, what all will say about them is not a list of their
accomplishments but that they never worked a day in their lives. I’m
pretty sure Jesus didn’t.
Peace,+Stacy
