I’ve always been moved by a scene near the beginning of “Fiddler on the Roof.” A Jewish family rushes about on Friday afternoon in preparation for the beginning of the Sabbath. There’s a visitor, there’s news about pogroms in other villages, there’s matchmaking for weddings, there’s Tevya’s work of delivering milk and feeding the animals and Golde’s cleaning and cooking. But then suddenly they all sit down together at the table, candles are lit, and a lovely Sabbath prayer is sung. Peace descends on the seeming chaos of the family’s life and concerns.
Sabbath was understood by the Jewish people as a gift from God. It set them apart from other people. It marked a moment when they remembered that their very existence came from God and not from their own labor. Generally, the Sabbath was regarded as precious time to be carefully guarded from all encroachments.
From that perspective of love for the beauty and peace of Sabbath, it’s a little easier to understand the dismay and anger with which Jesus’ critics approached Him when it was perceived that He and His followers were violators of the Sabbath.
Our text this week, Mark 2:23 – 3:6, includes two accounts of Sabbath “work,” first by Jesus’ disciples, than by Christ Himself. On the face of it, Jesus fails to observe the Sabbath properly, ignoring the strong warnings against any form of work on that day.
In reality, what Jesus and His disciples is very much within the spirit of Sabbath as a gift of God meant to refresh and renew human life, especially with a sense of peaceful dependence of God’s provision. The disciples eat by simply gleaning what is provided growing for them in a field. Jesus offers a healing which no physician could have provided to the man with the withered hand, restoring wholeness and peace to his life.
The issue for us is not the wholesale rejection of Sabbath keeping in the belief that these stories amount to Jesus doing away with that part of the Jewish Law. It’s more the difficult question of where true Sabbath time full of peace and the experience of dependence on God fits in the lives which we’ve accepted as normal in our time. Is there anyway we can experience Sabbath as Jesus described it, as a gift “made for humankind?”