Sermon

Binding and Unbinding

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Israel with my bishop and fellow clergy from the diocese of Chicago. We started in Galilee and made our way toward Jerusalem arriving, as it happened, bare hours before Sabbath began. In very short order, the transformation in downtown Jerusalem was amazing. Taxis and buses seemed to disappear from the streets. The hotel at which we were staying quickly erected curtains that shielded business transactions from the eyes of hotel guests and passersby. Sabbath Elevators kicked into action, stopping at each floor automatically so that no one need press a button, thereby activating electricity, thereby violating the Sabbath. I recall feeling a mixture of bemusement and envy. Bemusement, that so much labor was required to ensure that no labor happened for the duration of Sabbath. Envy, that Sabbath-keeping could be so pervasive, so accepted, so matter-of-fact and, most of all, so joyful. All these years later, what I remember most clearly was the joy of that Sabbath meal in Jerusalem.

We Gentiles generally don’t get it. The closest that most of us intellectually can get to the concept of Sabbath Keeping are the Blue Laws that use to prohibit commerce on Sundays. We apparently deemed such laws oppressive some years ago because we are hard pressed, at this point, to differentiate Sunday from any other day of the week with respect to engaging in commerce or labor.

I share all this as prologue, because we are apt to miss the scandal of today’s gospel passage if we aren’t clear about how foundational the Sabbath was and is to Judaism. That is to say, as foundational as, perhaps, the Resurrection is to Christians. Consider today’s passage from Isaiah, most likely written to the people who returned to Palestine from captivity in Babylon. The prophet counsels the people to refrain from trampling the Sabbath, from pursuing their own interests. They were to honor it and to take delight in it. In this, the people are reminded that failure to honor the Sabbath was one of the sins their ancestors committed that had resulted in the Temple being destroyed and the people taken in captivity to Babylon. Sabbath-keeping was utterly non-negotiable. Nothing had changed in the 500 years between 2nd Isaiah’s prophecy, and Jesus healing the bent-over woman on the Sabbath. Little wonder that the leader of the synagogue was scandalized! He was not being narrow-minded. He was guarding a crucial aspect of the faith as it has come down to him.

Jesus sees it differently, of course. From Luke’s perspective, Jesus is not violating the Sabbath, he’s redefining it. The creation of the universe was, according to sacred history, accomplished in 6 days. God rested on the 7th not because God was weary, but because all was finished and all was good. The 7th day was Shalom – the peace of God, but more than peace as we think of it as calm or quiet. This is peace that relates to the full-bodied goodness and wholeness of the created order. To enter into Sabbath rest meant that the Chosen People honored the goodness of creation and, as co-creators in human labor, ritually acknowledged each week that, apart from God, our lives and our labor have no meaning. Little wonder that our Jewish friends greet one another on the Sabbath with the words, Shabbat Shalom – Sabbath Peace.

But what happens when there is no Shalom for some on the Sabbath? What happens when wholeness of body and mind and spirit are missing – such as they were for the bent-over woman? What happens when the bonds of oppression make impossible the true Sabbath response of praise? The woman had been crippled for 18 years. Jesus describes this daughter of Abraham as one who had been bound by Satan – a name which Jesus, a devout Jew, would have understood as meaning, The Accuser. The one who points the finger. At that time, any illness or physical deformity was considered defacto evidence of sin. She literally and metaphorically was kept from doing the thing she was created by God, and shaped by her community, to do -- stand up and praise God.

Until Jesus loosed those bonds of oppression.

That’s the Sabbath that Jesus calls us to. As Christ’s disciples, we are called to be agents of wholeness in a world that is bound up by the power of sin. We are called to be agents of reconciliation in a world beset by the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, as Isaiah put it in our first reading. We are called to be agents of inclusion in a world that is distorted by the scape-goating, exclusionary powers of human culture. When we do this – and what I am talking about it no less than putting our baptismal vows to work in the world --  we ourselves come to realize the far surpassing power of God’s unconditional grace and love. We find that we, too, are unbound from that which oppresses us.

And when that happens, we too can stand up straight and praise God.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral