Thursday, August 12, 2010

A Legal Code

“The Sabbath was made for man…” – Mark 2:27

For some people, Sundays can be a burden rather than a blessing.

It can be a day filled with duties to perform, be it leading worship, operating the sound board, teaching in the kids meetings, or any number of other tasks. More than that, our Sundays can become defined by what we do. Our services revolve around our activities. We feel a burden of responsibility on our shoulders, as if we were made to maintain our Sabbath traditions.

Jesus teaches us a different way of being that runs against our usual habits.

Man was not made for the Sabbath. Man was not made to follow a strict legal code. The irony of the Pharisees is that in trying to ensure that nobody carried what was considered a “burden” on the Sabbath, they actually turned the Sabbath into a burden! It was a day that became defined by what you do or don’t do, and so failure to meet expectations was failure as a child of God.

Jesus confronts this way of thinking by re-enforcing the reality of the Sabbath as a blessing for people rather than a burden. When Sabbath rest is turned into a legal code, it kills. But when we remember that it is a day of blessing, a day of refreshment and refilling, it gives life.

Sunday is not a day we have to jump through hoops in order to please God. It is day – like every other day – when we are to encounter the grace of God. It is, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, “an invitation to form a new kind of human community”: a community that trusts in the blessings and goodness of God, and not in its own efforts.

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