Boundaries, Not Bondage

A sermon on Luke 13:10-17

[for an audio recording on this sermon, click here. Photo by Aida L on Unsplash.com]

A few years ago, I threw my back out on Thanksgiving.

To be more specific, the repeated strain of lifting the heavy roasting pan in order to baste the turkey every 10 minutes for 3 hours resulted in me reaggravating an old injury and dislocating one my ribs.

It was the kind of injury that isn’t an emergency, but is incredibly painful.

And the holiday weekend meant waiting several days to see my chiropractor, so I had to just… exist in the pain.

Except, I didn’t because my massage therapist, Nick, is also a facebook friend and he saw my post of lament and showed up with his massage chair to treat my injury (for free no less, and on his day off).

I could have lasted (on ice packs and Advil) until Monday morning.

In fact, I was planning to wait until either Nick or my chiropractor could see me during normal office hours, because my condition was not an emergency and I wanted to respect their time off.

But my friend saw that I was in pain, and that he could help me, so he did, office hours notwithstanding.

Of course, one long weekend is nothing compared with 18 years of suffering, but it is my personal frame of reference when I consider the synagogue leaders’ argument in today’s gospel that, “there are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.”

Absent a frame of reference in actual suffering, the leaders’ argument sounds reasonable.

The crippled woman’s plight was not an emergency.

There was no limited window of time in which intervention needed to be offered in order to save her.

She could have come another day. She could have waited until “normal business hours” to ask for her healing.

But she was suffering. And when Jesus saw her suffering, he did not want her to have to wait for no reason.

Although, was there really “no reason” for her to wait?

Keeping the sabbath is a divine commandment, after all. One of the ten big ones.

That’s not something that feels irrelevant.

And in today’s first reading, the prophet Isaiah names sabbath-keeping as one of the conditions on which the promise of restoration from exile depends.

Alongside exhorting care for the hungry and afflicted, and refraining from oppression and the speaking of evil, the prophet warns the people against “trampling the Sabbath” by “pursuing your own interests.”

Which gives me pause, because all of those other elements of the prophecy are obviously important to a moral society.

And when sabbath-breaking is framed as selfishness, as going your own way instead of delighting in God’s holy day… well, it doesn’t sound like just some legalistic standard of performative righteousness.

It sounds like an important boundary against human willfulness and self-centeredness: a weekly reminder not to be so focused on our own needs and tasks that we forget to pause for gratitude, for worship, for perspective.

And even in the context of my own out-of-office-hours need for healing, it strikes me that my friend’s generous action was a loving gift, but it would have been selfish and entitled if I had then started demanding appointments whenever was convenient for me.  

I respect his hours when scheduling my massage therapy because those limits on his availability are important to his own health, and his family.

Compassion sometimes pushes past the normal boundaries, but that doesn’t mean the boundaries are bad or wrong.

In the same way, the question of how to actually honor God’s holy day is more complicated that a do or don’t binary.

If we are going to listen to both Jesus’ teaching and the prophet’s, we need a more nuanced guide to discern what honoring the sabbath really looks like.

Thankfully, Jesus offers an interpretation of his act of healing that is actually pretty easy to apply as just such a guide.  He compares it to giving freedom from bondage:

He reminds the synagogue leaders that they “untie” their animals to lead them to water on the sabbath, and then asks why the woman should not, “be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?”

It’s a clear call back to the source of the sabbath command in the Ten Commandments.

In Deuteronomy 5, God’s people are commanded to keep the sabbath holy.

The command starts with the words echoed by the synagogue leader: “six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord you God. Don’t do any work on it.” (Deut. 5:12b-13)

But then, we get more details. The prohibition against work is universal: the people, their children, their slaves, their animals, and even the immigrant living among them are all to rest on the holy day.

For a very important reason:“remember that you were a slave in Egypt, but the Lord your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. That’s why the Lord your God commands you to keep the Sabbath day.” (Deut. 5:15)

Sabbath is meant to be a reminder of liberation from slavery, a commemoration of God’s action to set the people free from the bondage of endless labor.

So, of course, an action that frees someone from a physically painful and disabling bondage honors the sabbath. It’s an act of freedom.

And, of course, the general practice of resting from work (and – by the way – also making it so that others can rest from work) honors the sabbath too. That is practice of freedom.

The reason the synagogue leaders got it wrong when they admonished against seeking healing on the sabbath was because that was turning a law meant for freedom into a bondage itself.

They had separated the commandment from its purpose, which is the fatal flaw of legalism.

They thought obedience to the law was the point, not the result meant to be achieved through the law.

But obedience is only the point for autocrats and dictators, and the God of the Bible is neither of those things.

God’s law is not about reinforcing God’s power and domination. It’s not about putting us in our place or punishing anyone who steps out of line.

God’s law is the law of love.

It’s the law that commands us to pause from our effort and our striving and our demands on others to remember that God’s purpose for us is freedom.

It’s the law that exhorts us to care for the hungry and afflicted, and to refrain from oppression and the speaking of evil so that we may be repairers of the breach that has exiled us from the fullness of God’s blessing.

It’s the law that gives us boundaries to foster healthy lives and communities of wholeness.

Boundaries, not bondage.

That’s the difference between the rule of love and the rule of power. 

The rule of power is about control.

The rule of love is about wholeness.

So, what does it mean for us to remember the sabbath and keep it holy?

It can probably mean a lot of things.

It probably does include some boundaries meant to limit our compulsions to achieve and accomplish… compulsions that run us ragged and distract us from noticing the ways that we tie ourselves up in knots.

But the limits are never the point. They are only the guide to point us toward love and freedom.

Thanks be to God.