The second chapter of Genesis tells us that after six ‘days’ of creating, God took the seventh day to ‘rest.’ This is the headwater event for the Jewish Sabbath, but as with so many ‘religious’ events and items, down through the history of commemorating the events in liturgy and practice, they take on different meanings and assume sometimes political and social power plays with regards to how they truly function in the world of those who celebrate and commemorate them. ’
Just what kind of ‘rest’ is this that God takes after six days of creating? It’s not like He was worn out…I mean, God is God right? If we look one chapter previously in Genesis, we hear the wonderful creating of the universe, the world, the earth, all living things, including the creation of humanity, i.e., the human person! After each ‘day’ of creation, culminating on the sixth day of creation, God found everything to be ‘very good!’ The sense here is that the ‘work’ of creating is the very good ‘work’ of Divine Love enacting Itself, loving all into being, the giving over of the Divine self in and as the time and space inhabited by creatures of love. So, the ‘rest’ here is one of holy relishing or divine gazing at the beloved earth and all its inhabitants. The sacred afterglow of what was made in, through, and as Love. Love in its longing to give itself is now ‘resting’ by being presently engaged fully with the receiver of the Love, Creation itself. This is the radical reverence of Divine love-making. Is this a too far-fetched way of looking at Sabbath?
According to the Pharisees in today’s Gospel story, the answer is probably “YES!” (Mk 3:1-6). Here, we have the Pharisees scandalized by Jesus entering the synagogue on the Sabbath and, of all things, doing a ‘good work.’ And what exactly was the work? Jesus healed a man with a withered hand. In this passage, the Pharisees remain silent as they wait to see what Jesus will do; however, Jesus is fully aware that they are watching him and waiting for him to ‘slip up’ with regards to Sabbath law. So what does Jesus do before healing the man with the withered hand, he centers the man in the midst of the unfolding scene:
He said to the man with the withered hand, “Come up here before us.”
Then he said to the Pharisees, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil,
to save life rather than to destroy it?”
But they remained silent.
As with our present day experience of Christianity in many cases, the Pharisees’ understanding of their religion has somehow moved away from – or perhaps simply missed the point of – this Genesis sense of Sabbath described above as resting in the beloved creation of life . Somehow the sense of ‘good work’ has come to mean an action defined by laws rather than a giving of self as the flow of Life itself. We tend to relegate our actions to a morality code of laws that determine whether you’re ‘in’ or ‘out.’ You are either in conformance with the law or you are breaking the law, and the evaluation of whether something is good or not lies strictly within that legal code. How far away is this line of thinking and experiencing of life from the sense of ‘good work’ arising from a Divine Love that so longs to share itself that it has to give itself away as Love through creation, or as Jesus puts it in today’s Gospel, ‘saving life?’ How often do we choose to ‘destroy life,’ and insidiously accomplish this by applying and even creating ‘laws’ that justify our destructive actions?
When we use religious and civil laws as a means to imprison and enslave ourselves and others, we are not cooperating with the Divine creation, by the way, which we are manifestly charged to continue through engagement and participation. Private agendas fed by narcissistic individualism coerce us into reliance on laws as a substitute for experiencing a Life of Giving. This Life of Giving causes us fear because we forget that we are already the receivers. God’s Sabbath in the creation ‘event’ is a holy resting in the loved Being of us! It is not a selfish gaze but a self-giving engagement that ‘sees’ all things as they are – created in and as love. How radical is that to say that when God saw that everything created was ‘good,’ She was referring to all of us. There were no laws except the creative love of God –the fathomless divine longing to share the being of God’s self, which is Love.
Literally from a prison in Birmingham in 1963, Martin Luther King wrote to his fellow clergymen reminding them that in consideration of whether a law can be broken, one must consider whether a law is unjust or not.[i] He tells us that unjust laws are not laws at all (St. Augustine) and that – following St. Thomas Aquinas – the difference between a just law and an unjust law lies within the law’s capacity to uplift or degrade human personality. This is the one just creative law of Love that holds us accountable to continue its flow at the cost of hackneyed illusions of individualistic privilege that destroys life rather than ‘saving’ or giving life. And yet we, like the Pharisees, remain silent. The silence of the Pharisees in today’s Gospel is the silence of spiritual muteness that continues today as moral posturing which seeks to hide blind complacency and ignorance. Jesus is sensing perhaps something similar in the silence…
Looking around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart,
Jesus said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.”
He stretched it out and his hand was restored.
In this entire seeming tirade, there is the context which surrounds and includes it all – Creative Love, Sabbath seeing, waiting to be ignited through the interaction of how we ‘see’ and ‘touch’ each other. Here is the twisted man in today’s Gospel who the Pharisees would like to use as the scapegoat vehicle through which they will finally ‘catch’ Jesus, but who symbolizes each and every one of us ‘up here before us’ front and center as the beloved creation of Divine Love being called forth to ‘stretch’ ourselves in all ways as a response to receiving the creative love of God so that the creative love continues. We must not try to cling to the love, for then it becomes a distortion of itself governed by the laws of selfish agendas. No, we must allow it to pass through us as gift to others. Only then are we truly in the ‘creation story’ as we are meant to be, i.e., as receivers and transmitters of the creative love of God that longs always to ‘rest’ amidst us and within us as engagement and solidarity.
As the first reading tells us in the story of David and Goliath (1 Sm 17:32-33, 37, 40-51 ), it need only take one small stone to take down a ‘giant,’ i.e., when that ‘small stone’ is the steadfastness of creative love that reveals the dramatic illusions we try to cling to instead of allowing it to flow through us nurturing creation. And each of us, in every creative act we do, in our reception and stretching forth of the love we have received, echoes the Divine creative love that eternally longs to ‘rest’ and be with us, not in a static way but through constant engagement.
And let us not fall prey to believing that one small act has no effect upon the world and the life of everyone and everything in this universe. For, as the Episcopal priest and wisdom teacher, Cynthia Bourgeault, reminds us, no matter how meaningless, disconnected or ‘unproductive in terms of reward and gain’ a particular creative act of self-giving (kenosis) may appear, any act of giving grounded in love already belongs to what she calls the “divine exchange.”[ii]
What a wonderfully challenging and profound calling we all have…to hear and respond to the call to ‘stretch! This is Sabbath stretching – participating in the ongoing creative flow of Divine Love by exchanging and engaging with each other and all of creation – resting, seeing, being, receiving, healing and saving all things in God!
Peace,
Thomas
[i] See https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
[ii] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind – A New Perspective on Christ and His Message (Boston, MA: Shambhala Inc, 2008), p. 73. Cynthia is speaking specifically here of kenosis, a Greek word that carries the meaning of self-empting or self-giving.