Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seeyouonsunday/videos/1068034515090160 and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJeHt37z0aw

For many generations, most preacher’s understanding of the Jewish world comes from commentaries written by the Christian theologians, preachers, and scholars before them. This is what we do. Very few had conversations studied together with Jewish scholars who might actually know what the 1st century Judaism was like, because, fairly quickly, Christianity became an anti-Jewish force.

For the last couple of generations, and you can imagine why, there has been a push toward more accurate, honest, and compassionate readings of Judaism in our Bible stories, and naming where the authors are trying to… build a narrative.

For example, New Testament, Jewish, biblical scholar Amy Jill Levine writes that “From this and other narratives of Jesus healing on the Sabbath, a number of Christians have received the impression that Jesus completely revised the way the day was observed. In this ‘Christian’ view, ‘the Jews’ had turned the Sabbath from a day of rest and celebration to a day of constraint: don’t do this, don’t do that. This impression is symptomatic of a larger view of Judaism as a straitjacket with thousands of picky injunctions, and of Jews as fearful that if they were to violate one commandment, they would face the wrath of an angry God.” “No Jew, then or now, would have upheld any Sabbath ruling preventing work were a life in danger… [but] should one practice medicine and ‘work’ in order to heal a non-painful, chronic condition such as the one in Luke’s story?”

That way of thinking that Jesus was doing nothing but upending the rules. The law is common. It’s what many of us were taught. Many of us were raised on. It’s still found in many a book, but the more time we spend and dialogue with our Jewish siblings we will find in many ways Jesus was a very good Jew for his time.

This is really meant to give the Jewish community and the Pharisees a little bit more grace than historically we have. Our story says some of the Pharisees were upset and some of the Pharisees wanted to trap him and arrest him it wasn’t everyone.

So let’s spend a little time talking about the Sabbath. Coming both from Exodus when the Hebrew people were freed from slavery that even their slaves and their animals would have a day of rest and some Genesis 1. That at creation the very first thing that humans experienced was rest.

Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday. If you are not going to cook, if you are not going to purchase anything, if you are not going to travel great distances, Sabbath is something you have to plan. Sabbath doesn’t just happen. Sabbath is a choice.

When Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote of Sabbath, “Sabbath isn’t for us to prepare to toil for the rest of the week. It isn’t an interlude in our toil, but it is the climax of living.” It is what makes us human. It is for the sake of life. He writes that the rest of our life is space about making space between us under shorter smaller, it’s things it’s technologies. Sabbath is about making Time sacred.

He wrote, “What is Sabbath? spirit in the form of time. with our bodies, we belong to space our spirit and our souls, soar to eternity, aspire to be holy. The Sabbath is an ascent to the summit. It gives us the opportunity to sanctify time to raise the good to the level of the holy to behold the holy by abstaining from profanity.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a mystic, academic, and advocate; those three often don’t go together. Sometimes they do and it might be easy to imagine this rabbi writing in his professor office at a Jewish college in Ohio or New York about the Sabbath. But he was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1907. He pursued his doctorate in Berlin in the 1930s. In 1938 he was deported back to Poland and he landed in the United States in 1940 leaving behind his mother and sisters. All of whom were killed.

And yet, he’s still made time for wonder for all of the holy. And that we are co-creators with the holy co-creating a better world. Rabbi Heschel was on the front lines marching at Selma. Maybe he had some of that good cooking from Miss George’s house. He got involved in anti-Vietnam war protests, not because he was a pacifist but because he thought what was happening there was wrong. He got involved in Catholic-Jewish relations, even advised on the writings and policies of Vatican 2. He got involved in what was right and just, and he made time to rest. He made it made the time holy and sacred. Not because he earned it but because it was what gives life.

The Deuteronomistic law says, if someone’s ox has fallen into a ravine on the Sabbath, you need to save the ox. Likewise, if a child or anyone is in a life-threatening situation, the law makes space to care for someone on the Sabbath. People don’t die on the Sabbath because it is the Sabbath. People die on the Sabbath because people die every day but no one is neglected on the Sabbath.

The question for Jesus then is not: should someone be allowed to be healed on the Sabbath? Rather: should you heal someone who has a chronic non-painful condition this man has lived with for seemingly years? Or could Jesus have just waited till the next day? Which kind of seems like a fair question. What good is the Sabbath if you can so easily manipulate for what you want to do?

I do believe Jesus thought that Sabbath was important, necessary, and vital. It seems like he also thought that to do nothing when mercy was necessary was to do harm. And we’ll see over and over again throughout the story, whether we’re reading it or it’s on Sunday morning or it’s in the spaces between that, Jesus will go off on his own and pray, and so maybe he realized he screwed up the Sabbath a little bit and needed to go spend some time in prayer.

I think it’s reality, an awful reality for many, for Rabbi Heschel, you can’t save everyone. Sometimes you can never do enough. Sometimes the people you love are killed by Nazis or shot on their hotel balcony. It doesn’t mean the work is unnecessary but it doesn’t mean you work all the time.

Rabbi Heschel’s daughter, also Rabbi Heschel, talked about how when she was living with them. When they were all in New York and they would light the Sabbath candles on Friday, then sit and watch the sunset out their window and breathe into the Sabbath into the sacred time. I have a holy envy for that.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote “to set apart one day of a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar of dependence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshiping the idols of technological civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and forces of nature- is there any institution that hold out a greater hope for man’s progress than Sabbath?

I have holy envy for that, for reclaiming a time outside of these things that try to own us, of the world who tries to tell us who we are, who is worthy. In this new administration has used the term shock and awe which is horrifying. And if you want, there are reasons every day to be angry, reasons to join the fight. And if it is a fight, it’s going to be a long one. We, like Rabbi Heschel, like Jesus, are fighting for people, for love of people, for care of people, the fullness of humanity for all. Claiming that by doing nothing when mercy is necessary is doing harm, that we must choose sides in the face of injustice, for neutrality helps the oppressor and never the victim, that we must do good when we can.

And we must make some time holy, we must claim some time for wonder and awe, for celebration and dancing, we must separate ourselves from all that would keep us separated from God and from each other. We have to take time for the sacred in ourselves and in the world.