Blessed Rest - Sermon for the Second Sunday After Pentecost (June 2, 2024)

Scripture Readings: Deuteronomy 5:12–15 | Psalm 81 | 2 Corinthians 4:5–12 | Mark 2:23–3:6

“Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent.” (Mark 3:4).
 
What are some of your favourite ways to rest? To unwind a bit and relax for a while?
 
Maybe it involves a leisurely stroll on the beach… or a good book, a glass of wine, and a warm bath. Maybe it looks like sitting around with some friends… or finding a quiet moment to ourselves. Whatever our ideas and ideals around rest might be, one thing’s for sure: one way or another, we all need it. We humans need time to be restored… time to recover our strength… to refocus… to remember the blessings we have received… and where these blessings really come from.
 
And our readings today from the Scriptures invite us to reflect on the sacred rest that the Living God offers His people… not just a break for our bodies and minds… but the blessed rest of His new life.
 
Our first reading today from Deuteronomy Chapter 5, is from one of the two places in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, where the famous Ten Commandments are listed. These Ten Commandments served as the cornerstone of the Living God’s covenant partnership with Israel, setting out the clear parameters of the life of God’s chosen people. And as we heard, the fourth of these Commandments was to observe the Sabbath, the sacred seventh day of rest, and to keep it holy… to set it apart, not to pursue their own interests, but to honour the Lord their God and all that He has done for them.
 
In other words, Israel was to regularly practice rest for an important purpose: to celebrated… to keep alive in their hearts, and minds, and bodies, the story of God’s great compassion… God’s concern for justice… and God’s saving, and sustaining steadfast love. Week after week, they were to break up the rhythm of their daily work to remember what the LORD had done for them by coming to their rescue and setting them free from slavery.
 
Deuteronomy 5:15, “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.”

The Israelites didn’t save themselves from Egypt… nor did anyone else come to their aid. No one pitied them. No one cared… but God cared! And God saw their plight. And God Himself saved them with an outstretched arm from the power of Pharoah.
 
What happened to them was pure grace. A gift of God’s great compassion, justice, and steadfast love.
 
And so now, God’s people were to rest to remember the freedom and new life that the LORD had won them. Before that, they had no rest… or freedom. They had been trapped, and exploited, and oppressed by a tyrant… but now, the Living God had given them a whole new life… one they were to ensure everyone got to share in… rich and poor… women and men… strangers… even their animals were equally set free to share in this sacred rest.
 
Deuteronomy 5:13-14, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.”  
 
The whole community was given this gift of sacred, Sabbath rest… a chance to regularly relive the experience of deliverance… of being set free to be restored, and to remember the grace, and justice, and steadfast love of the Living God who rescued them. This gift of new life was to be baked into the pattern of Israel’s weekly rhythms… a constant reminder that even though they had been slaves, God had saved them, and shares with them the blessings of peace and rest… providing for them, attending to them, and offering them a glimpse of the glorious future that awaits them: God’s ultimate rest when the world is set right and God’s blessed reign fills all of creation.
 
At its heart, the Sabbath was a sign of God’s salvation already achieved in the past, and of the blessed future rest that awaits His faithful people.
 
But tragically, God’s people tend to forget our story… and according to the prophets, over the centuries Israel too forgot the grace, the compassion, the justice, and the steadfast love of Yahweh, the Living God, and they gave themselves over to their own desires… and became enslaved again to sin… transforming the way they treated each other… leading to the practice, not of sacred rest, but of injustice, exploitation, and oppression… reflecting the image of the tyrant Pharoah, instead of their gracious Saviour.
 
And as the old saying goes: “the corruption of the best is the worst”… and even God’s good gifts like the Sabbath, can get turned into a tool to build up self-righteousness… or worse… a weapon of oppression… creating misery instead of sharing in God’s new life.
 
And of course, this is a warning for all of God’s people… not just ancient Israel… we know that over the centuries, and even today, we the Church can just as easily fall into this same pit.
 
But the Good News reminds us that even then, the Living God can lift us up, and set us free… that God sent His Son into the world, not only to rescue the oppressed… but to break sin’s hold on oppressors too.

Turning now to our reading today from the Gospel of Mark, we see Jesus of Nazareth, God’s own Son on the scene, bringing about God’s sacred rest… God’s gracious compassion, concern for justice, and steadfast love in ways that really challenged how many in His day understood what it meant to keep the Sabbath holy.
 
As we saw earlier, the Sabbath was one of the Big Ten Commandments… a practice of deep faithfulness to the Living God, and a commitment to His covenant. But over the years, strict Sabbath adherence had sometimes been used as a way to build up people’s public image… to show off one’s own status within the community. And when this happens, the good gift of the Sabbath gets twisted into a tool of self-righteousness… a sign of how good and ‘godly’ we are… and no longer serves as a reminder of God’s grace, which we can do nothing at all to deserve.
 
And it can also become a weapon… a way to attack and accuse those who do not fall in line with our way of doing things… instead of as a sign of God’s great acts of salvation… rescuing the hungry, the hurting, the lost and oppressed… and bringing them His blessed rest.

But that is exactly what Jesus Christ has come to do… to achieve God’s greatest gift of freedom and release… to win for His world lasting peace and rest… to offer and embody the fullness of God’s sacred Sabbath… in Himself.
 
Our passage starts off with the story of Jesus’s disciples plucking grains of wheat as they walked along on the Sabbath. Some of his critics, eager to find fault with Jesus, pointed to this simple act of grabbing a snack as an example of law-breaking… of deeply dishonouring God’s holy Commandments… and proof that Jesus Himself was not in line with the LORD’s ways, and so should be opposed.
 
In response, Jesus recalls a story from Israel’s past, when King David, out of great hunger, shared the sacred bread from the Tabernacle with his followers… and yet remained faithful to God.
 
It’s not that He’s saying that the Sabbath doesn’t matter, but that those who were using the Sabbath to condemn those who were hungry had forgotten what the Sabbath was all about: not just avoiding work for no reason, but to cultivate a way of life that was based on the grace of God… a living reminder of His great compassion, concern for justice, steadfast love for the vulnerable, and the blessed life that He would one day bring about for good.
 
And when Jesus enters the synagogue, we see Him again challenge His critic’s vision of what the Sabbath’s all about. In this gathering of their faith community, Jesus sees someone with a withered hand… a man who, because of his injury, would not have been able to do much work any day of the week… and who could not undo the damage, or deliver himself from his suffering. In other words, Jesus saw someone in deep need of God’s grace… and so Jesus  brings Him new life.
 
Mark 2:4-5, “Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.”
 
Right before the doubting eyes of the crowd, God’s gracious compassion, concern, and steadfast love breaks through the bonds laid on this man’s life… finally setting him free to experience and enjoy the blessed rest that the Sabbath was always meant to recall. Far from dishonouring this holy time, Jesus was bringing its deepest purpose to light… a gracious invitation to share in the blessed life of the One who is Himself the Lord of the Sabbath.
 
In these two episodes, St. Mark is showing us something profound about Jesus: He is the Lord even of the Sabbath. Jesus is the One who shares God’s blessed life with us. He is the One who sets us free. He is the One we can truly turn to for God’s grace, His compassion, justice, and steadfast love… the Cornerstone of our faith, and the One who deserves our truest devotion.
 
And in Jesus Christ, God’s holy Sabbath has come to life… reaching out to us in whatever slavery we might be facing today… in our own struggles with sin, with our fears and doubts, with the heartbreak, and burdens, that we cannot seem to be rid of, no matter how hard we try… and He says to us all: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28).

How will we respond to Him today? Are we willing to let Jesus sustain us? To heal us? To correct us? To deliver us? Or like those who saw the miracle in the synagogue that Sabbath long ago, will we harden our hearts, and look for ways to resist and reject the work of the One who came to bring God’s gift of rest to all?
 
Saying yes to Jesus, following Him means letting our lives be reshaped by the grace, compassion, justice, and steadfast love of the Lord. It means regularly taking time to remember what God has done in Jesus to set us free from our sins, and from everything else that keeps us trapped in slavery. It means embracing a new way of life that retells this story, keeping it alive in our hearts, and minds, and bodies, and seeks to share this Good News with those around us. It means coming to Jesus, week by week, as we gather in His name, to hear His word, and to receive together the gifts of His body and blood… His own life given to save us… pointing us forward in hope to await His return to set all things right, both in our own lives, and in the world around us.
 
And so, with the Holy Spirit of God at work in us, may we look to Jesus our Saviour, and find in Him the rest we need today. May His grace, and compassion, and justice, and steadfast love sustain us, and set us free to serve Him without fear. May His new life reshape our hearts, and minds, and bodies to take part in His healing work in our corner of His world. And may we share this Good News with others, so that they too can come to Him and find God’s blessed rest. Amen.