When You Work Morning, Noon, and Night
Preached by Ben Bechtel
September 27, 2020
Scripture Reading
Mark 2:23-28
23 One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24 And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” 25 And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: 26 how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” 27 And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”
If I were to ask you what the greatest threat is to the spiritual life of Christians in our country today, what would you say? You might say the moral degradation of society, or the breakdown of the family, or the mixing of Christian faith with love of country, such that the two are virtually indistinguishable. But my suspicion is that many, if not most of us, would not answer the way that one prominent Christian thinker answered this question. When asked what the greatest threat to the spiritual life of the American Christian is, this man responded with hurry. “Hurry” he says, “is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.”[1]
Hurry? Really? Of all the things wrong, hurry is our biggest problem? This may strike us as silly, even naïve. But then we begin to ponder. How do most people respond when you ask them how they are doing? “Oh I’m good, just busy.” Or what is the first question we ask someone after we first meet? “What do you do?” Hm. Let’s continue to ponder. Do you feel like you have enough time in your life for prayer? For communion with God? What truths do our children implicitly pick up on about Jesus and Christianity because of our pace of life? Or how about this simple question, are you tired?
When we think for even a few brief moments, this thinker’s words start to sound less like a wild diagnosis from a naturalistic health guru and more like a diagnosis that makes sense of and associates a wide variety of symptoms that affect our whole self. In Matthew 11:28-30 which we looked at last week Jesus invites us all to come to him to find rest. This week, we are going to study Mark 2:23-28 which deals with the Sabbath, that ancient Jewish practice commanded by God in which the people would set aside Saturday, the seventh and final day of the week as a day of rest of worship. The same events of Mark 2 are recorded at the beginning of Matthew 12, the passage immediately following Jesus’ invitation to come to him. In this story, Jesus shows us what real rest, real peace, and real Sabbath look like. We need this peace. Let’s run to him.
1. The Abuse of Sabbath
Turning to Mark 2, Jesus has a run in with the religious leaders of the day, run ins which are highlighted in several short stories throughout Mark 2. This particular dispute revolves around the Sabbath day. On this particular Sabbath day Jesus and his disciples were picking heads off of grain and eating them, a practice that was permitted in the law for travelers and the poor (Deut. 23:25). However, this act of picking the grain violated the religious leaders’ stringent tradition that they had built up around the Sabbath laws of the Old Testament. Now, it can be easy to dunk on the Pharisees, but we have to ask ourselves the question why they had all these laws around the Sabbath?
To them, Sabbath was the religious practice of practices. You see in Jeremiah 17:24-27 the Lord tells the people of Israel that judgment is coming for their failure to observe the Sabbath unless they begin to practice the Sabbath again. Their Sabbath observance was tied up with God bringing in his kingdom. It is for this reason that they tie up heavy yokes of Sabbath burden on the backs of their people. They are hoping that if the people all obey the Sabbath then God will send the promised king and restore them.
But these guys miss the point entirely. You have to love the way Jesus responds to these guys. He basically says to a group of pastors, “Have you never read the Scriptures?” Have you never heard of how David, God’s anointed king, had to eat the holy bread of the temple when he was on the run and his life was in danger? Jesus is saying, you guys are missing the point. That promised king you are hoping for, the goal of your Sabbath striving, the one who is greater than David is right here. Your stringent rules are not the main focus right now! This is like being at a cocktail party with the president and being obsessed over the fact that a painting of that president is crooked on the wall the entire time. Jesus is here! Stop your religious striving and focus on him. He’s the whole point of the Sabbath.
2. The Neglect of Sabbath
Maybe you even grew up in a legalistic church context where the Sabbath meant staying at church all day, no smiling or dancing, and a list of extra rules you had to keep, and this passage really is important to you because it is freeing to you. But I think if we don’t look closely, we can misunderstand this story of Jesus. I’m afraid that we have so quickly used this story and similar accounts in the gospels to write off the Sabbath, that we may have traded one heavy-laden human tradition for another. Just as equally oppressive as Pharisaical Sabbath keeping, is the human tradition that we blindly follow in the western world today that says you don’t need rest, that our bodies and souls can just keep grinding.
For all of us who are worried that stopping to rest one day out of seven might cause us to fall back into legalism let me ask you this question. How is not resting working out for you? As Christian author Adam Mabry puts it, “it’s not rest that threatens to oppress you, but your refusal to.”[2] I don’t want to say something unilaterally for all of us, but I talk to a lot of you, and I know myself, and we are worn out. We’re exhausted and anxious and restless. Many of us here today, whether we would describe ourselves like this or not, are workaholics. We cannot put our work down and can’t focus on our home life at home. We can’t even put our phones down while trying to pour milk on our cereal because that important work email or text might come through. Many of us who describe ourselves as tired are not workaholics, but we still experience a busyness of the soul. We can’t sit still. We always have to have music on in the background or text someone or scroll through Facebook. Our lives are filled with constant distraction. And yet others of us bend and buckle under the weight of living in a 100 mph world. Our boss gives us another impossible deadline, or our kids have another soccer practice or game on a Sunday that we have to travel for and we just want to scream out “stop!”
In the beginning in the garden of Eden we read that God created everything in six days and that on the seventh day he rested (Gen. 2:2-3). The picture that we are supposed to see here is one where God sits down on his throne, takes up residence in the house that he has built. He is the Lord of the Sabbath. He is the King of creation. He sets the boundaries of work and tells Adam and Eve and all of us what is good for us. God also gave them the boundary that they could have every tree in the garden except for one. And yet they doubt God’s good boundaries for them. They eat from that one tree because they think that what God forbids will truly satisfy them, that they know better than God what will bring them lasting happiness. But, as we know, this results in a curse upon their labor, both work and childbearing, and eventually their death (Gen. 3:16-19).
(FCF) Ever since then, we like Adam and Eve think that we are lords of the Sabbath, lords of our own work and time. We long for the satisfaction of Eden, of peace and rest with God, and we think we know the best way to get there. All of our busyness ultimately comes from an attempt to bring the satisfaction and rest and wholeness of Eden into our lives. When we work 70 hours a week, when we strive as parents to provide every possible opportunity for our kids (sports team, extra-curricular), and when we use all of our down time to get caught up in feuds on social media or binge watch Netflix we are seeking to enter back into the Garden and find satisfaction. In doing this, we like Adam and Eve are disregarding God’s good boundaries around our lives, showing us the pattern of six days of work and one day of rest. And ultimately, we feel the effects of the curses of Eden in our lives by our efforts to satisfy ourselves in our own way. This is why so many of us feel like zombies who have fallen victim to the god of busyness. In the end, we have the same problem as not only Adam and Eve but the Pharisees as well. We, like them, buy the lie that we are lords of our lives and that we can achieve the satisfaction of Eden on our own terms not God’s. Hurry is not our biggest problem, although I would argue it is the most prominent manifestation in our day of the larger underlying problem. The biggest threat to the spiritual lives of Christian today is that we think we know better than God how to attain wholeness, peace, and rest.
But Jesus shows us that God’s boundaries are good for us (verse 27):
And [Jesus] said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
If the Pharisees needed to hear that man was not made for the Sabbath, we need to hear that Sabbath was made for man. Notice, Jesus doesn’t say anything about Sabbath rest itself other than this. God created a pattern of work and rest into his universe and he invites us to live with the grain of the universe. Jesus here invites us into a world where we don’t have to play god any longer. The beauty of stopping to rest is that it reminds us that we are not that big of a deal! The world will keep on spinning and this church would keep on operating if I took a day off. Do you see the freedom in that type of thinking? We’re all so stressed and busy and tired largely because we feel the weight of having to play God. We don’t have to play God for our family by providing them with an endless supply of money or by giving our kids every sports or academic opportunity. We don’t have to play God by constantly jumping from different forms of entertainment in order for us to feel satisfied. Jesus is saying to us that the rest pointed to in the Sabbath is good for us because rhythms of rest force us to recognize God as Lord of the Sabbath, not ourselves. We need this far more than we know.
3. The Fulfillment of Sabbath
While that is all true, we all recognize that no matter how many weeks in a row we rest with our families on Sundays and no matter how many things we rightfully give up in submitting to God, we are not in Eden. We are not experiencing the satisfaction of fellowship with God and others in peace and wholeness. And we all know that we cannot get there. We cannot Sabbath ourselves back to the rest of Eden. And this is where we get to the bottom of Jesus’ words in this passage (verses 27-28):
And [Jesus] said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”
It is so easy to miss the radical nature of Jesus’ claim here. Who did we say is the Lord of the Sabbath? Genesis 2:2-3 says that God is the Lord of the Sabbath. This is a claim to divinity by Jesus. This is precisely why after another scuffle over the Sabbath in the beginning of Mark 3 they begin to plot to kill him.
But not only is this a statement about Jesus’ identification with God, but it is also a claim about his identification with us as humans. In using this title, among other things, Jesus is calling himself the truly human one, the new Adam. You see, this title was a claim that Jesus is not only in charge of the Sabbath but that he as a man will lead us into the rest that we all long for. Jesus worked throughout his life to roll back the curses of Genesis 3 by healing the sick, raising the dead, and forgiving sinners. And his life work culminated in his death on the cross where he took those curses upon himself, literally bearing the thorns and thistles of this fallen world upon his brow. He finished his work on Friday before the Sabbath, crying out “it is finished” and then rested in the grave on the Sabbath. But then on the eighth day, on the first day of a new week, Jesus rose from the dead, signifying that this age of toil and sin and death are no match for the Lord of the Sabbath. He did the work that you could never do in order to bring you into true rest, deep, soul-satisfying rest which cures that busyness and anxiety of the soul, a rest in which you have peace and fellowship with God. (BI) Jesus bore the heavy burdens of this world and in exchange offers us the easy and light yoke of his kingdom, of true satisfaction and rest. Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath.
4. The Promise of Sabbath
a. For Every Day: Jesus’ resurrection and reign as Lord of the Sabbath in one sense means that every day is a Sabbath! His cry of it is finished is the mantra of our life in Christ. Do you see the heart of Jesus in this for you? He invites you to take up his easy yoke every day and live with a soul-satisfaction in him. This means that the infinitely fruitful output of Jesus defines you more than your meager daily output. This means that you don’t have to justify your existence by your efforts at work or at home with your children. This means that you can come home from work free to love your family no matter what the day was like because you have a peace you can’t earn and can’t lose. This means your entire life is defined by rest! In the new world opened up by Jesus’ resurrection you don’t work for rest you work from rest. Each day in Jesus you have a rest so deep to which your best night of sleep doesn’t even compare. Even as you toil in this world, in Jesus you are seated in the heavenly throne room where he enjoys his eternal rest
b. For A Future Day: And one day you will be there with him in the fullness of that rest. Hebrews 4:9 says, “So then there still remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” On the days when the cares of this world over run you or you feel like you’re going to need to tape your eyelids open just to make it to lunchtime, you can be hopeful and assured that rest is coming. And because of this, we can recognize the short nature of our toil here on earth. The eternal rest puts into perspective our earthly toils. We must fight hard to keep the hope of this rest set before us, particularly in a day like our own where the monsters of productivity, consumerism, and entertainment threaten to chew us up and spit us out.
c. For One Day: Now this is where all the questions begin. Which day should be the sabbath? Am I allowed to work? Does it mean I’m in sin if I miss one Sunday of church? There are so many different things to talk through on this point, that I’m not even going to touch those here. See me after the sermon and we can talk about those things! But here is one thing to consider: who defines and controls my time? Writer Andrew Sullivan in a piece entitled “I Used To Be a Human Being” writes this commenting on how Sabbath keeping is now dead within the culture at large: “[Sabbath keeping] reflected a now-battered belief that a sustained spiritual life is simply unfeasible for most mortals without these refuges from noise and work to buffer us and remind us who we really are.”[3] Practicing a weekly day of rest in a secular culture is a declaration that travel sports teams, and bottom lines, and corporations, and the NFL do not control my time and do not tell me who I truly am. Only the Lord of the Sabbath can do that! Throw out all those “religious” preconceived notions about a Sabbath day. The day of rest is the day when we resist the pull of this world’s system of defining who we are by what we do in order to rest and worship. If you are hesitant, here’s the best argument I could make for setting aside a day in your schedule each week for true rest: it’s like scheduling a taste of heaven into your life every week! See the goodness of Jesus in this. He gives you a chance to set aside a day for refreshment and communion with him and others. There are a million forms this could take and a million great ideas for how you as a family could begin to practice this. Talk, pray, and be creative!
Church, as I close this morning, I am going to invite you to come to Jesus and experience his light and easy load. When we look into his eyes, we see rest. Don’t wait another second. Let’s come to Jesus and find rest in him.
[1] This quote is from Christian philosopher Dallas Willard cited in John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, 19.
[2] Adam Mabry, The Art of Rest, 48.
[3] Andrew Sullivan, “I Used To Be a Human Being,” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-my-distraction-sickness-and-yours.html
