Great, fantastic, and that's good news even for the heathen and the rascal. For everyone, no matter your beliefs, no matter what you may think about God, and the Bible, you probably don't mind having a day off. A day off, a day in which you do no work, it sounds good, doesn't it? Everyone wants one of those, perhaps more than one. When you ask people how they're doing, do they say 'busy?' When you ask people how their weekend or their holiday was, do they say 'Not long enough?'
This is the curse of the modern age, that we are too busy. It wasn't always like this, but it's sure like this now. and consider the elements that go into this fiasco. For us, in the modern age, we have found a problem in which the weekends have all become every bit as busy as the rest of the days midweek. There are really no other ways that people live these days, they're essentially always trying to move and work within a system that never ever gives up. They're trying to work with their FOMO, trying to make sure they can cram the maximum into all their time, and they're working as hard as possible to make sure that their time is filled with buying, selling, and greasing the wheels of commerce.
For the merchants don't take a day off. The merchants don't rest, you know, not on the sabbath or ever. They are active wherever you are, following after you. They know you have money, they can smell it, and they're not going to rest until you've given that money up. They're not going to wait, not going to take it easy, until you've handed over every last penny to them. And they're not going to want you to take a day off. Things can't shut down for a day, you've got to buy, sell, and be engaged all day every day. The ancient Hebrew people had a great way around that, of course, which was a mandated day off, mandated by the Lord their God himself, who told them in Exodus, as well as Deuteronomy, that they were to do all their work in six days, and in that seventh day, they were to do no work at all . No work. None. Zippo. No buying, no selling, no engaging in commerce, no patronizing merchants, none of that at all. Now, that's a good idea, a day where you have to rest from all that stuff, a day that, at the end of the week you would be mandated to rest, to take it easy, to do no work, that's a great idea. There was one problem with it though, which is that people got really specific about what a lack of work would be. For what is a lack of work? It's not enough to say that you shouldn't do any work, because not everyone views work the same way, so the Jews had to end up creating a big long list of what counts as work and what doesn't, and what they did was to set that list of things as a matter of things to be avoided, and they turned the sabbath into a passive experience. That is, the sabbath observance was about what you didn't do, and not about what you did. It turned the most moral Sabbath into one that you did absolutely nothing whatsoever, in which you stayed in a coma, so nobody could accuse you of working.
And we learned that, and learned it hard. We all believed in the sabbath so much that the concept of the weekend, of having a day off, became sacred to us. We believed very hard in the concept of a day off, believe in it so thoroughly that we all internalized it, and grew very attached to time off. But, the definition of that day as a day off, it became a mandated day off in which nobody was supposed to do any work, but the answer came back, loud and clear 'well then, what are we supposed to do?' And that's a great question. For what we had done was to create a vacuum, something that nature abhors. We made a vacuum, where we weren't doing any work, and then the question came up, of what then should we do? And people, in their desire to do nothing, and in their forgetting of God, elected to do what they always do, which is to consume, to buy, to brunch and to sport. But if you're going to brunch and sport, if you're going to shop and peruse, then someone is going to have to sell those things to you. And if you're going to go out a-brunching, you're going to use your car, and so is your waitress, your chef, and all of a sudden, you're in a world in which it's turning into a day exactly like any other. You go to the store, buy linens, pick up a hat, go to the market for avocados, all that noise because, well, there are a bunch of things to do because Sunday isn't a Sabbath, it's just a day.
That vacuum has to be filled with something, you know. The people in the Gospel reading were so desperately holding onto the notion of not working, that they didn't realize that we were moving into making a vacuum that would be filled. For every vacuum is, you know, even the vacuum of space. And if the vacuum is going to be filled by something eventually, why not have it be filled with the right thing?
Christ, oft accused of being a sabbath breaker, was actually the only one who ever truly kept the Sabbath, you know. Sure, while he was here on earth, he did wondrous works, healing, cherishing, gathering God's people together on the Sabbath, doing good and not doing evil on the Sabbath, being about the Lord's work, and comforting God's people on the Sabbath, which is wonderful work. And after accomplishing that, the people looked upon him, and wondered how they might kill him. They asked this because Christ was about his Father's work, of course, but they wanted to preserve that vacuum, telling themselves that the most important thing was to not work, not to worship God in his fullness, in his grace and in his grandeur. The Sabbath had to be kept as completely passive, inactive.
So those who wanted to kill him succeeded. They took him away, and had him crucified. And Christ called out, loudly and clearly that it was finished, all his work was done. But Christ had the temerity to not die right away, and the crowd became concerned, worrying that they might have to handle a dead body on the Sabbath, quite forbidden indeed. So they made sure that Christ was lanced through his side, and that he was fully dead. They took him down off the cross and ensured that he was buried before the sabbath started. And Christ rested.
This man accused of being a Sabbath breaker, of taking the sabbath too lightly, he was the only man who had ever fully and completely kept the Sabbath in its entirety. He quite literally did zero work on that Sabbath way back between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Rather, instead of doing work, he rested from all his labor, from all the work that he had done, from all the work he had completed and finished, which he did. He rested so well on that Sabbath that he didn't even breathe, not even a heartbeat, not a motion, not a twitch, nothing. He rested.
And by resting, he fulfilled, he completed the Sabbath, and he gave his people a new day for worship. The first day of the week, the Sunday, the Lord's day. The day not when you are commanded to do nothing, but rather the day in which you are impelled and compelled to remember the work that Christ did on that day. He rose from the dead that day, the Sunday, the most important event that has ever happened, the greatest thing that has ever been done, the most world-altering thing that has been done, and you and I get to come together to commemorate that every Sunday. To remember that if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. Your job on Sunday isn't to keep a vacuum for the sake of just a day off, trust me, the merchants will get a hold of you one way or another. But they can't get a hold of you if you are filling that time with something else - with prayer, praise, rejoicing, and celebrating the victory of Christ over death and the grave. You're celebrating that great victory of Jesus of Nazareth over death, where he finished all his work by sundown on Friday, rested on Saturday, and rose back from the grave on the Sunday. The Lord of the Sabbath fulfilled the Sabbath in a way that you and I would be incapable of doing. He is truly the Lord of the Sabbath. Listen to him on the day he has given you. Fill your morning with his prayer and preaching, grow in your faith, push back against that vacuum that is there, and fill it with grace and truth.
I promise, the brunch will still be there when you're done.
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