Sermon on Luke 13:10-17

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Sabbath was our theme throughout last year. We spent a long time talking about how important rest is, how our culture doesn’t make room for it, and the biblical mandate for rest practices.

And yet in today’s Gospel, it sounds like Jesus was flouting the Sabbath laws given by God.He cured this woman even though it was the Sabbath. The religious leader in the story called him out on breaking the Sabbath commandments.

It’s not like the religious leader didn’t want this woman cured. He was just trying to faithfully observe the way of life given by God after the exodus. Sabbath means no work, and surely curing someone was work. If there were life-threatening circumstances, then of course, he could intervene, but why couldn’t Jesus have good boundaries and cure her tomorrow?

This was an ongoing controversy among God’s people. What counted as work? When was it permitted to do work even though it was the Sabbath: to save someone’s life? To ease someone’s pain? When were humans overstepping and pretending we’re too important not to work—essentially playing God? Even God rested on the seventh day of creation.

The synagogue leader seems to have fallen on the stricter side of the question. But instead of pulling Jesus aside to voice his concerns, he called him out publicly. And instead of speaking to Jesus himself, he addressed the crowds. Not just once, but he “kept saying to the crowds” that there were six days to work, and that they shouldn’t come looking to be cured on the day of rest.

But Jesus wasn’t having it.

Jesus was making it clear that Sabbath is about liberation. The language throughout the story uses imagery of bondage, not just healing and illness. Jesus used the language of “bound,” “bondage,” and “set free.” Jesus didn’t just cure the woman: he liberated her.

That’s important, because Sabbath isn’t just about rest. It’s about liberation.

When God liberated God’s people in the exodus, God gave them the Law, including Sabbath laws. Those laws reminded God’s people week in and week out that they were God’s, not Egypt’s. They were no longer enslaved—they had the freedom to rest and enjoy God’s creation, just as God had done at the beginning of time.

God reminded God’s people about the Sabbath laws in our reading from Isaiah, too. This came at the end of the Babylonian Captivity, when God’s people had been taken into exile by the Babylonians. They were once again being freed from a foreign power, and God was reminding them what it means to be God’s people.

The reading opens with reminders to live into their newfound freedom by speaking life-giving words and taking care of those who were hungry and afflicted. And then, it goes right into a reminder of the importance of Sabbath. Taking care of each other and observing Sabbath go hand-in-hand. These are what it means to be God’s free people.

God freed them from the oppressive power of the Egyptian Empire and the Babylonian Empire, as well as all other empires forever. The Sabbath laws weren’t just about the weekly Sabbath. They also included a sabbatical year every seven years and a Jubilee year every seven times seven years. During these special years, the land and the people and animals that worked it would get a break.

God promised to provide enough food to allow them to let the ground lie fallow for a year, restoring the land and its creatures to health and flourishing for the coming years. In the Jubilee year, debts wereforgiven, enslaved people were freed, and land was returned to its previous owners.

All of this goes against the human urge to expand and hustle and dominate. It goes against human empires’ desire to get bigger and more powerful no matter the cost.

Instead, God frees God’s people from that oppressive hunger for more by instituting cycles of rest and rejuvenation.

So, when Jesus set the woman free from her ailment, it wasn’t breaking Sabbath laws; it completely aligned with the spirit of Sabbath.

Sabbath is about liberation, and Jesus liberated that woman, just as God had liberated her ancestors.

The synagogue leader observed the letter of the Sabbath laws, while Jesus observed the spirit, but it’s still hard today to discern how to observe the spirit of Sabbath.

We talked last year about Sabbath not just being about showing up to church on Sunday mornings, though it’s wonderful to worship with you all. And it’s not necessarily about rigidly setting aside a 24-hour period of not doing certain things.

We spent a whole year talking about Sabbath, because it’s really countercultural today. Our culture values hustle and productivity, trying to squeeze the last drop of potential out of every second of our days and maximizing the profit. We’re not encouraged to rest unless maybe it’ll make us more productive tomorrow.

As we’ve been talking about today and all of last year, Sabbath isn’t about making us more productive. It’s about freedom, gratitude, and remembering Whose we are.

But it’s hard to live that out in a culture that doesn’t value rest and where we’re bound to systems that value people based on their productivity and not their inherent worthiness as human beings made in the image of God.

Our culture values some bodies and tries to ignore and even erase others. People who aren’t white, straight, cisgender male, able-bodied, middle-class and above, neurotypical, documented, slim, and young are marginalized, written off, given lower paid jobs, considered drains on the system,maligned with various unflattering stereotypes, and even criminalized.

It's hard to practice the spirit of Sabbath when you have to work three jobs, take night classes, and take care of your kids as a single parent. Or when because of a disability, the system makes you choose between getting paid to do the meaningful work you feel called to and receiving the benefits that make it at all possible to pay for the treatment, equipment, and assistance that keeps you alive in a society that’s not built with you in mind.

There’s a lot of work needed to make our society and world more just for everyone. And it’s tough to discern how and when to rest, remembering our freedom and belovedness in God.

It’s hard to rest when there’s so much injustice in the world, and it’s also hard to keep going and not give up under the weight of everything wrong in the world.

And yet, God knows what in this world doesn’t align with the Beloved Community and still calls us to rest. God calls us to both rest and liberation. We can’t completely have one without the other.

But God also never calls us to do it alone. Even the big names like Moses didn’t do it alone. We sometimes forget, but Moses’ siblings, Aaron and Miriam, had big parts in the exodus too. Later on, God told Moses he was doing too much trying to be the judge in every matter the Israelites brought to him, so God gave him other leaders to help.

I know a lot of you have participated in choirs and other musical groups. Choral singers and wind instrumentalists have to stop producing sound when they breathe. So, in big groups like choirs, they do what’s called “stagger breathing.” They take turns breathing, so that the sound is maintained by those who aren’t breathing at that second. No one of us can sustain our work constantly by ourselves, but together, we can keep the liberating work going, even as we each participate in liberating rest.

And God works, too, when we rest. The breath of God’s ever-sustaining Holy Spirit moves through us and our world constantly, comforting the suffering and inciting good kingdom-building trouble, bringing about freedom and shalom for all.

The spirit of Sabbath is liberation. We observe the spirit of Sabbath by incorporating rest into our justice work and justice work into our rest. We do both together and with God’s help.

A lot of work needs to happen to make sure that every single human being is treated like the image of God they are, but instead of saying, “we won’t rest until that’s a reality,” we will rest as part of making that a reality.

Rest well, beloved. Continue to live into your divine calling to do justice and to love mercy. The God who created the world and called it good created and loves you and every one of your neighbors.

Live out the spirit of Sabbath by continuing to discern together the rhythms of rest and justice work that set the world free.