Palace of Time - a Place of Healing

I know - it's been almost a year. I said there would be a next time, it just took a lot longer than I thought. I'm not going to explain my absence other than to say I needed the rest. But now I'm back. Matthew's story still calls to me and I can no longer ignore it. So let's just pick up where we left off, shall we?
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In our last episode, I talked about the Sabbath being a Palace of Time, a place where we could escape the hustle of the daily agenda and find time to spend with God exploring who He is and who we are in Him. But the Sabbath is not just about getting some rest. There's more to it than that.

He went on from there and entered their synagogue. And a man was there with a withered hand. And they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”—so that they might accuse him. He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other. But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.

(Matthew 12:9-14 ESV)

Now, the Pharisees actually have a point to make here. You see the prevailing wisdom of the day was that while it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath, it was only in the case of life-threatening situations. They acknowledged that allowing a living thing to die by inaction was no way to honour God on His Sabbath; but the man with the withered hand was in no danger. His healing could wait a day and the sanctity of the Sabbath would be maintained. In some respects it was a reasonable argument.

But Jesus doesn't see the argument as reasonable at all, because to Jesus suffering is suffering and needs to be relieved. He points out the flaw in the Pharisees reasoning, because even they themselves would rescue an animal on the Sabbath, "of how much more value is a man than a sheep?"

Jesus, as Lord of the Sabbath, makes it clear that to end suffering, to help the helpless, to do good, is lawful at anytime, even on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is not just a Palace of Time, it is also a Time of Healing. An opportunity to relieve the stress that withers our spirits during the week and allow ourselves to reach out to God and be restored. It also calls us to reach out and be a source of healing as we gather with those we care for and let them find restoration in a time of fellowship.

It is, as Jesus made clear, a time to do good. The most acceptable form of work on the sabbath was the ministrations of the priests in the temple as they offered the showbread in recognition of God's provision. (Jesus makes reference to this in the previous section.) In like manner I believe the sabbath is a time for us, and as citizens of a priestly kingdom, to offer ourselves to the benefit of others; to use the time to participate in the healing of the community provided by the fellowship we experience in the Palace of Time.

But the episode doesn't end there.

Jesus, aware of this, withdrew from there. And many followed him, and he healed them all and ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah:

“Behold, my servant whom I have chosen,
my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased.
I will put my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
He will not quarrel or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory;
and in his name the Gentiles will hope.”

(Matthew 12:15-21 ESV)

Jesus withdraws to another place. Some would look upon this as a retreat, but rather I think He is looking to avoid letting the confrontation escalate until the time is right. He withdraws because the Gospel of the kingdom is not about confrontation, it is not about winning a theological Battle Royale. Rather it is about hope.

And who is the hope for? Oddly enough it is for us, the Gentiles. Those who until this point in history have been excluded from the Gospel Kingdom. I mentioned at the beginning of the process that I felt Matthew was writing not to a Jewish audience exclusively as others have suggested, but rather to a mixed audience. A church of Jewish believers and Gentile converts likely struggling to get along. It is passages such as this one that re-enforce my feelings on this.

The Jewish believers needed to understand why they were worshiping God in fellowship with Gentiles. They needed to understand, and still do, that it was God's plan from the beginning to heal the rift that started in the days of Abraham.

And the Gentile converts among them, these new Christians, they needed hope. They needed to know that God had never abandoned them. They needed to know, as do we, that the gift of salvation, that citizenry in the Gospel kingdom is not about race, or nationality, or how well you can slice and dice the scriptures until they resemble the Word no more than french fries resemble a potato. No... it is about faith, and faith alone.

Faith in the one who gave the Sabbath to mankind that in it we might find refreshment and renewal. A moment in which we might find a fresh start, an opportunity to put the past behind us and begin a new week, revived by fellowship with God and with each other.

Until next time... Shalom.

A Palace of Time

It is sometimes a remarkable thing the way God points me in a particular direction in my life. The other night I was at my friend Gord's place, with a number of other people and we found ourselves having a very meaningful conversation about how we need to 'experience the moment' more. The next day I sat down to consider the following passage of Matthew's gospel in preparation for this article and was a little taken aback because, in a manner of speaking, the passage is about the same thing.

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. And His disciples were hungry, and began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!” But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” Matthew 12:1-8 NKJV

When someone mentions the Sabbath, what comes to mind? A day of prayer? A day for church? Synagogue? It is certain that these things have their place in our Sabbath observance, but to truly appreciate the depth of the relationship between Jesus and the Sabbath we need to understand that above all else, the Sabbath is - a gift!

Think about it for a moment. The first thing that God chose to declare as sacred forever, was not a piece of land for people to make pilgrimage to, not a building where one would seek His presence, or even an artifact, some carving or golden idol that would be the object of our worship. No, the first thing that God chose to make scared forever was a day (Ex. 20:8-11), a period of time, a collection of moments set aside for the purpose of being with His people. The most sacred thing to God, after ensuring we knew who He was, is to spend time with us.

The Sabbath is a gift - a gift of time. In a world that, even in Jesus' day, called upon the individual to spend every waking moment struggling to survive, God seeks foremost to ensure that we are rested. In the world of the Bible the only ones who reclined at dinner were the masters, the oppressors, the idle rich, most of whom had achieved their wealth and power on the backs of others. To His people God offers a taste of equality with the upper classes; what Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel calls, "a Palace of Time," a place where the servant and the slave, the fisherman and the carpenter, the handmaid and the midwife, come to recline at table with their Creator.

In a life of hardship and stress God gives his people the greatest gift of all - time! It was a completely foreign concept for the culture of that day. No one outside of the Jewish community could fathom it at all. Consider the words of Roman historian and orator Tacitus on the subject...

"In order to secure the allegiance of his people in the future, Moses prescribed for them a novel religion quite different from those of the rest of mankind. Among the Jews all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral. ... We are told that the seventh day was set aside for rest because this marked the end of their toils. In course of time the seductions of idleness made them devote every seventh year to indolence as well."

In fact most cultures considered the Jews lazy, shiftless, and undisciplined because of their habit of taking a "holiday" every seven days. It was one more thing that contributed to the general public's distrust of all things Jewish.

Of course, as usual, the Pharisees and the priests had turned it into another way to burden the backs of the people with layers and layers of legalism. In the strictest terms they were right to challenge the actions of Jesus' disciples. Picking the heads of wheat could be interpreted as work. Since there was good reason for the Sabbath laws, they had to be observed. The problem was the Pharisees had forgotten the reason.

The laws of the Sabbath were designed to slow down God's people enough so that they could enjoy God's gift. Even in the first century, life often was racing around at such a pace that people didn't see what was right in front of them. Picture it this way...

Imagine that the moments in your life are like the telephone poles at the side of the road. If you're driving down that road at 60 miles an hour then the poles are going by at about one per second. Not much time to notice either the poles themselves or the spaces between them. But if you are going from pole to pole, from moment to moment, at the pace of a Sabbath walk, then you get to enjoy it all. You can see the flowers God has planted along the road between the poles. You can hear the singing birds which God has housed in the trees - trees that need to be pruned to make room for the wires to pass from pole to pole. And yes, you can even see the pop cans and McDonald's containers that litter the way, making note to come back the next day when work resumes and clean up the highway of your life just a little bit.

The laws of the Sabbath were not designed to restrict us, as some Pharisees might think. They were designed to grant us access to the Palace of Time, where matters of the soul, the heart and the mind can be examined without the tyranny of the agenda to distract us. It's hard to love God with all your soul when your soul is so badly in need of rest.

Jesus came to take us back to that palace, to reunite us with the gift that God chose to give us first above all others - the gift of time with Himself. A time for us, as my friend Gord would say, "to carry eternity in our hearts... to dialogue freely with an inner expanding universe... and to catch the truth in a net."

How He did that we'll talk about next time.

Shalom.

P.S. The pic below is of an artwork that Gord created some time ago. It depicts the poem he wrote that the above quote comes from. I hope you don't mind Gord, it's too good not to share. (click to see larger version)