Shabbat Shalom! Lent 4A

Shabbat Shalom

“As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.” [John 9:1-41] Thus begins a drama in seven scenes: After healing the man Jesus talks with the disciples; the neighbors talk to the man; the Pharisees talk with the man; the Judeans talk with the man’s parents; the Pharisees talk with the man again; Jesus talks with the man; Jesus talks with the Pharisees.

 

Jesus says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” The man does, and he sees for the first time. The neighbors cannot believe it. They take the man to the Pharisees, those who devoted their lives to understand what God expects from us. Then the narrator let us know what is really at stake: “Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.”

 

Sabbath. Shabbat. Sabbath is the gift of time God offers to humankind. It’s the third of the Ten Commandments. The idea is simple: Six days God created the world and appointed us as stewards of creation, and on the Seventh Day, God rested. We are given six days to work in the realm of space, working with things, acquiring things. To enhance our power in the realm of space and things appears to be our main objective. Yet, to have more does not mean to be more. As Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us in his volume, The Sabbath: It’s Meaning for Modern Man, “The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of Time. But time is the heart of existence. To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gathering power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time.

 

“[Sabbath] is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern… Many hearts and pitchers are broken at the fountain of profit. Selling himself into slavery to things, man becomes a utensil that is broken at the fountain.” It is this brokenness that leads to so much sin in the world; in our lives. The Sabbath Day, a day off, is not a religious observance, though it is at the heart of how live a religious life. It is not a day to go to synagogue or church in its inception. Shabbat is a day that is prescribed to break the tedium of our self-imposed slavery to doing and having and taking and controlling; to offer a time, a day, to let the brokenness of our lives be healed and to simply “be.” Over time, Shabbat and the preparations to take a full day-off has been likened to preparing to welcome a Queen, The Queen of Days, the Queen of Time, into our home, and thereby into our lives. It is a time to simply be and to be restored; a time to reboot; a time to remember that it is only by the grace of God that we are here at all!

 

As we reflect on the story of the man born blind coming to see, we must resist the urge to see the Pharisees as the “bad guys” for wanting to preserve the holiness of the Queen of all days, Shabbat. Indeed, it is altogether right for them to question why Jesus could not wait 24 hours for the next day, the first day of the week, to do his work of healing. Shabbat is meant to remind us that God does not intend for us to continue to slog from day to day, often working without purpose, until finally you reach the borderline of time and die pointlessly. Sabbath is meant to be a foretaste of the feast to come, and a reminder of having once been liberated from slavery: slaves in Pharaoh’s Egypt, in the Empire, get no day off. The Pharisees are correct to argue that to “work” on Shabbat is a serious matter!

 

Which points to a fundamental dimension of life in the realm of God’s mercy: Argument itself is a gift from God that allows faithful people to work out proper courses of action. Argument is a sign that the faithful community is living faithfully. If they did not care about faithfulness, they would not argue…It is the Jewish ritual of thinking hard together, chewing on those things that are important, as a sign that the whole community cares about integrity. Such wrestling and arguing has resulted in  exceptions made to allow certain “work” on the Sabbath. (Swanson, Richard, Provoking the Gospel of John)

 

The standard Sabbath greeting is, “Shabbat Shalom.” And just what is Shalom? The central vision of world history in the Bible is that all of creation is one, every creature in community with every other, living in harmony and security toward the joy and well-being of every other creature, including creation its self. The vision is that all persons are children of a single family, a single tribe, heirs of a single hope, and bearers of a single destiny, namely the care and management of all God’s creation, everyone and everything therein. This persistent vision of joy, harmony, well-being, and prosperity is difficult to capture in a single word or idea, but Shalom is that word that bears a tremendous freight – the freight of a dream of God that resists all our tendencies to division, hostility, fear, drivenness, and misery. Shalom, therefore, connotes persistent themes of justice and peace for all persons, and the respect for the dignity of every human being. (Brueggemann, Walter, Living Toward a Vision: Biblical reflections on Shalom)

 

As the story of the Man Born Blind wends its way through one scene and argument after another, two things emerge: First, the Man whose life had been reduced to begging near the town gates has been truly liberated. Not only can he see, he can now participate as an equal in the disputations of the Pharisees as to the nature and will of God. When ordered by the Religious Authorities to give the Glory to God for his new-found ability to see, AND to declare Jesus as a sinner for having healed him on the Sabbath, he speaks with authority as he says, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” His declaration is the very genesis of the hymn Amazing Grace, written in 1779 by a man who commanded a slave ship in the eighteenth-century, saw the sinfulness of his participation in a system of injustice, and left the slave trade to become an Anglican priest, confessing, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” As a mentor to William Wilberforce, Hannah Moore, and other abolitionists, Fr. John Newton helped to bring about the end of the slave-trade in England in 1807!

 

Secondly, what the Man Born Blind ultimately comes to see is who Jesus is as he confesses: “Lord, I believe” that you are the Son of Man. It is unclear whether or not the neighbors, the man’s parents, the Pharisees, or we have come to see who Jesus is, or whether or not it is the will of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Exodus and the Passover, to heal those in need on the Sabbath. It is fair, however, to suggest that as time rolled on, the greeting, “Shabbat Shalom,” has come to embody the notion that healing of others, the healing between nations and tribes, the healing of God’s Green Earth, is always more than just “all right” on the Sabbath, and is to be the very heart of every single day of the week. For there are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of Sabbath, for observance of Shabbat allows us time to know God and be known by God, and to know the many ways in which we can love our neighbors. Aeons hence, when many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry of the Queen of all days will continue to shine! Sabbath Time is God’s gift to those of us who live in the world of space. And for this we give thanks! Shabbat Shalom!