The Lutheran Hour
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"How Christians Can Admire the Jewish Sabbath"
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Text: Luke 6:1-11
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One of the most compelling turning points in the story of the Fiddler on the Roof is the Sabbath prayer. If you’ve never seen the movie or the play, or it’s been a while, search “Fiddler on the Roof Sabbath Prayer” on the internet, and watch the video clip. At the beginning of the story, if you remember, the little village, Anatevka, is all in a stir. Not too different than you and me like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a tune without breaking our necks. We scramble for a living to raise a family, make a home, go to school, learn a trade, and try to find a good match. But it’s Friday afternoon in Anatevka, and the Sabbath is coming. The Sabbath is all most here. And when the Sabbath comes, when the sun sets, the mothers and fathers sing the Lord’s blessing over their children and their guests. Every member of the community is invited to rest. From the moment Golde lights the Sabbath candles until the first star appears in the sky 24 hours later, the Sabbath is a picture of peace with God and with each other.
Every time I see that scene in the movie or in a stage production of Fiddler on the Roof, I find myself admiring that practice. And I think, wouldn’t it be good if more Christians admired the Jewish practice of Sabbath-keeping? Now I’m not saying that Christians should keep the Sabbath like Jewish people kept and keep the Sabbath. I can’t say that, because Christians follow Jesus and the New Testament of the Bible and in the New Testament of the Bible, in the letter to the Colossians 2:16 it says, “Let no one pass judgment on you with regard to a Sabbath.” Why, because as verse 17 continues, these things, that is, the ritual laws of the Old Testament, including the Sabbath and other Jewish festivals, eating kosher foods, and circumcision, all of these things, the New Testament says are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
It’s like this: say a husband is sent away for his job and is temporarily separated from his wife. His wife keeps a picture of her husband, a picture that he gave her. She keeps it close to her while they are separated. But then one day the separation is ended and they’re reunited. So, what happens to the picture? The picture is surpassed by the experience of the two of them standing in each other’s presence. It’s like that for the followers of Jesus. This experience of being in the presence of Jesus Christ, the Jewish Messiah, the experience of being known by Him and loved by Him, trusting in Him, following Him, being part of His church, His body, His bride, that experience surpasses and fulfills these Old Testament rituals—like how the presence of a person surpasses a photograph of them.
But if you love that person, you can still admire the image of them, right? Likewise, Christians can admire the Jewish practice of Sabbath-keeping, this practice of focusing on God, by refraining from work for a whole day. Now imagine what that would be like, not doing any work at all for 24 hours straight. Is that admirable or impractical? What would it be like to not work for a whole day?
I was talking to a friend about his visit to Israel. He said that when they were there on a Sabbath day, he saw how the whole community worked together to make refraining from work more practical. For example, all the doors of the hotel had been propped open so that you wouldn’t have to work by turning a handle. And everyone in the hotel was offered a candle, so you wouldn’t have to work by turning on one of the lights. And there was a special Sabbath elevator that automatically stopped at every floor, so you wouldn’t have to work by pushing a button. And someone said, that feels like a lot of work to keep me from doing work. It is a lot of work. There was a special interest group in ancient Israel called the Pharisees, and they had worked up a list of 39 categories of activities prohibited on the Sabbath. The list of unlawful Sabbath actions included gathering and preparing crops for food, carrying items from your home into a public place and vice versa, giving or receiving medical care for chronic non-life-threatening ailments. Using tools was also prohibited. And though they didn’t discuss whether an elevator is a tool, the ancient writings of the Pharisees are filled with debates about the myriad of possible exceptions, such as if you can’t use a fingernail clipper on the Sabbath, but you trim your nails by biting them, does that still count as work? Or if you carried something from your house out into a public place, not with your hand but by sticking it in your belt, is that considered work? The Pharisees had been working on sorting out these exceptions for 200 years before Jesus was even born. Trying to figure out how exactly to refrain from work for 24 hours is a lot of work.
So, speaking for Christians now, is Sabbath keeping something we should admire? Now, the ancient Pharisees also spoke about the essence of the Sabbath. That is, what the Sabbath is really about, God’s commandment to rest on the seventh day, to refrain from work, to remember who God is and what He’s done for us. One Jewish sage in the medieval age said it like this: that God’s people look forward to the Sabbath like one who looks forward to meeting a person he loves. Go and watch that Sabbath prayer scene from Fiddler on the Roof and you will catch a glimpse of the essence of the Sabbath. People gather in their homes for a meal, dressed and ready as though God Himself were coming to stay with them. That’s the essence of the Sabbath. Think about how you might prepare your home for a distant loved one who was coming to visit you for a day. You’re making the final preparations, but then the doorbell rings and everything stops. Your attention turns towards your guest. That’s the essence of the Sabbath. And it’s something Christians can admire.
But didn’t Sabbath-keeping lead to self-righteousness—the belief that I’m better than others because I follow the rules? Sabbath-keeping did lead to self-righteousness for some, including some of the Pharisees. It was like they had taken that picture of God and had put it in a box to protect it with their 39 categories of unlawful activities on the Sabbath, and then they paraded that box around to show how they were better than other people. But having that picture didn’t make them better. The Jews weren’t special because they had this picture of God in their law. God had imprinted that image of Himself on every human heart. That’s what the Bible means when it says that all people are created in the image of God. It means that we all have the work of the law written on our hearts. It means that we were all created to love God and to reflect his love into the world by welcoming others into our lives, as we would welcome God Himself.
But now, having this picture of God written on our hearts doesn’t make us better. It exposes how we’ve separated ourselves from God’s image—that we would rather serve ourselves than welcome others. When God chose the Jewish people, He knew that they were just like the rest of us. What made the Jewish people different was this: on the back of their picture, so to speak, there was a handwritten note from God promising to end the separation, to restore His lost image in all of us. That note that promise is written, it’s codified in the Jewish ceremonial law, which includes the Sabbath. It was the promise that God Himself would come and end the separation once and for all. But the Pharisees were so busy parading around their box, they didn’t even recognize the promise when He was standing right in front of them.
Here’s an example of one of Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees as it’s recorded by one of Jesus’s ancient biographers, a man named Luke. Luke tells us in the sixth chapter of his book that it happened once on the Sabbath, Jesus was walking through the grain fields and His disciples began to pluck heads of grain, rub them in their hands, and eat the kernels. And some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” Answering, Jesus said to them, “Have you never read what David did? What he did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him? How he went into the house of God and took and ate the Bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except for the priest. And he gave it to those who were with him.” And Jesus said to them, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
Then it happened on another Sabbath when Jesus was in the synagogue, and He was teaching. There was a man in the synagogue whose right hand was withered. And the scribes and the Pharisees were watching Jesus carefully to see whether He would heal on the Sabbath so that they might have a reason to accuse Him. But Jesus knew their thoughts, and He said to the man with the withered hand, rise up and stand here in the middle. And he got up and stood there. And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” And He looked around at all of them. And He said to him, “Stretch out your hand.” And he did so, and it was restored. But they were filled with rage and they began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus.
Luke goes on to tell us how Jesus continued to enrage the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders. He enraged them because He was claiming to be their King. He was claiming to be the promised descendant of David, who would rule Israel and the world forever. Jesus said that He was the Lord of the Sabbath, that He—the Son of Man—was from eternity the Son of God, the perfect living picture of God, the image of God. But this was too much, so they thought, for a nobody from Nazareth to claim about Himself, and eventually Jesus was crucified because of it. And then, God raised Him from the dead and proved that Jesus is who He says He is. Jesus is alive and I’m speaking to you in His Name. He’s the fulfillment of the Sabbath for Jews and for Gentiles alike. He’s the turning point in our story. He is God’s image who’s come to restore that lost image in us, to end the separation once and for all.
Living separated in a long-distance relationship is difficult. For three years before my wife, Amy, and I were married, we were in a long-distance relationship. We were each attending colleges in different states. And at my college, in my dorm room, on the cork board above my desk, there were pictures of her displayed. And some of them had little handwritten notes on the back. Recently, I found some of those old pictures in a box in our basement. And when I found them, I stayed there for a while and admired them. But what really honors and delights the person who gave me those photos is when I go upstairs and find her and stay, not just with her picture, but in her presence.
Where do you find Jesus? He’s here with us now. You’ll find Him wherever His Word in the Bible is shared and spoken. You’ll find Him wherever people are baptized, restored in His image. You’ll find Him whenever the baptized are gathered around the bread and the wine of Communion, with the promise of His presence. And to find Him in others, to meet Him in solitude, you’ll have to set aside some of your work. So, you and I can admire Sabbath-keeping practices, even adopting and adapting some of them. But your rest isn’t confined to a single day; it’s fulfilled in a relationship with a Person, the Person who loves you so much that He set aside everything so that He could come and stay with you. And one day Jesus will return to restore God’s image in all who seek His face. And on that day, like when the families of Anatevka stopped everything to welcome the Sabbath into their lives, so we will welcome the Lord of the Sabbath into ours.
Please pray with me. Come, Lord Jesus, come and stay with me. Amen.
Reflections for February 6, 2022
Title: How Christians Can Admire the Jewish Sabbath
Mark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. Coming up next, Dr. Jeff Kloha joins us from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. For FREE online resources, archived audio, our mobile app, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. And now back to our Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Michael Zeigler: Thank you, Mark. I’m speaking again with Dr. Jeff Kloha. Dr. Kloha is part of the leadership team of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The museum’s mission is to invite all people to engage with the Bible, which is the most translated, bestselling, and arguably most influential book in human history. Thanks for speaking with us today, Jeff.
Jeff Kloha: Great to join you again. Thank you.
Michael Zeigler: All right. We’ve been discussing the Gospel according to Luke. And the last time we talked, we mentioned a little bit about this gathering of these documents that told the account of Jesus of Nazareth, these four “Gospels” as they’re called, and how they were gathered together. And then obviously, they began to be gathered with other writings such as the letters of Paul, and we began to have what we call now the New Testament. Could you just summarize in a simple way that process of what normally we call the “canon”? How did that happen of the New Testament?
Jeff Kloha: Right. Yeah. The simple way is this message was heard and received, and these writings that testified to that message continue to be copied and used, and then eventually gathered together by the middle of the second century as far as we can tell, perhaps a little bit earlier. And that formed the foundation of the New Testament that we still use today. And looking back, you can see why they picked these writings. Although, again, they never voted on them. There’s no record of this. But some things are pretty key in retrospect. Well, first, the authors either were eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry or had access to eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry. So somebody who saw and heard Jesus Himself was a key characteristic of these four writings, and certainly one of the reasons that they were preserved because they had that firsthand account.
A second criterion looking back that seems to have been important was relatedly connected to an apostle. So someone who was one of Jesus’ followers from the beginning, right from the very call at the Sea of Galilee, all the way through the resurrection and ascension. So somebody either who was a disciple or a follower of a disciple in the case of Mark and Luke was also important.
And then third and really most important is the message itself. That’s really the key point because if you got the right people and they’re talking about the same Person, they’re going to have the same message, and this message about Jesus Christ and His life, His teachings, His death, resurrection—those are really the three, looking back again in retrospect, that seems to be the things that cause these writings to be preserved and collected together, and which we still rely on today.
Michael Zeigler: And that makes a lot of sense in what you were saying last time that this all starts with an event. That Jesus has risen from the dead, and if He weren’t risen from the dead, we would never know the name Jesus. He would’ve been lost into the piles of history. But He rose from the dead, and then His followers began spreading this message. And as you said, the Roman Empire wasn’t a literate culture; it was primarily a spoken-word culture. So they’re just telling it word of mouth for a generation. And then as those apostles are dying out, they realize, “We got to get this stuff written down.” They write it down. But they’ve already been using and telling the story, so it’s nothing new. And it’s not until a couple hundred years later that there’s rival accounts out there that now we got to say, “Now, this is what we’ve always been saying. This is what the apostles have always taught in all times in all places.”
Jeff Kloha: Right, exactly. And even the Gospel of Luke itself, Luke tells us that he’s writing for a man named Theophilus who has already heard the Gospel. It’s not like Luke is telling him for the first time. He says, “I’m writing this down so that you may have certainty concerning the things which you were taught.” So the teaching about Jesus is going on from the very beginning, and Luke and Mark and Matthew, they’re writing these down so that they can be spread more widely, that they can get out to more people. They’re really, in a sense, missionary writings so that the Gospel message can be passed down generation to generation beyond just the individual speakers.
Michael Zeigler: You mentioned last time about how Luke was probably received at first through the ears, that you had somebody read the whole thing, not just a section of it, but from start to finish for three hours. Was that common? Was that normally how these documents were used by the early church?
Jeff Kloha: Yeah, very much so. Gospel of Mark, as you know, because you’ve performed it yourself is shorter, so it takes about two hours. Again, they didn’t have newspapers. For Pete’s sake, we don’t have newspapers anymore either. Now it’s all internet. But your access to information happened only through the spoken word. So somebody would come to town, they’d get to the market, and they would announce whatever the news was. Right? They would do a monologue. They would come and do some teaching. You would go to the marketplace and you would hear stuff. Right? And this is what you see the apostles doing in the book of Acts. Paul goes to the Areopagus and he starts telling this story, and people respond. So that’s how this message would’ve gone out. That’s how the vast majority of people would’ve received the written Gospels. They would’ve received it first by hearing about it.
Michael Zeigler: And we have testimony from sources outside of the Bible about Christians doing this kind of thing, right? They’re getting together on the first day of the week. They’re reading these accounts of Jesus. Am I right about that?
Jeff Kloha: Some of the earliest accounts or records of Christians are not the Bible itself but actually people who are persecuting the church or reporting about persecutions. So the one you’re referencing quite famously is a letter by Pliny the Younger who’s a governor in what is today Asia Minor, and he’s writing to the emperor about what to do about these “Christians,” so so-called “Christians.” And the problem was that the Roman government did not like people gathering together just because that’s what empires do. They don’t like people gathering together unless they’re under their control. And Christians insisted on gathering together because that’s what Jesus told them to do, right? So they kept doing it. So he’s like, “Well, what do we do? They keep gathering. They won’t sacrifice to the emperor,” which was required, you had to do that. It’s kind of a ritual; you just had to do as part of your citizenship. “So what do we do about these obstinate people?”
And then he says, “Let me tell you a little bit about them.” He said, “They gather together early in the morning, a certain day of the week, and they do so before dawn because they have to go to work later in the day.” And he says, “They gather together” —this is a key phrase—”they sing hymns to a Christ as if to a God.” So he doesn’t think that Christ is God, but he is acknowledging that these Christians are singing hymns to Christ as a God. And he says they have a meal together and they swear oaths together like that they’re not going to steal and they’re not going to … what is it? I know steal is in there. They’re not going to murder, various oaths. So obviously, they’re teaching the Ten Commandments.
So it’s an in-passing description, but many of the elements that we still do today as church are all there. We sing hymns to Christ as to a God, read the Bible together, teach it, the gathering together, sharing a meal together. Right? It’s all part of what Christians have been doing for century after century and, ironically, the first evidence of that is reported by political people who have to persecute the church because they’re doing things that Roman emperors don’t like.
Paul is writing in the ’50s of the first century. He’s calling Jesus God. Philippians 2: you can’t get any clearer than that. Romans 1: you can’t get any clearer than that. And he doesn’t have to make the case. He doesn’t have to argue for it. He just assumes it. He just describes it. So even the apostle Paul in the ’50s is not inventing the divinity of Jesus or that Jesus is a God. He’s simply repeating what’s been the teaching for the last 20 years. Right? So this argument that the divinity of Jesus comes up much later or that they had to vote on it or something, even the very writings of the apostle Paul themselves that are undeniably first century make that case quite clearly.
Now, how exactly you can describe somebody who’s both God and human at the same time? Now, that’s pretty complicated, and that they did continue to argue and debate about. But the question was not, “Is Jesus divine?” The question was, “How does His humanity and His divinity relate together?” Right? So that did take a while to sort out. And even still today, how do we understand this great mystery? It’s still a mystery that we strive to teach clearly. But that Jesus was God, that He was human, that was not in question, at all.
Michael Zeigler: And as we said at the beginning, this doesn’t start in philosophical speculation. It starts in the impact of the historical Jesus on these Jewish people who followed Him around, saw Him raise the dead, forgive sins, calm the storms, and then Himself rise from the dead. That’s where it starts. And we’re still trying to figure out how to say it, but we know that that happened.
Jeff Kloha: Yeah. I mean, He said in Matthew 28, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to Me.” Right? So that’s a pretty bold claim and no human being can make that claim, and He backed it up. Right? And we’ve been trying to figure out what that means for the last 2,000 years as we wait for His return, but that claim’s there from the very beginning.
Michael Zeigler: Well, thank you again for being with us.
Jeff Kloha: Yeah, thank you.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“Hail to the Lord’s Anointed” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House)