A woman is bent over. Maybe from osteoporosis? Maybe from an injury, stress or working too hard? It invariably happens to us all, especially as we get older. For those of us who’ve experienced this, don’t you love Jesus’s words about her, his language of being set free from bondage on the Sabbath: “Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” But the fact that this healing takes place on the Sabbath day, really irritates some of the Jewish leaders who witness it. This was not the first or only time that the Lord Jesus had engaged in a debate on this subject, in fact it happens six times, with five centering on healing.
In a way, I get their anger, after all we are talking about the Fourth Commandment. In Exodus we read: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” Consider too that there was no real need for Jesus to perform these healings on the Sabbath. None of the people Jesus healed on the Sabbath were dying, or had an urgent medical condition. Jesus was teaching through his actions that the Sabbath is a day of liberation, a day where people return to the joy of the world the way God created it.
For Jesus, the Sabbath was a day to do good, show mercy, save life, and set people free from bondage. These acts, appropriate for the Sabbath, spoke of God’s nature: a merciful God, the God who heals, the God who delivers people from evil. Acts that glorify God can never be a breach of the Sabbath. In Mark 2:27, Jesus says, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.” The Sabbath is to be a gift to us, not something to which we slavishly try to conform.
Jesus’s healings on the Sabbath reveal profound truths about our God who created and sustains us, who showers us with mercy, heals us, and delivers us from evil. It points out how important Sabbath days (even Sabbath moments) are—days of healing (though not always in the physical sense). Personally, I need them and try to take one every week—usually Fridays. It almost always involves time away, usually alone with my thoughts.
The Hebrew Scriptures are clear about the importance of the Sabbath day, and by Jesus’s time, Sabbath rules had been codified into thirty-nine actions that the Jewish people were not supposed to do. This came from good intentions, but Jesus broke up the rigidity of the rules. Jesus did not dispute the significance of the Sabbath. His conflicts about the Sabbath with the Jewish religious leaders of his time were confined to what is appropriate behavior on the Sabbath or, to look at the bigger issue, the question of what the Sabbath reflects about God to the people who observe it.