In
1836 a bill came before the English parliament aimed at enforcing strict blue
laws on Sundays. Novelist Charles Dickens, under the pseudonym Timothy Sparks,
fired off a little pamphlet opposing the legislation. In the opening lines of
"Sunday Under Three Heads" he carps that:
Menial servants, both male
and female, are specially exempted from the operation of the bill. 'Menial
servants' are among the poor people. The bill has no regard for them. The
Baronet's dinner must be cooked on Sunday, the Bishop's horses must be groomed,
and the Peer's carriage must be driven.
The law, Dickens sneers, requires
leisure on Sunday for those already at leisure and sanctions labor on Sunday
for those who have labored all week.
Jesus has something of the same beef
with the application of the Sabbath laws in his own day: They free the healthy
to remain healthy and the sick to remain sick and, as a bonus, free the healthy
from doing anything to heal the sick. A rich man can order his servant to untie
his ox but God cannot order His Son to untie His daughter. Jesus argues that
God's Sabbath frees the strong to heal and the weak to praise.
Jesus
attempts two miracles here: to untwist a woman's spine and to untwist a ruler's
mind. Only the first one really comes off. To be fair, the woman's backbone had
only been corkscrewed for eighteen years; early training had doglegged the
official's thinking from childhood.
The counter-argument about coming on
a different day falls pretty flat: This woman had gone 0-for-6 through eighteen
years of Sundays-through-Fridays. The synagogue held no healing until the
synagogue held Jesus. That may have been what really bugged this official: He'd
rather Jesus not heal on the Sabbath day because he knew that he himself could
not heal on any day. Dallas Willard insists that one dimension of The Kingdom
Among Us is "power to work the works of the kingdom," and that
"the world we live in desperately needs such works to be done."
Perhaps if we follow Jesus so
assiduously that a word spoken in His name will undo decades of demonic damage,
we will no longer need laws that prevent soccer leagues from scheduling games
on Sundays. Perhaps if we view worship as freedom of the strong to serve the
weak, people will come without compulsion.
Fast
and Loose,
Doug
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