The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. Sabbath is a gift God has given us for our good. We are feeble creatures who need rest, yet foolish creatures who would otherwise work ourselves to the bone. The sabbath is a reminder of our weakness, of our finiteness, of our inability. It is a reminder of all of these in a physical sense and, more ultimately, in a spiritual sense, for so much of what is true of our bodies is true of our souls. We accept sabbath as a blessing from God and ignore or reject it to our own peril.
Yet even as we accept sabbath, we are prone to profane it, which is exactly what the religious authorities of Jesus’s day had done. They had taken the simple gift of a day of rest and surrounded it by complicated laws. Terrified of breaking the one big commandment, they had hedged it in with a whole list of small rules and regulations—only walk so far, only carry so heavy a burden, only do these kinds of activities. Soon the day of joy had become a day of fear, the day of freedom had become a day of captivity. Instead of anticipating the sabbath people dreaded it, for they had become enslaved to it. In this context Jesus reminded them: You weren’t made for the sabbath, the sabbath was made for you! And in doing so he warns us that even the best of God’s gifts can be coopted and perverted by the legalistic hearts of fallen men.
I have often wondered if we need to hear a related admonition today: The local church was made to serve the Christian, not the Christian the local church. I think this is true in the sense Jesus’s phrase is true—not as an absolute statement but as a phrase that is meant to catch our attention and provoke some self-examination.
Around mid-March churches began to shut down. While most quickly moved their services online, the rest of their programs went into hiatus. Sunday evenings and Sunday schools, book studies and Bible studies, men’s meetings and prayer meetings, children’s programs and youth programs—it all just suddenly came to a screeching halt. And it was my observation that many people breathed a quiet and perhaps sheepish sigh of relief. It was my observation that many people did not realize just how many commitments they had to the church—and perhaps more seriously, how many commitments they felt to the church—until they were all taken away. Some Christians were doing too much and it took a pandemic to make them realize the strain they were feeling; some Christians were doing just the right amount, but were still laden with guilt that they were not doing more.