Te Pouhere and the Sabbath
Was Sabbath made for humanity, of humanity for Sabbath? It is the question at the heart of our gospel reading (Mark 2:23 – 3:6) It is still one of the big questions we wrestle with as a church and as followers of The Way. How do we understand Jesus answer? Often we read this as a new way of reading Torah. And at our less humble moments, this shows how we are right and Jews are wrong. But what if Jesus approach was not new? This week on Working Preacher [1] both Matt Skinner and Karoline Lewis have suggested that Jesus was tapping into an old rabbinic tradition that understood this commandment as either the an invitation to the Hebrew people to rest with God before they joined in the ongoing work of creation (Exodus 20) or was an offer of one day to a people who had been enslaved, working every day in gruelling conditions (Deuteronomy 20). It was God’s guarantee they would never go back to those days. It was an invitation for them to work with God to ensure no-one else suffered
