News

The people of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, or, more accurately, more than 1,300 out of a population of about 20,000, have signed a petition, as you may have heard.  The petition is to oppose Tesco’s proposal to start opening their Stornoway store on Sundays.  The opposition is born, no doubt, of a long tradition of Sunday observance, rooted in Old Testament requirements for the Sabbath. That tradition, as you will know, includes strict prohibition of most work and unnecessary activity on the Sabbath.

Some newspaper reporters seem to confuse the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. The Sabbath is, of course and by its meaning, the seventh day of the week, in our terms Saturday, commemorating God’s day of rest in the creation story, after the six days of hard creative work. Whereas Sunday is, in the Christian tradition, the first day of the week, commemorating Jesus’s Resurrection. Sunday became a traditional day for rest and recuperation, but without the excessive restrictions attached to a traditional Jewish Sabbath. Humanity does urgently need times for peace and reflection, and we can sympathise with the people of Stornoway. I guess that the Stornoway Christians, being highly observant of their Sunday rules, believe it is their right, their human right, to have their rules respected.

What Jesus would have made of the Stornaway claim to this I have no idea.  But it is clear that Jesus would have supported some human rights.  He would have advocated human responsibilities as well, though, for instance reinforcing the ancient command, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’.  But there are also clear examples of Jesus supporting human rights, including two in this afternoon’s second reading.

These relate to what was permitted on the Jewish Sabbath. Jesus vociferously opposed the inhumane accumulation of rabbinic teaching over the minutiae of Sabbath observance. On one occasion, Jesus said:

The scribes and Pharisees tie up heavy burdens . . . and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.

It was the on the Sabbath when, as we heard in this afternoon’s reading, Jesus found himself in trouble with the strict Pharisees for his disciples’ rule-breaking. They were hungry, and so they ate grains of corn as they walked between the fields. I’ve certainly done the same, and you may have done, too.  I wonder if, technically, it’s stealing, and what the penalty at law would be: perhaps community service to replant wheat seeds for the farmer?

On a similarly lighter note, you probably haven’t heard about the hiker who made himself quite ill with eating too much grain he picked beside the path as he walked along between the crops. He asked his doctor for help.  The doctor’s reply?: ‘I really would like to help, but it’s not exactly in my field’.  And that’s what you might literally call a corny joke.

But it wasn’t for stealing from anyone’s field that Jesus and his followers were in trouble: taking grains just by hand was in fact specifically allowed, according to the book Deuteronomy. The offence was working on the Sabbath, work of four kinds: plucking the grain constituted reaping; rubbing it in their hands was threshing; separating the grain and chaff was winnowing; and the whole simple process constituted preparing a meal.

But Jesus had some answers for the Pharisees:

1. King David, no less, with his companions, had been given the sanctified bread to eat at a holy place they visited, when no other food was available;
2. the temple priests themselves did all sorts of work on the Sabbath to keep the animal sacrifice system running, what with stoking the fires, handling the animals, lifting them into place, and so on;
3. the Hebrew prophet Hosea had set a better standard: ‘I [the Lord] demand mercy and not sacrifice’; and
4. ‘the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath’.

The title ‘Son of Man’ could refer to Jesus himself.  But a wider interpretation was simply to refer to any human being: sons or daughters of man and woman.  And this would accord with something that St Mark has in his account of this story, namely Jesus saying ‘The sabbath was made for man, or humanity, not man for the sabbath’.

So Jesus was setting a fresh priority, against legalism and in favour of humanity. This fresh priority is also evident in the second story in this afternoon’s reading. The Pharisees followed Jesus into a synagogue, where there was man with a paralysed hand.  Provocative to a T, they asked Jesus ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’  Jesus pointed out that even the Sabbath rules allowed doing good, like hauling a sheep out of a pit, so healing must be permissible.  The man may well have needed two good hands for his work as well as for daily life, and Jesus went ahead and healed him. The Pharisees departed, defeated but muttering and scheming.

So what can we gain from all of this?

It’s all about priorities from a Christian perspective.  Laws and courts of law are hugely important for the welfare of society: that is beyond question. And not only for our country, but for Europe and the world, too. The European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice still include the UK, with the aim of maintaining humane principles in the face of legalistic action. I know some of this is politically contentious at the moment.) The courts of the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions and the International Criminal Court are of vital importance across the world in setting and upholding strong standards of humane behaviour. All these would, at their best, win Jesus’s approval when they uphold care and human values in the face of tyranny and inhumanity. Today, tragically, secular and Christian ethical standards are being broken across the world on what it’s fashionable to call ‘an industrial scale’ In our country, modern slavery is reported to include about 130,000 people who need identifying and protecting. Jesus’s priorities for human rights really do need the universal support of humanity.

We seem to have moved a long way from an innocent picture of Jesus and his disciples strolling between fields and plucking a few grains to satisfy their pangs of hunger.  But perhaps the issues are not too dissimilar.  It’s all a matter of Christian priorities, in our individual lives and in our collective and international community lives as well.  Politics can’t be left to the politicians when it comes to Christian values. We all have a part to play in upholding human rights.