Food in the Bible: Matthew 12:9-14

Matthew 12:9-14 He left that place and entered their synagogue; a man was there with a withered hand, and they asked him, ‘Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath?’ so that they might accuse him. He said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.’ Then he said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other. But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.

Here again, as in the previous passage, Jesus is not doing away with Sabbath, but instead challenging our understanding of Sabbath. Personally I bristle at the statement Jesus makes, “How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! ” That is so anthropocentric! Isn’t this part of what has brought us to this place? We think that we are the pinnacle of creation and that somehow makes exempt from the laws of nature. We don’t have to deal with the repercussions of the way we treat the earth because somehow we’re more important than sheep and animals.
Well, as always, it would serve us well to read the Bible in context. The original hearers would certainly not have read (or heard) that into the text. They were agrarian people who depended on the land. Jesus in fact points out that saving an animal on the Sabbath trumps the rules about resting precisely because the Sabbath is about life, not rules. So, this passage might actually be highlighting the dependence of human beings on creation. It’s our modern mind that reads such a technocratic elitist idea into the text.
Perhaps Jesus’ words about the value of human beings is also to point out the inhumane way in which people treated other people, the sick, the lame, the blind, etc. Jesus restores humanity to the man with the withered hand by rightly relating people to each other and to the Sabbath. Remember that the Sabbath commands are about economics and ecology, our relationship to the earth and to each other. In other words, Jesus says, “You would break Sabbath in order to be rightly related to that which you depend on for sustenance. Recognize that you depend equally on being rightly related to your fellow human being. This is the meaning of Sabbath.”

Food in the Bible: Matthew 12:1-8

Matthew 12:1-8 At that time Jesus went through the cornfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, ‘Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath.’ He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”, you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.’

Sabbath has been a pretty regular part of the conversation here about Food in the Bible. How do we read this passage in light of extending the sabbath to include the Sabbatical year (Deut 15) and Jubilee (Lev 25)? Or in light of the Sabbath being about remembering our place within the creation story?

I’ve read this passage in the past as another exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees (which it is) in which Jesus triumphs over those legalists showing them who’s boss. The sabbath is primarily about taking a day off and following the rules and Jesus is breaking the rules in order to show them how stupid their rules are. But this is not quite what’s happening is it?

Jesus is not getting rid of the sabbath. He’s reclaiming and redeeming it for its rightful purpose. He uses two examples from the Hebrew scripture (the only Bible around at the time) to show them that had missed the point of the sabbath. In fact, the disciples plucking heads of grain is reminiscent of the sabbatical command to allow the poor and wild animals to glean from the fields.

Jesus’ example of David taking the bread of the Presence when he was hungry reminds me of the way we treat the elements of communion. Denominations have different versions of the same thing. Basically the “bread” and “wine” are considered “holy” and off limits except during the particular ritual of the Eucharist. In some churches the bread and wine have to be finished off, poured down a particular drain or disposed of properly because of their sanctity.

In light of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 11 about divisions at the agape meal and his warning about taking communion unworthily which follows, he seems to imply that taking Eucharist unworthily means not sharing your food with the hungry. If that is the case then every time the elements (especially if it’s a loaf of real bread) are disposed of or gorged on by someone in order to fulfill the letter of some traditional ritual, we may be partaking unworthily of the Lord’s Supper. (further discussion will be shelved until we get to 1 Corinthians sometime in 2050).

Finally, Jesus reorients the understanding of sabbath by putting the commandments in light of God’s desire for “mercy and not sacrifice.” This is a helpful guiding principle for following Jesus and interpreting the Bible. If mercy is not the driving force and guiding principle then we will end up with empty legalism and broken relationships. Jesus identifies himself as “lord of the sabbath,” meaning not only over the particular command to rest on the sabbath day, but also over the command to let fields rest, to free slaves and return land, in essence over the equality and justice of the created order as God intended.

Food in the Bible: Exodus 23:10-13

Exodus 23:10-13 For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; ¹¹but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.

12 For six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home-born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed. ¹³Be attentive to all that I have said to you. Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips.

This is the commandment for the Sabbatical Year. It is followed by a list of the annual festivals to be observed and then a promise that if the Israelites followed the commandments that YHWH would conquer Canaan for them, the Promised Land. It’s important to recognize that this covenant is conditional, “But if you listen attentively to his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes” (Ex 23:22). So the giving of the land to the Israelites is contingent on them following particular agricultural practices.

I don’t know what the agricultural practices of their neighbors in the Ancient Near East were (Philistines, Egyptians, Assyrians or Babylonians). It would be interesting to study that and compare it to the biblical commands. We do know that the recommendation to let fields lie fallow for one year out of seven is better for the land than the intensive production schedules of industrial agriculture today.

As I mentioned in my sermon, the Sabbath commands often combine the ecological and the economic. Let the land lie fallow (good agricultural practice) so that the poor will be taken care of (just economic practice). We have done everything we can to create a division between the economic and the ecological. No matter how hard we try, it appears that this is impossible. Since economics is the way that we order our lives together, it follows that it must involve the ecological. Our lives cannot be ordered together without affecting and connecting to the earth. If we choose to order our lives in such a way that we ignore the ecological, it follows that there will be consequences in both the economic and ecological realm. And that seems to be the case today.

I included the last verse of this passage on purpose, because this is another area that we tried to make into a separate sphere of life. The last verse connects the ecological and economic to idolatry. Augustine talked about the right ordering of love. The problem was not that material things were evil. The problem was that we put them in the place of God. All love properly ordered finds its ultimate place in love for God. Idolatry is not about choosing the wrong religion or worshipping too many gods (though that might be part of it). Ultimately idolatry is about misplacing our allegiances and putting things out of order.

So this command, which tells the Israelites how they need to rightly order their agricultural practices and their social relationships, puts both things under the umbrella of rightly ordering their allegiances. I often hear people say that you should, “Put God first.” This notion puts God somehow in a category that is abstracted and detached from the reality of the world we live in. Here we see that putting God first clearly involves ecological and economic action and right relationships. God does not simply appear at the top of our checklist. Our allegiance to God orders the way we eat, the way we shop, the way we talk, the way we answer the phone, the way we do our job, the way we live our lives and the way treat others.

Sabbath as Creation Care

September 18th I will be speaking in chapel at Texas Lutheran University. I will also be participating in a panel of alumni on environmental sustainability. I thought I would share with you my sermon for Friday. Some of it is taken from a previous post on Sabbath.

What did you have to eat this morning? What’s for lunch? If it’s true what they say, “You are what you eat.” What exactly are we? The truth is many of us have no idea. Are we maltodextrin, or xantham gum? Monosodium glutemate? Anyone?

Almost everything you eat, no matter how far removed it seems from plants and animals, ultimately comes from a plot of dirt somewhere in the world, or more often in the case of processed foods, many plots of dirt scattered across the globe. As Wendell Berry so eloquently wrote,

Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act. And that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

The way that the world is being used today in order to feed our appetites is not sustainable. The loss of topsoil because of agricultural practices throughout the world is considered by some to be the greatest threat to our global environment. Agriculture accounts for somewhere between 15-30% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The produce at the grocery store travels an average of 1500 miles from farm to plate. Eating fast food may actually be worse for the planet than driving a Hummer. Let that sink in.
Let me suggest that part of the solution to our national eating disorder is the biblical commandment of Sabbath.

Exodus 20:8-11 Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9For six days you shall labor and do all your work. 10But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

Over the centuries rabbis have written countless pages trying to unpack what it meant to “not do any work.” Is it okay to open the fridge? What about using scissors? What if my donkey falls into a ditch? Rather than the obsession with not doing any work, let me suggest that the Sabbath is about remembering and resting.
The initial command is not to cease from working, but to remember. This is important. The whole law was based on Israel’s memory, their remembrance, of God’s past action for them in history. “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing.” It was the retelling of stories, particularly the Exodus from Egypt, which was the foundation of their continued covenant with YHWH and practice of the law in community. Remembering this story was more than just entertainment or even teaching moral lessons. The Passover is a reenactment of the story as believers place themselves within the story. As the seder meal says, “When we were in Egypt…”

So, in the same way, “remembering the Sabbath” is a re-telling of the creation story and a re-enactment of that story as we place ourselves within it. Sabbath is about grounding our lives in the creation story.
So, we remember that we did not get our own day in the creation story, but share the sixth day with “cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind” (Gen 1:24). We remember that dominion is not a license for domination and exploitation. We remember that the earth is its own character in the story. It says that “the earth brought forth vegetation” (1:12). We remember that we are dependent on the earth for our lives. We remember that God was a gardener, digging God’s hands into the dirt both to plant a garden and to shape the first human. We remember that we are given the garden “to till it and to keep it” (2:15). We remember most of all that the original intention of God’s creation was for us to be connected to the earth and in particular to our food.

The connection between the Hebrew word for human, adam, and the word for earth, adama, in this story has often been noted. The best English equivalent I can find is humus and human. Humus is that mysterious part of the soil that gives life and fertility. In the second creation account the human is formed from the dirt, graphically illustrating the dependence of humans on the land. Human from humus.

We are part of a wonderfully complex ecological system that God created. In one sense the story tells us that creation does not depend on us for either its creation or sustenance. God is Creator. At the same time, it reminds us of the power of dominion and the responsibility of stewardship that have been uniquely given to us as the only creatures who possess the ability to manipulate and destroy the very system that sustains us.
J.D. Crossan says, “It is not humanity on the sixth day but the Sabbath on the seventh day that is the climax of creation… our ‘dominion’ over the world is not ownership but stewardship under the God of the Sabbath” (53). The reason that scripture gives for observing the Sabbath is not worship, as you might assume. The reason given is so that the slaves and foreigners could have rest as well (Ex 23:12; Deut 5:14). Again Crossan says, “The Sabbath Day was not rest for worship, but rest as worship… In summary, the Sabbath was about the justice of equality as the crown of creation itself” (54). The Sabbath Day is extended to the Sabbath Year (Ex 21:2 and Deut 15) and finally the Sabbath Jubilee (Lev 25).

The Sabbath was not just about people either. Exodus says this about the Sabbath year,

“For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard and your olive orchard” (Ex 23:10-11)

It is important to point out that the Sabbath commands often combine the ecological and the economic. Our relationships with each other and the earth hang in the balance of work and rest. This passage also clearly indicates the relationship between the work and rest of the land and the people who work that land. The right ordering of relationships, between people and other people and between people and the earth ultimately results in just distribution of resources.

The worst of modern industrial agriculture does not allow rest for the land or people. The same field is planted year after year with the same crops. Because the fertility of the soil is depleted and topsoil eroded, farmers must use synthetic petroleum-based fertilizers to continue growing crops. The excess nitrogen in many of these fertilizers leaches through the soil into groundwater, or runs off due to erosion and ends up in waterways. This is far removed from the picture of both abundance and right relationship in the creation story. This way of producing our food and caring for the land has forgotten the story.

Crossan says that through the progression of Sabbath laws “we can see clearly the demand of God for a just distribution of land-as-life based on the creation theology in Genesis” (71). Did you hear that? “Land-as-life” The soil on which you stand is the very stuff that keeps you alive. We have now reached the point where we can no longer outsource our soil, environment and agriculture.

Let me give you a final picture to help you understand the situation we’re in today. A woman in California’s Central Valley, the most productive agricultural place on the planet, was visiting her son’s elementary school for lunch. Curious, she asked the worker in the cafeteria where the food was from. The worker replied that most of it was canned food shipped from China. The world’s most productive land can’t feed its own children. What’s more we must borrow money from China to buy this food. And to top it all off… We moved a lot of agricultural production overseas because of our concerns about pollution, which is now being picked up on the trade winds in China and blown all the way back to California. This is what our garden looks like now after we have tilled and kept it the last hundred years or so.

The commandment to keep the Sabbath is not about just taking a day off. It is about re-connecting ourselves to the ongoing narrative of creation in which we participate unawares most of the days of our lives. It is about “re-membering” as Wendell Berry puts it, putting back together things which have been rent asunder. This is kingdom work that Berry describes in one of his Sabbath poems:

By human work,
Fidelity of sight and stroke,
By rain, by water on
The parent stone.
We join our work to Heaven’s gift,
Our hope to what is left,
That field and woods at last agree
In an economy
Of widest worth.
High Heaven’s Kingdom come on earth.

Amen.

Food in the Bible: Exodus 20:8-11

Exodus 20:8-11 Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9For six days you shall labour and do all your work. 10But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

We have previously looked at this passage in terms of the place of the Sabbath Day, Year and Jubilee within an overall framework of justice and equality in the Hebrew Bible. It was pointed out that the reasoning for the Sabbath was rest for slaves, aliens, livestock and the land. I would like to look at two other aspects of this foundational commandment: Remembering and Resting.

The initial command is not to cease from working, but to remember. This is important. Elsewhere the law is said to be based on Israel’s memory, their remembrance, of God’s past action for them in history. (anyone industrious enough to look up this reference for me?) It was the retelling of stories, particularly the Exodus from Egypt, that was the foundation of their continued covenant with YHWH and practice of the law in community. More than just a retelling of a nice story, the Passover is a reenactment of the story as the faithful place themselves within the story. “When we were in Egypt…”

So in the same way “Remembering the sabbath” is a retelling of the creation story and a reenactment of that story as we place ourselves within it. Sabbath is about grounding ourselves and our lives in the creation story. We are part of a wonderfully complex ecological system that God created. In one sense the story tells us that creation does not depend on us for either its creation or sustenance. At the same time, it reminds us of the power of dominion and the responsibility of stewardship that have been uniquely given as creatures with the possibility to manipulate and destroy the very system that sustains us.

We reenact the Sabbath by resting from work, just as God did. This rest is an embodiment of the truth we are remembering. You cannot remember the Sabbath without acting on the truth revealed in the remembrance. Likewise, the action of resting from work reveals to us the truth that we are not the Creator, but also have immense responsibility as stewards.

Over the centuries rabbis have written countless pages trying to unpack what it meant to “rest from work.” Is it okay to use electricity? What about scissors? Hopefully, we see that this is putting the cart before the horse. The purpose of resting is remembering. We enter into God’s story of creation when, by imitating God, we recall our place within tat creation narrative.