Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text is the first six verses of the Holy Gospel reading concerning Jesus' healing of the man on the Sabbath. The text has already been read.

Dear friends in Christ, a couple of years ago I was using Google to look for a Bible passage and it happened to pull up a blog entry by a fellow who was feeling very guilty because he thought he was not keeping the Third Commandment very well since he always found himself doing lots of housework or yardwork on Sundays. He said that in his confirmation classes, he had been taught that the Third Commandment means that on Sunday you have to rest since, according to his teachers, Sunday is the Sabbath, Sabbath means "rest." The man complained that he and most Christians seem to do a lousy job of resting on Sunday, in obedience to that commandment. He was at least partly right: all sinners do a lousy job of keeping the Third Commandment, but not at all for the reasons that particular gentleman thought.

The Third Commandment actually says, "Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy," or as some of you learned it, "Thou shalt sanctify the holy day," which is an English translation of Martin Luther's German rendering of the Commandment (see the 21 December 1891 Lutheran Witness for a discussion of this issue). But in Exodus and Deuteronomy, the commandment concerns a specific day, the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week (which we call Saturday). God commanded the Israelites to remember or observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, that is, to keep it the way the LORD told them to.

And it is true that God told Israel not to work on the Sabbath: while they were in the wilderness, He told them to gather a double supply of manna on Friday, and forbade going out to gather on the Sabbath; God said, "Six days you shall labor, and do all your work...On [the Sabbath] you shall not do any work"; He said, "Everyone who profanes [the Sabbath] shall be put to death. Whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people"; God even stipulated that lighting a fire in your fireplace is a form of work!". And lest you think God's threats were idle, consider the fellow described in Numbers 15:32-36, who the Israelites found gathering sticks on the Sabbath, and the Lord told Moses, "The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp." And that's what they did, just as the Lord commanded Moses to do.

So what do you think? Are any of you up for keeping the Third Commandment the way God originally gave it to Israel? I suspect not, but in fact, the requirement not to work isn't all; there are some other things that God told Israel to do on the Sabbath, which I'll get to in a bit. But for now, let's just focus on the commandment not to work on the Sabbath. There's no way any of us could have avoided being stoned to death by now much less condemned for disobedience, and so our only hope is one of two things: 1) either the Commandment doesn't apply in the same way to us as it does to the Israelites, or 2) the requirements of the Third Commandment have been reinterpreted and relaxed to make it easier to fulfill.

We'll talk about the second option first, because the gentleman who experienced so much anxiety about not resting on Sunday clearly thought that the Sabbath law's requirement of rest still applies to Christians, yet in a relaxed sort of way. Like him, the Pharisees and other members of the Jewish religious establishment tended to focus on the "don't work on Saturday" requirement of the Third Commandment, as if that were the whole point of the commandment. But they realized that in order to keep it that way, they had to define what was work, and what wasn't work. "What do we have to do? What do we not have to do?" they asked. Since this was a point of interpretation of the law, naturally the lawyers got involved. And the Pharisees and lawyers developed an elaborate system of defining what was work and what wasn't, so that the Jews could try to keep their legalistic version of the Third Commandment down to the letter.

But then Jesus came along, and He presented a completely different approach to the Sabbath than the Pharisees and lawyers, so this inevitably led to conflict, and today's Gospel reading is a representative example of their many disagreements over the Sabbath. St. Luke tells us that "One Sabbath, when [Jesus] went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully...[T]here was a man [next to Jesus] who had dropsy [today we call dropsy "edema," which is severe swelling caused by fluid accumulation, and it can cause severe disfigurement]."

Then St. Luke says that "Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees." Jesus perceived their sneaky glances and as God He knew their plots against Him, so He responds by "saying, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?" But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And [Jesus] said to them, "Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?" And they could not reply to these things."

Jesus left the Pharisees speechless. They simply couldn't argue against His logic: if the Pharisees allowed a person to rescue a child or ox from a well on the Sabbath--and not consider that heavy lifting "work"--then why couldn't Jesus rescue a man from an affliction like dropsy by hardly lifting a finger? This is only one of several times Jesus silenced the legalistic Pharisees, which actually infuriated them, and put them to shame by His arguments in favor of doing healings on the Sabbath. And by doing these things, Jesus demonstrated two things. First, He showed that He Himself is Lord of the Sabbath, and second, that Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for Man.

First, Jesus was Lord of the Sabbath, as He Himself said and demonstrated. In John 5, Jesus healed a man who had been an invalid for 38 years, and it was a Sabbath. The Jews took issue with this supposed breaking of the Third Commandment, but Jesus answered,"My Father is working until now, and I am working." He was calling Himself, along with the Father, the Lord of the Sabbath, the One who had given Israel the day of rest to begin with. Then St. John explains, "This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God". To be equal with God is to be God, and for a man to present Himself in such a way was scandalous to the Jews. In fact, if Jesus had not been telling the truth about His divinity, it would have been blasphemy, and the Old Testament penalty for blasphemy was death by stoning, and that's what the unbelieving Jews sought to do to Him for making Himself equal with God. And so, as God Himself, Jesus was Lord of the Sabbath and could do anything He wanted on it. And His healing miracles on the Sabbath demonstrate His claim.

As the Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus wanted to restore the proper intent of the Sabbath commandment, and so one time He said, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath". The Pharisees and many legalists since then believed that man was made for the Sabbath. In other words, they thought that God made man simply so that he could be a slave to God's Sabbath law (as well as God's other Laws), as something they would have to do to earn God's favor. But Jesus said, "The Sabbath was made for man." In other words, God created the Sabbath as a gift to Israel, as something they would get to do because He gave it to them. God gave them a day of rest from labor, to enjoy God's gifts and His Word and their families. (And remember, when they were in Egypt, they were slaves who worked 7 days per week--a day off each week was a wonderful gift!). On the other hand, the Pharisees took the Third Commandment to be a requirement that they had to desist from work and not do anything--or actually, do as little as possible (to their credit, they did go to the synagogue to hear the Word of God; the problem was, they heard that Word through legalistic, self-righteous ears rather than with ears that were tuned in to the Gospel).

But Jesus showed the folly of the Pharisees' attitude and restored the right understanding of the Sabbath: God made the Sabbath for man, not the other way around. And it was made as a day of creation, redemption, and healing, just as it had been instituted in the Old Testament. I said earlier that God gave more instructions about the Third Commandment besides the command not to work. God gave not only more requirements, but also explained them based on His own works in the creation. In Exodus, God instituted the Commandment by saying, "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy...For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy". Only the LORD can make things and people holy, and He made the Sabbath Day holy in order to make His people holy. On the Sabbath, the Israelites were given a day of rest to enjoy the gifts of God's creation and teach their children and grandchildren to be thankful for everything God had given, and God promised that in the observance of the Sabbath He would make His

people holy, which is the greatest blessing He could ever give them.

So the Sabbath wasn't just a day not to work, but a day of remembering God's creation and His redemption of Israel. It was a day of remembering all of God's promises to Israel, especially the promise of the Messiah, who would grant them an eternal Sabbath rest. And when Jesus came, His entire approach to the Sabbath reflected God's original intent for the Third Commandment. He restored the proper remembrance of God's created gifts as well as His redemption of Israel, but then He also came to fulfill the Law and fulfill all things in Himself. Because sin had earned death and eternal condemnation to us sinners, and so we desperately needed to be recreated as God's holy people; we needed a redemption from sin, death, and hell, and so Jesus came to deliver those. His healings on the Sabbath showed that He was the LORD of the Sabbath and the Messiah, and He had come to redeem and recreate His own creation.

And Jesus would accomplish this throughout His life, but in particular on one Day of Preparation for the Sabbath, the Friday before the final Sabbath of the Old Creation, the Day of Preparation that we call Good Friday. In those twenty-four hours before the Sabbath Jesus instituted the New Testament in His own blood at the Last Supper, He taught the disciples about the meaning of His death for the sin of the world, He agonized and prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, He was betrayed and arrested by sinful men, He made the good confession before the Sanhedrin, Pilate, Herod, and then Pilate again, He was sentenced to death, took up His cross and marched steadily to Calvary, then He was crucified for our sins and died under God's outpouring of wrath against our guilt. Finally, He was buried, which brought that Good Friday to a close.

And then came the final Sabbath of the old creation. After doing all the work that was necessary to save us from eternal death, Jesus rested in the tomb and showed that He had fulfilled the Sabbath Law, and all Old Testament laws in our place. The women who came to Christ's tomb dutifully kept the Sabbath according to the Law of Moses, but on Easter Sunday Jesus would burst forth from the tomb to show that the law that condemned us to everlasting death now had been fulfilled and that everlasting life had been earned by Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, who now promises us an eternal Sabbath rest with Him in heaven. As St. Paul writes in Colossians 2: You Christians have "been buried with [Christ] in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with [Christ], having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. 16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ". In Christ Jesus, everything has been fulfilled for you, and you have been promised an eternal Sabbath rest with Him through Baptism and faith.

But then what about the Third Commandment? Does it even apply to us anymore? Yes it does, but not in the original sense of resting or abstaining from work on a given day. Rather, as Dr. Luther explains so well in the Small Catechism, "We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it." And there is no relaxing this commandment to hear and gladly receive God's Word. Even if we take advantage of every opportunity presented to us to hear preaching and God's Word, we must gladly hear and learn it. And so we sinners completely fail to keep the Third Commandment when we ignore it, or when we only grudgingly follow it, or when we treat it as a merely something we have to do to get God off our backs: "we have to go to church, we have to use the Sacraments, we have to go to Bible Class or Sunday School or Confirmation, we have to pray." For our sins against this and all the commandments, we deserve nothing but eternal damnation. Our ingratitude toward the God who has created, redeemed, and sanctifies us should lead us to the worst "have to" of all: we should have to go to hell.

But Jesus kept the Sabbath Law perfectly as it was meant to be kept, He suffered and died for our sins against all the commandments, He rested in the tomb on the Sabbath to completely fulfill it, and He rose from the grave on Easter morn to sanctify every day as one of eternal Sabbath rest for the people of God, as they hear and meditate on His Gospel promise of eternal rest in heaven for the sake of Christ. And Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, says to all of us poor, miserable sinners, " Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light".

We get to enjoy His glorious grace and mercy that He delivers here in the Church through Word and Sacrament, and so we can gladly receive it as wonderful rest for our weary souls. We get to come here and be given Christ's saving gifts. So to ask, "Do I have to go? Do I have to learn?" is to put yourself into the shoes of the Pharisees, back under God's condemning Law, since you never can go to church enough or learn enough of God's Word to completely fulfill the Third Commandment.

But in fact, asking Law questions about hearing and learning God's precious Word is really like asking questions like these: "Do I have to eat this free steak dinner? Do I have to take a day off of work? Do I have to go on a tropical vacation?" Or, consider this one: "Do I have to go to heaven?" Kind of silly, isn't it? "Do I have to go to church? Do I have to take the Lord's Supper? Do I have to pray?" If you ask Law questions, you can only expect Law answers, and that's not a safe place to be.

So rephrase your questions to confess your faith in the Gospel, the Good News of salvation in Christ that we simply can't ever get enough of: "Do I get to go to church to hear God's Word and praise His goodness? Do I get to take the Lord's Supper, Christ's true body and blood given into death for my sins? Do I get to pray, calling upon a gracious God who promises to answer?" "Yes, yes, and yes!" And then you are on the right track for "gladly" hearing and learning the Word. Because of what Jesus has done for you, you get to go to church, you get to study His Word, you get to go have all your sins forgiven, you get to pray, and you will get to enjoy the eternal Sabbath rest for God's people in heaven. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.