Back in Queen Victoria’s day, Tacket Street Congregational Chapel was the poshest Nonconformist place of worship in Ipswich. It wasn’t where the so-called “County Set”, the landed gentry and gentleman farmers attended: they attended the Parish Church. But Tacket Street was where you’d find the merchants, the business owners, the folk who made their money in trade (although possibly without dirtying their own hands in the process!) On Sunday mornings these highly respectable people would make their way to the Chapel for worship; they would return home to a sumptuous lunch and then engage in “improving” – but never frivolous! – activities such as reading, leading a “Pleasant Sunday Afternoon” meeting for the poor (intended to keep them out of the pubs) and finishing off by singing hymns around the piano. No work was to be done on a Sunday; entertainment and humour were strictly forbidden. For this was the Sabbath, the day of rest, dedicated to the worship and contemplation of God.

To be honest, that was probably a bit of a caricature. And there’s one aspect of those Victorian Sundays which I’ve deliberately left out. For, in order for those prosperous families to enjoy their day of rest, a veritable army of servants had to work very hard, whether in making up fires, fetching water for washing, dressing the ladies of the house, cooking and serving the meals, preparing the horses and carriage, or giving the drawing-room a quick dust while the family were out at chapel. It is true that they were given a couple of hours of freedom in the evening: but woe betide if they were seen visiting the public house rather than God’s! So were those employers hypocrites? We might say so – but the fact is that they probably never even noticed these discrepancies, they were simply part of “the way things were”. Much had changed by the time I arrived at the church in 2005 to be its Minister – but remnants of that strict class structure still survived.

In today’s story we see Jesus unhesitatingly denouncing his critics as hypocrites – that’s the second time in two weeks! So why did he call them that? Because they told him off for daring, on a Sabbath day, to end the suffering of a woman who had been in pain for eighteen long years. They didn’t seem to have the slightest care for the woman herself, nor were they amazed by her miraculous healing. Their one concern was that Jesus had contravened the strict Sabbath law; for, while routinely feeding and watering farm animals were perfectly acceptable, an act to end a human’s lengthy misery was not. Surely, they might have thought, Jesus could have waited one more day, or even till sunset when the Sabbath ended. After so many years, couldn’t the woman bear her pain for just a few more hours? Jesus obviously felt that she shouldn’t have to, and healed her on the spot.

I don’t need to tell you that “keeping the Sabbath day holy” was (and still is) a sacred Hebrew institution, something which has defined Jewishness in every place and time. We might think that Sabbath observance came into being with Moses and the Ten Commandments, but of course it goes back much further than that, in fact to the creation story in Genesis. For there we not only read of God creating the universe in six divine days but of him then resting on the seventh day, thereby making it holy. On reflection we might think it a bit strange that an almighty God should need to take a day off to put his feet up; nevertheless that story has always underpinned the principle of Sabbath rest for the Jewish people.

Obviously we can’t know how this worked out in practice over the centuries. But the golden principle was clear: the Hebrews should not do any work on the Sabbath. However therein lay the problem: for what precisely what and wasn’t “work”? Over the years a complex spider’s-web of rules and regulations developed, covering every conceivable eventuality; if you followed these you could be sure that you were staying in the right side of the law. That, by the way, is why Jesus’ disciples were criticised for plucking and eating grains of corn as they walked through a field on a Sabbath: they weren’t stealing, as travellers were allowed to pick grain so long as they only used their fingers. However, according to the law, the disciples were “reaping”, which was “work” and banned unless the people doing it were in imminent danger of starvation and death.

We may see today’s story as yet another instance of Jesus clashing with the Jewish religious authorities. Or else we might want to hold it up as a sad example of prioritising rule-keeping above caring for our fellow human beings; indeed those are the ways I’ve always looked at it. Well, I did some reading while preparing this sermon and I discovered a couple of things which may shed a slightly different light on what happened. For I’ve learned a bit about the synagogue official who rushed to criticise Jesus; and I’ve learned a bit about where the whole issue of Sabbath law actually stood during Jesus’ lifetime.

Let’s start with the history. What I didn’t know is that theis issue of Sabbath healing was a very “live” subject of debate in Jewish circles, not just in Jesus’ time but for the next two centuries. The reason for this is that everything linked to healing involves “work”: mixing medicine, travelling to the patient or carrying equipment. That made healing a “no-no” in the eyes of many. However care for the sick and respect for the sanctity of life had always been a priority for the Jews. We can see this in a law which dates from a few years after Jesus, which decreed that it was acceptable to extinguish a light (usually prohibited on the Sabbath) if this helped in an invalid to sleep. Furthermore the Mishnah, the first record of Jewish law to be made after the Bible, states, “If anyone saves a single life, he has saved the whole world”. So most of the rabbis and theologians had come to the view that healing on the Sabbath was acceptable, the right thing to do. What is especially interesting here is the position of the Pharisees; we usually regard them stick-in-the-muds who took a rigid view of the law. But in this matter they and Jesus were in total agreement.

That all seems cut-and-dried, doesn’t it – but it isn’t. For, as so often, the views of ordinary people lagged behind the scholarly debates. Popular thinking had been greatly influenced by something which had happened two centuries earlier, when a group of Jewish soldiers had refused to fight the Greeks on a Sabbath because they regarded fighting as “work”. You can guess the outcome: it was total slaughter. By Jesus’ day the event had become a Jewish legend which was retold every year at the Hannukah festival. Although the religious leaders were saying that the men who died had been mistaken in their strict observance of the law, most folk hailed them as glorious martyrs and an example to follow. To suggest that they had done the wrong thing might well be regarded as an insult, a betrayal of their memory.

That’s the history. Let’s turn now to the “synagogue official” who was so quick to criticise Jesus for breaking the law. Who was he? We tend to assume that he was one of the scribes and Pharisees who, as we know, were constant critics of Jesus and with whom he had many exasperating verbal tussles (although I do wonder if he sometimes enjoyed pitting his wits against theirs!). However the story doesn’t actually say that; and scholarship tends to point us in a different direction. For many synagogues at this time were basically voluntary associations, run by local people and organised very much like this church. They may have had a tame Rabbi to offer teaching, although any man over 30 had the right to share his thoughts with the congregation. But they definitely did have “lay” leaders, similar to our own deacons, who weren’t theologically trained but who took care of the day-to-day business and the finances. Larger synagogues would have a structured heirarchy with a “president” at the top; smaller ones would be run more informally, often with one man taking several roles – who might have been little more than a glorified caretaker!

So what I’m suggesting (and I must be careful here as I don’t want to insult anyone!) is that this “synagogue official” was no Pharisee but a layman with a basic knowledge of the law but little more; someone who “knew right from wrong” and was untroubled by theological debates which, in his eyes, over-complicated simple issues; perhaps a man who enjoyed the status his position gave him, and who certainly wasn’t going to be bested by some clever-clogs visiting rabbi with dubious credentials. Here was someone who might say, “We’re not going to have any Sabbath-breaking here, not on my watch anyway!” For rules were rules – just imagine what would happen if people started saying, “Ah yes, but you can break this law in such-and-such a situation”. That would lead to anarchy; this man couldn’t have that.

Debates about the Sabbath – or, later, about Sundays – didn’t end with Jesus. They were a bone of contention in England, particularly at the end of the sixteenth century, with some Christians contending that Sabbath-keeping was part of “God’s immutable law” and others arguing that it only applied to the Jews, not to the Church. The Puritans preached that Sunday was the day when God “ploughed the hearts of people” as they listened to the Gospel, and said that it should be used for “quietly meditating in God’s law, reading the Scriptures, giving oneself to divine contemplation, talking of serious matters, praying to God for grace and visiting the sick and comfortless” – which sounds pretty busy to me! This fierce debate, full of conferences, sermons and leaflets, took place alongside the Elizabethan “Merrie England” whose activities such as hunting, hawking, fencing, clowning, morris dancing and trading largely took place on Sundays. When a stand collapsed at the Paris Gardens bear-baiting arena in 1578, killing eight people, some Christians were quick to allege that it was God’s judgement – not on cruelty to bears, but on Sabbath-breaking. (In fact it was due to rotten timber and poor maintenance). Queen Elizabeth was urged to sign a law forbidding Sunday entertainments, but refused to do so.

By and large, modern Christians in Britain, except perhaps for a few folk in Scotland, aren’t too troubled by Sabbath-breaking. (Perhaps we should think about that some time; but not today). Anyway – to get back to our story – I don’t think that Jesus’ primary concern really was the Sabbath. He was wanting to draw out a broader principle: that, although rules and regulations can be helpful (in fact we need them for society to function smoothly), applying them too rigidly may cause pain, suffering and exclusion. For if Jesus hadn’t healed this woman – and, who knows, he might just have been passing through her town – then she would have been condemned to further agony and disability. As far as Jesus was concerned, her wellbeing trumped any law, even one so firmly embedded in Jewish life and history. The Sabbath had changed from being a day of rest into a day of captivity and Jesus was keen to show that that wasn’t what God intended.

We all know that, in the past, churches seemed to impose all kinds of rules on their members. They weren’t always have been written down, but you’d know that you’d broken one when eyebrows started lifting and people started muttering. Moira remembers wearing jeans to her Scottish church in the early 70s – very practical but definitely “not the done thing”. At least it’s better than the visiting minister who arrived on the isle of Lewis; people said that he couldn’t be spiritual because he was wearing brown shoes instead of black ones (they were wrong). And there used to be lots of other things “that Christians don’t do”, down to the wearing of make-up (never a temptation for me) or going to the cinema or visiting a pub: ossified relics from the past when these strictures genuinely had made sense. We today – rightly – know that Christ calls us to freedom and that we are ruled by grace, not law.

The issue which arouses the strongest feelings in churches today is gender and Same-sex Marriage; it deeply divided the Anglican bishops from around the world who recently met for the Lambeth Conference and has been an extremely delicate subject in the Baptist Union for years. It’s a complicated subject, but basically on the one side there are people saying, “Marriage was ordained by God as the union of a man and a woman; it goes right back to Adam and Eve in Genesis and we have no right to change it”; while on the other there are people who say, “Marriage and our understanding of gender have changed over the years; denying marriage to Christian people of the same sex both excludes them and causes them deep pain. How can that be a loving approach?” The tendency among both the Anglicans and Baptists is to say, “We simply cannot agree about this, or even to disagree nicely” so ‘kick the can down the road’ – but that can’t go on for ever. Equally I haven’t dared mention this subject since I came to be your Minister, because I know how controversial it is – yet we can’t ignore it and must ask each ourselves, “What would Jesus do?” The answer to that question rather depends on who you ask!

It isn’t always easy for us to interpret the Bible, and that’s not just because some parts of it seem irrelevant and others are difficult to understand. It’s because, in the New Testament, there seems to be a constant tension between obeying God’s commandments and having the liberty to act as we wish, hopefully guided by the Holy Spirit. It was Augustine, the North African saint of sixteen centuries ago, who probably got the balance right here, so I close with what he wrote: “Love God and do whatever you please: for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved”.