Friday 13th March - Ought we not be set free?

DAILY BYTE

We have acknowledged this week that we struggle with the baggage of our past. We struggle to identify things that cripple us, slowly untangle things that bind us, remember our past rightly, and make ourselves vulnerable, asking for forgiveness and healing help for our bodies, minds, and spirits. We struggle to be free.

So as the Sabbath day approaches, we must ask the question, as Jesus asks, ought we not be set free from bondage on the Sabbath day? As we set our faces toward Jerusalem, do we see waiting there freedom or more bondage?

In Exodus 31:16 it is written: “Therefore the Israelites shall keep the sabbath, observing the sabbath throughout their generations, as a perpetual covenant.” The Sabbath is a crucial part of peoples’ covenant with God. It is a time when we are commanded to rest in the assurance of who God faithfully is, and through this rest, we learn to believe more deeply, trust more implicitly, and find the grace to live more like Christ. Through this rest, we are bound more and more tightly into our covenant relationship with that faithful, forgiving God.

So, as we head toward both the cross and resurrection of Jerusalem, we must keep in mind that we can never truly be free unless, as Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove says in his book, Free to be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line, “we are free to be bound together in Jesus Christ.”

And so indeed, as Christ implied, we ought to be set free on the Sabbath. But we can only be forgiven and released of our pasts if we realize that forgiveness means we are tied to the cross with the one who forgave us, and we also rise, equally tied to him in the resurrection. Being free means we are forgiven and released from guilt, shame, and pain, as individuals, but it also means we are indelibly bound to others in our community who are also forgiven, who need forgiveness, and who we, ourselves, are trying to forgive.

We often see the Sabbath as a day to kick up our feet, read the newspaper, maybe go to the beach, and consume whatever we are fed in worship on a Sunday morning or evening. But how might your view of the Sabbath change, if you think of it as a time set aside purposefully to become more free by becoming more bound to God through Christ and through relationships with one another?

PRAY AS YOU GO

Pray this edited version of Martin Luther’s reflections in his work, The Freedom of the Christian, as your own prayer:

Although I am an unworthy and condemned person, my God has given me in Christ all the riches of righteousness and salvation without any merit on my part, out of pure, free mercy, so that from now on I need nothing except faith which believes that this is true. Why should I not therefore freely, joyfully, with all my heart, and with eager will do all things which I know are pleasing and acceptable to such a Father who has overwhelmed me with his inestimable riches? I will therefore give myself as a Christ to my neighbour, just as Christ offered himself to me. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Luke 13:16

“And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?”