In any list of unusual animals, you are likely to find the sloth. The sloth lives in trees, much of the time hanging from a limb by its four strong feet. The encyclopedia says, "Sloths sleep, eat, and travel through the forest upside down." It's a strange thought ... the idea of living upside down. If we did it, we would certainly see things differently. In a world where flowers grow down and balls fall up, anything seems possible. And, if anything were possible, maybe we would even see the ways in which we get our lives upside down. That was the challenge on that sabbath when Jesus went walking through the cornfields with his disciples.
As they walked along, the disciples picked some of the ears of corn and ate them. On any other day of the week that would have been just fine. Travelers were permitted to take corn as long as they did not use a sickle in the field. But the disciples were picking corn on the sabbath when anything resembling work was strictly forbidden.
Back then, there was a very long list of rules for the sabbath. The Talmud is an ancient collection of Jewish teachings. A whole section of it is devoted to prohibited acts on the sabbath, under 39 different classifications. In their walk through the cornfield, the disciples broke four of the rules. As upside down as all this might sound to us, for the Jewish rabbis it was serious — a matter of deadly sin. What made it even worse was that the disciples gave more respect to Jesus than they did to the sabbath laws.
Marcus Borg talks about conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is about the rules we live by. It is reflected in popular sayings like, "You reap what you sow" or "What goes around comes around."1 Robert Fulghum's book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, is loaded with conventional wisdom. "Stand up straight. Hold hands when you cross the street. Line up in a straight line," and so on. Conventional wisdom is about performing in a way that is expected of us. It's a good basic guideline for life, but it is dangerous when it becomes the only wisdom. Jesus attacked the conventional wisdom of his day. He was more interested in a life centered in relationships ... relationships with God and with each other. Instead of using language about rules and regulations, Jesus uses "heart" language. He says what we need is a new heart, not a new rule. Jesus was teaching his disciples to see their lives in a new way and then hoping they might learn to live them in that new way.
Conventional wisdom said people were made for the sabbath. Jesus said "The sabbath was made for humankind" (v. 27). The sabbath is not just about people. Even animals and fields get to rest on the sabbath according to the Old Testament. And then, as though that were not enough, God declared every seventh year as the year of the sabbath. For a whole year, everyone is released from roles and rules, free to forage in the cornfields of God. The sabbath turns notions about ownership upside down. Abraham Heschel said it like this: "On the sabbath we care for the seed of eternity planted in our soul."2
If we decide to take God up on this radical upside-down idea, then we will get to consider living in a new way. If we decide to grant ourselves a sabbath, that means at least for one day each week, we can stop running, stop responding to the bells and sirens of our world, stop seeing the dust balls, the bills, and the weeds, just for one day. On this one glorious day, we can take the time to feel the wind against our skin, listen to the birds singing, and appreciate a new unity with the world around us. No one will praise us for doing this, of course, but we will certainly feel more alive.
Apparently, even God feels more alive on the sabbath! In Exodus 31:17 it says that God rested and was refreshed on the sabbath. Now, there's an upside-down idea! If God can rest and become alive again, then certainly God's people can be re-created and remade. That is, if we can first look in the mirror and see what we are doing to ourselves. Everywhere I go, I see people with their ears plugged into machines or their eyes intent on a screen. I am among the worst of them. I can hardly make myself stop when I get on a roll, cranking out the work like crazy. What am I thinking? Am I thinking that I prove my worth by the work I do? I need others to help me see myself and my world. We need each other if we are to understand and live the upside-down life of Jesus.
Sabbath is not just about rest. It is also about resistance. The second incident in our gospel makes that clear. Jesus healed a man on the sabbath and the Pharisees wanted to kill him. How upside down is that? For Jesus, the sabbath is about life, not death. We need each other if we are going to resist conventional wisdom and live life according to Jesus' heart-wisdom. We need each other to resist our insatiable hunger for more things, more money, more time. God knows that people who rest together are also more likely to resist together.
There was an incident on a playground when I was in elementary school. My friend dared me to hang upside down with her on the jungle gym. That was a radical idea, because girls wore dresses in those days and we weren't allowed on the jungle gym. My friend and I thought it was a bad rule. We got the giggles as we were hanging there. We were seeing a topsy-turvy world, our knees hooked around the bar, hanging upside down, doing our best to hold up our skirts with our hands. Not even the teacher's lecture afterward could change the pride of two little co-conspirators who had challenged the rules and had seen the world upside-down.
I am doing my best to become more of a sabbath person. Now, when I anticipate my day off, I start getting giddy the evening before. It's no surprise to me that the Talmud says we receive "an additional soul given to us on the eve of the sabbath." I want to get better at experiencing that additional soul. My goal is to grow beyond sabbath as a spiritual discipline to sabbath as an experience of God's extravagant love.
In the Greek gospel of Thomas there is a story told of the child, Jesus. When he was five years old, Jesus was playing by a brook in the soft clay of its banks. Out of the clay he fashioned twelve sparrows. It was the sabbath when he did this, and an old Jew, observing this disregard for the rules, reported it to Jesus' father. Joseph came and found his son by the brook and scolded him for breaking the sabbath law. But Jesus clapped his hands together and the sparrows took flight and flew away chirping.
For those of us who are willing to see the world upside down, we might just end up seeing it the way God sees it. It will take some getting used to. We've been living right-side up for so long. When we get the hang of it, though, we just may be surprised by an experience of divine love so strong that it pours over us like a rain shower and doesn't simply soak our clothes, but runs through our skin into our very souls. Amen.
1. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 69 f.
2. Abraham Joshua Herschel, The Sabbath (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1951), p. 13.