sabbath

We have a service each Wednesday lunch-time here. A gentle sort of punctuation mark in the flow of a busy week.

At the moment, in these weeks after Easter, we're taking the time to reflect just a bit on the varied resurrection narratives with which each of the gospel records ends.

For myself, I find it instructive and full of challenge. Not the task of expounding God's Word, so much as the content of that Word.

We've been thinking a lot, for instance, these last few weeks, about the contrast between the women who came to the tomb that Easter Sunday morning, and the guards who were there and saw it all unfold.

Two groups of people, all of them very much 'witnesses' of what went on. And yet so strikingly different.

Both the women and guards are there to do some work. Yet while for the guards that work is seen as no more than their routine job, for the women their work is service. A small distinction, perhaps. But significant nonetheless. Their outlook on life is different. Across the board.

Both the women and guards are afraid. The same word is used of them all. Fear. But the fear which grips the guards is one that simply paralyses them. Whereas the fear which the women experience is one which, by contrast, energises them. Another distinction, this time hardly small.

The fear that the women are gripped by is a thing which the Scriptures refer to as the 'fear of God'. A vigorous, vibrant, wondering, love-driven awe before the majesty and greatness of the Lord. A whole different planet from that on which the guards live out their life.

Both the women and guards go off and tell their story. Again, I find it hugely interesting that both groups are doing the same. And yet, again, just what's going on in either case is worlds apart.

The guards resort to what we now call 'spin': an official sort of 'party' line, a well-constructed press release which has little to do with the truth. The women engage in testimony: they don't really know what exactly is all going on: their words betray the fact that their conviction is shot through with much confusion.

The guards are afraid. The women are clearly excited.

The guards want to save their skin by promulgating lies. The women are prepared to lose their lives by propagating truth.

The narrative is fascinating. The guards had the chance to go down in the records of history as the first to witness the greatest event in all history. But they flunked it.

The guards were there, as the women were there. The same, but totally different.

And I'm trying, in reading the narratives here, I'm trying to tease out just where that difference actually lay. Why are the women so different in how they respond?

And the answer is given, I think, in the opening words of the accounts of Matthew and Mark.

"After the Sabbath..." (so Matthew at 28.1): "when the Sabbath was over..." (so Mark at 16.1). In other words, they had work to do, these women: but they waited. They marked the Sabbath.

They observed the rules of God's grammar. They put a huge big punctuation mark where it belonged. An emphatic full stop.

They paused for breath in the rush of events, by downing their tools, and getting their eyes back on God. That's good grammar.

And being good Jews, in observing the Sabbath, they remembered again that God is the great Creator (Exodus 20); that whatever goes on, however upsetting, disturbing or downright confusing it all may have seemed to become - this world remains God's world.

He made it. He loves it. He rules it.

And they also remembered that God is the one who delivers (Deuteronomy 5). No matter how strong, no matter how cruel, no matter how ruthless the mightiest tyrant may be, the powers that be are as nothing compared with the Lord.

Pharaoh in Egypt was simply brushed aside. When he sought to enslave them, sought to negate all their influence, sought to remove them, sought to destroy and to crush them - well, God stepped right in and delivered them out of his grasp.

Astonishing. Remarkable. Wonderful.

But all there in their history. He opened up a whole new future for them at the moment of their darkest pain and peril.

That's what these women remembered as they followed God's good grammar and observed God's Sabbath day.

With the grace of the Sabbath informing their outlook on life, they were bound to be different from those, like the guards, who knew little of that whole perspective and whose lives were thus shallow and false.

Grammar is important. We need to learn to make quite sure our lives are always punctuated well.

When the Sabbath was over...

Our Sabbath rest directs our gaze to God once more. We see him as the God who made the world, the God who comes to rescue and to save, the God who's there to meet us at our lowest point and opens up a future which we barely could imagine.

Learn to use God's grammar! When the Sabbath observed in that manner is over, we're different men and women.