THE EARLY CHRISTIAN SABBATH - Friends of the Sabbath Australia

1. Jesus and the Sabbath
The Early Christian Sabbath
JESUS “broke the Sabbath!” John5:18. Of this fact there are numerous instances.
The Jewish leaders challenged the disciples, who, against the “traditions of the elders,”
gathered and ate handfuls of grain on the Sabbath day. Jesus refused to rebuke His
followers for this. Matthew 12:1-8. The Jews had a tradition that on their Sabbath day no
sick might receive treatment. Again and again Jesus healed people on the seventh-day
Sabbath, sometimes in the synagogues, sometimes in homes or at roadsides. It was on the
Sabbath day that Jesus healed a paralytic, hopeless after years of suffering. It was on the
Sabbath day that Jesus healed a man horn blind. Neither of these men would have
suffered augmented hurt had their healing been postponed one more day, but Jesus did
not wait. He deliberately broke the Jewish Sabbath. And what He did made the Jewish
traditionalists furious.
Tradition does things to people. It is the impact of a people's past habits and
prejudices upon their current experiences, and it has all the weight and authority of
antiquity and of custom. We all inherit attitudes and concepts from our forebears. We are
usually what we are, politically, socially, and religiously, because of our past. Most of us
belong to the particular political party in which we vote, attend the particular church in
which we worship, and even study in the particular college we select, because it was the
party, the church, or the school of our fathers.
This is in some respects a good thing. It tends to stabilize society. It keeps us from
raveling out our associations and interests into a thousand diverting but untried paths. But
this stabilization is too often inert. Our physics books define inertia as that property of
matter by which it tends to remain in an existing state of rest, or of motion in the same
direction, unless acted on by an external force. Unthinking adherence to tradition is too
often merely inertia, spiritual or political or social. The resulting stabilization can be
definitely harmful. It can block progress.
Worse yet, tradition may be spiritually or morally bad. Tradition can as well
perpetuate a wrong concept or practice as a good one. It may thus put the stamp of its
authority on what God has shown to be wrong, or it may pervert some principle or
practice in religion which God has already established.
It was this sort of wrong and harmful religious tradition maintained by the Jews,
which Jesus broke. “You made,” Jesus said, “the commandment of God of none effect by
your tradition.” Matthew 15:6. In vain they do worship Me,” He added, “teaching for
doctrines the commandments of men.” Verse 9. He condemned not only such man-made
perversions of religious truth, but also the merely external adherence to a divine precept.
This is plain in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said repeatedly: “You have heard that it
was said by them of old time: . . . but 1 say unto you.
This is why Jesus broke the Jewish Sabbath. He hated the externalism of the
Jewish observances, and the traditional burdens which made the Sabbath hateful to the
people. All this He rejected. As a matter of fact, this rejection had been divinely
pronounced centuries before. God had said through the prophet Isaiah:
“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? Said the Lord: I am
full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood
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