Canter Bridge

Still, he drives the four hours each way to San José twice a week to take my Hebrew class. I’ve never heard him complain about that, not even three weeks ago when he showed up on a day we’d cancelled class because I’d forgotten to contact him to let him know. No, no, profesor, his words hurried out at me when I tried to apologize, ‘I’ll just spend a few hours in the library. Don’t worry about it.’

Octavio caught my eye two years ago, when I had to take over the second semester of a Greek class because circumstances forced the teacher to drop out. It was not a pretty sight.

In such a place one’s thoughts, unsolicited, veer towards biblical rhetoric about drunken fools and unruly children. The students had not been ‘brought up in the way that they should go’. Getting them ‘to return to it’ turned me into the proverbial mean teacher.

These aspiring Greek scholars were undisciplined, disoriented, and confused. They were loud, clueless, mutually disrespectful, and serially wrong about the fundamentals of Greek grammar. They acted as though they’d been invited to a party and seemed offended to be confronted by a Greek class. When forced to parse a verb, they became a communal self-esteem issue. They responded to my provocations as though the science of Greek grammar had died with their regrettably disappeared professor’s last words in the prior semester, and that to push on any further was to dance naked on its grave.

They were a pedagogical open wound.

Not Octavio. He sat quietly on one side of the class, always met my eye, and regularly nodded ever so slightly in assent to my instructions. It was easy to sense the man’s integrity from across the room.

Recently, more than a year later, I found myself responsible for organizing our seminary’s brief, Monday morning chapel services. I decided to ask one of our community to address us each week, and simply to answer the question, ‘What is your dream?’

I put Octavio in there, of course. I wanted to hear from him. I wanted our seminary family to hear from him. I was not to be disappointed.

I listened in awe to the poise and penetration of his words. Octavio is, I saw now, not just a dedicated Hebrew student. I had known that already. His is also the kind of preacher who surely feeds that flock, down there, four hours away on the hot, hot coast.

I found myself smiling, not only with satisfaction at the quality of Octavio’s words, but also at his unanticipated audacity as he swerved with the slightest possible rebellion from the topic I had given him.

No quiero hablar de mis sueños …

I don’t want to talk about my dream, but rather about God’s dream. What is his project, his desire? What is he yearning to give himself to accomplish?’

Humanity is God’s dream, Octavio told us that morning. I think he’s right. I can’t get the notion—tweaked and conditioned as it must be by broader focus and more sophisticated nuance—out of my head.

It is said of Jesus that …

he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come forward. Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

The Sabbath, among the famous Ten Commandments, shares that divine passion for life which motivates and seasons the rest of them. It aims to create a sphere of sanity, of rest, of family, of community well-being. It aims against control freakery of every kind, asking every Israelite to throw away one-seventh of his time in glad confession that having enough doesn’t depend on me working a little harder, staying a little later at the office, canceling attendance at one more soccer game.

This particular item of the Hebrew Bible’s Ten Words appears in both of that ancient book’s ten-fold lists. Its twin motivations are beautiful. In its first appearance, Sabbath is justified by that audacious pillar of biblical ethics called the ‘imitation of God.’ Simply stated, this principal threatens almost to close the gap between divine and human behavior: God rested after six days of labor. Those who come after him do the same.

The second time this commandment—how odd that we should call permission to rest by that name—invades Israel’s life for a different reason: Israel’s sons and daughters would know by well-trained memory if not by their own experience, what oppression had been like. The commandment to rest would forever inocculate them against treating other human beings, Pharaoh-like, as gears in some big, smoky machine.

Nor would Sabbath be some private religious ritual, a particularly restful piece of piety that does me a world of good, or really helps me to center, or lets me worship in my own way. Rather, it would be a spectacularly public folly, a national waste of time. This is who it’s for: ‘you, your son, daughter, manservant, maidservant, animals, the alien within your gates.’ It’s as though God says to an entire nation, ‘Will you please just stop!’. ‘Stop’, after all, is what the word Shabbat really means.

Sabbath is a beautiful thing.

Which makes me think of Octavio, and then of Jesus, and then of the frenzy which has become the wolf at the door of my life and the lives of those I love.

Sabbath—conceived, designed, and fitted out for life—had become in the view of Jesus’ opponents the prime reason for allowing some poor guy’s shriveled up, embarrassingly useless, socially marginalizing hand to stay just the way it was. Dead to any real use except as a visual kind of shout that he was different, perhaps derisively so, from most everybody else.

A religious command to look out for the other had become a pretext for killing the one who would hear the other’s unspoken anguish, and respond. A good thing—Israel’s Sabbath—now controverted its reason for being. Religious men found this a fine arrangement.

Jesus’ question has lost none of its chill for twenty centuries of sacred attempts to warm it up just a bit:

Which is lawful on the Sabbath:to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?

Jesus understood correctly that human beings—even eminently ignore-able ones with hands like this guy’s, far too awkward to shake without grimacing at the duty of it—are God’s project and that ‘religion’ was meant to serve them. He underlines this in the section just prior to the paragraph from Mark’s gospel that I’ve quoted in one of those clipped statements that has a world holed up inside of it:

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

A fine thing, this Sabbath. Made to order.