Epiphany 4

Epiphany 4 (Mark 1:21-28)
“On the Sabbath, Jesus entered the synagogue and taught.”

The seventh day is the day of Real Presence.

The Sabbath day completes the creation of the universe. The world is not complete until our Heavenly Father forms time itself according to the Pattern of the co-eternal Word, the Beloved, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the real presence of the infinite and eternal God in the universe of matter, energy, time and space. God the Father designed the Sabbath to remind of the reality of the Son.

Under the Old Covenant, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday is the day of Real Presence. It is the day God the Father set aside and sanctified. It is the promise of the Father woven into the very fabric of the universe that he is with and he is for us. It is the time when the timeless touches time, hallows time and holds time in the pattern of the Beloved.

Holy Mother Mary taught her son that the Sabbath Day is the day the faithful hear the call to worship and assemble to immerse our minds, hearts and wills in the steadfast holy love of God. God the Holy Spirit issues the call to worship on the seventh day as the invitation to the marriage feast. It is an invitation to celebrate. It is an invitation to receive the blessing God designed into the universe so we can live the blessing and be the blessing to others.

Throughout the time of the prophets most people in Israel most of the time ignored the Sabbath. As they ignored the call to worship so they very quickly abandoned God. As they abandoned God their perception of the world and other people narrowed. They lost faith and lived by fear.

By the time Jesus came into the world most people in Israel most of the time attempted to keep the Sabbath. Sadly, they thought of the Sabbath as a Law to keep in order to gain God’s favor and avoid God’s wrath.

They took a simple command to sanctify the seventh day and complicated it. The complication came in the desire to find the loop holes.

They understood that the Sabbath was a day of rest. They understood that they were called to stop work on the Sabbath Day. Sadly, they teased out the meaning of the command not to work and develop a way around the invitation to meet God at the time and place God appointed to meet them.

Once such work around was to sell their business to a Gentile, a non-Jew, for a day. The contract stipulated that the Gentile was obligated to turn the day’s profit over to the owner and to sell the business back to the owner on sundown Saturday. The Gentile would run the business on the Sabbath so the owner could keep the law and preserve his profit.

It was a law based solution to a fear based problem. The fear was lack of income if the business owner actually kept the Sabbath as God intended. Fear erodes faith. God created the seventh day to be a day of faith. Faith does not ask what is the minimum I must do to gain God’s favor and avoid God’s wrath. Faith is the door way to an experience of the infinite and eternal love of the co-eternal beloved.

Law based religion sees only the burden of the Sabbath. Faith based religion sees the Sabbath as the invitation to experience the personal relationship with the divine in a moment of time.

The religious culture of first century Israel tended to hold the outward forms of the Law and miss the inward grace. Not everyone took this approach. Certainly there were some who perceived the joy of the Sabbath. Many others experienced the Sabbath as a burden.

It is no surprise then that Jesus would encounter demonic presence on the Sabbath in the synagogue. In a fear based religious culture there is a profound distortion of Divine Law and Divine Love that opens a door for the spiritual distortion of the fallen angels.

The fallen angels fell because they rejected love and holiness in order to seize knowledge and power. They chose to separate from God long before God created the material universe. In that choice they lost the truth of their own nature. They yielded their original purity to Lucifer and Lucifer repaid them by murdering their true selves.

The fallen angels are now burnt out remnants of their former glory. They are spirits of spite who hate God from whom they separated, Lucifer who betrayed them, humanity whom they envy and themselves for what they have by their own choice have become. They sealed their spirits in separation through pride and now exist in a state of what the poet John Milton once called “heroic despair.”

Fallen angels, demons, will use fear based religion to bully and intimate human beings. Their attitude is: If I’m going down I will take as many of you with me as I can. They cannot force any human being to do anything. They can use fear to deceive and manipulate people. On a rare occasion they can even take possession of a human being.

On that Sabbath Day in the synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus manifested the Real Presence of the Living God on earth. Jesus fulfilled the very pattern of the Sabbath. In that pattern, Jesus brought the grace of God to all assembled. Jesus assured the people that there is no condemnation in God.

The people were astonished at Jesus’ teaching. There is no fear in Jesus. There is only infinite and eternal love. It was that love that our first parents Adam and Eve rejected. It was that love the fallen angels abandoned.

The demons possessing the man in the synagogue cried out in fear and anger as they recognized the Real Presence of God in Jesus. They had known his glory once in the Heavenly realms. They had abandoned him then in a vain effort to acquire his power. They now feared he would use that power to destroy them.

Love cannot co-exist with fear. Perfect love casts out fear. Jesus is that perfect love the fallen angels made an original choice to reject. They would not and could not embrace that love and so they fled from that love. Jesus released the man from the demonic powers by the Real Presence of Divine Love on the Day of Real Presence.
Everyone in the synagogue that day experienced the reality of the seventh day. The reality of the Sabbath is Jesus himself. The reality is the grace of God activated by the faith of people through the love of Jesus. Sadly, not everyone chose to enter into the joy of that reality through faith.

Jesus liberated the possessed man from the demons. Some saw his action as a manifestation of a superior knowledge and power. Some envied that power. Some coveted that power. Some reacted with an even greater fear of that power. Some responded by faith.

The seventh day of Real Presence in the New Covenant is the day of resurrection. The principle is still the same. It is the Day God the Father invites us to meet God the Son at the altar of sacrificial love to be transformed by God the Holy Spirit. It is the day God himself designed and created as the day of grace. It is the call to live by grace through faith.

It is the day of perfect love that transforms fear into faith. It is the blessing of the infinite and eternal touching time and transforming time.

On the Sabbath day Jesus entered the synagogue and taught. He taught that God just doesn’t have love God is love. The demons fled from that love. The spiritually oppressed found liberation in that love.

It is on the Sabbath Day of real presence Jesus meets us and completes us and sets us free to be the love of God.