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The story is told that Mahatma Gandhi was once asked by a mother to tell her son to stop eating sweet things or his health would suffer. Gandhi thought for a while and told her to come back with her son in two weeks’ time.

She duly returned a fortnight later. Gandhi looked at the boy and said: “Stop eating sweet things.” The mother looked at him in surprise and said: “Why couldn’t you have said that 2 weeks ago?” Gandhi replied: “2 weeks ago I was still eating sweet things myself.”

And, so, it is with some trepidation that I preach this sermon. Whether I should have been more Gandhi-like in sorting my own life out first.

A delight

How do you spend your Sundays, our Sabbaths? Whilst the Sunday Opening Hours horse has bolted for society at large, we still have choices about how we spend our time. The Sabbath should be ‘a delight’, as Isaiah has it.

Abraham Heschel said that the first thing to be named holy wasn’t a place or a person or an object but a time. The first thing to be named as holy was the Sabbath. The sabbath was more than a day of rest but a time of spiritual renewal and experiencing God’s embrace.

And it’s not just a question of what you don’t do but what you do do. Because it should be a time of compassion too, as we learn from today’s Gospel. A compassion that both sees broken bodies and broken souls – and then does something about it.

As Mark 2:27 has it: ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’. Or as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it: ‘God is not interested in religion; God is interested in human beings…’

More to it

But as our OT reading shows, there’s a lot more to it than how you observe the Sabbath. Isaiah is addressing a group of people who, in the verses before ours, were complaining that they had been faithful at going to worship, fasting and reading of Scripture. But despite all that, despite doing ‘all the right things’, God didn’t seem to be interested. He seemed to be absent.

God said in reply: I’m not ignoring you – you’re ignoring me! What you do on the Sabbath isn’t matching up with what you’re doing for the rest of the week. If you want to know where I am, says God, then you can find me in the town centre of Bury at night with the Street Pastors, or handing out food at Porch Boxes or working as a chaplain at Fairfield Hospital.

To borrow some other passages from Scripture, the people were being told that you can’t love God with all your heart and soul and strength unless you love your neighbour. Unless. Loving your neighbour isn’t a tagged-on optional extra.

But let’s just get some context for the situation being described in Isaiah.

Complete destruction

The people had been forced into exile after the complete destruction of their capital city by an invading force. They’re now back, after years away, and with the benefit of international development aid money from Cyrus the Persian to help them rebuild Jerusalem and their beloved Temple.

You might think everyone would be full of optimism to be back. But Jerusalem remained a pile of rubble for a long time after their return. All of the poetry and promises from earlier in Isaiah now seem hollow and burned out.

And the reason that Jerusalem was still in ruins was because their social structure, and not just the infrastructure, was shattered too. Their society was a pile of rubble – not just the buildings.

It makes you think about Gaza and Ukraine. If the fighting stops today, what happens next? It will be more than roads and buildings that will need reconstructing.

Taking advantage

The newly returned people were divided economically and socially and religiously. The wealthiest were taking advantage of the economically vulnerable and not paying them minimum wage (Nehemiah 5:1-7). Because of their experience in the past, there was a fear of foreigners and a fear of change, which drove them to be obsessed with purity of language and ethnicity. Then we have the priests embezzling the tithes meant for those who relied on them for their food and wellbeing – and the political elite syphoning off the money given by Cyrus for the Temple. (See Nehemiah 13 and Haggai 1)

Meanwhile that same elite conveniently blamed the foreigners for delays with building the Temple – even though those same foreigners were eager to help (Ezra 4). And those who returned from exile considered themselves superior to those who had remained, who they thought of as being tainted somehow by the occupation (Ezra 10). It was a mess.

It’s a story that rings sadly true today, doesn’t it, of aid not going where it is intended. And you can quite imagine the risk of nationalistic fervour in Ukraine and Gaza for years after the wars eventually finish, where anything coming from another country is viewed with suspicion.

Alternative way

So, in steps Isaiah to give the people a telling-off and offer them a vision of an alternative way of being. He speaks of justice and righteousness and of spirituality. They should be socially minded and inclusive of both foreigners and those of different sexual orientation (56:3-8). He calls for liberation of any who are oppressed and for the building of a new society.

But just as you might imagine today, Isaiah collided with those in charge, the political and commercial grandees, the people who had feathered their nests and had something to lose. These are the same people who claim to be religiously observant. They regularly go to worship and fast and publicly show contrition – but they do it to get something in return.

God’s response is that all their worship and ritual is completely meaningless unless the economic and social oppression is stopped. But God promises that if they do repent, if they do undertake reform, then God would again dwell in their midst.

To that end, our verses today have a series of statements. If you do this, then God will do that. If you feed the hungry and tend to the needs of the oppressed, then we have a starting point for healing the community. One naturally follows the other. That healing will be so overwhelming that it will feel like sunshine breaking into a gloomy day or a spring of water that will never run dry.

Nephesh

But the Hebrew text goes much further than that. It’s not ‘offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted’ as translated on our sheet – it’s better expressed as ‘give one’s whole being (nephesh) in the service of the hungry and the oppressed’.

To truly act justly is to give all of yourself. In return, your whole being will be satisfied and continually refreshed. And when Isaiah says ‘your’ he is talking to individuals, each one of us separately. It’s not enough to point to someone else and say well they’re doing it, so as a community we’re OK. The expectation is that each and every one of us plays our part – and that each and every one is cared for and looked after.

Because as long as some remain oppressed, then we’re all living in an unhealthy environment. Until we’re all free, none of us are free. That communal transformation creates the possibility of God’s blessing for all.

Stop

On top of everything else in Isaiah, the Sabbath had been commercialised, used for individual interest and gain. Here the prophet really goes to town, as well he might in our society today. Remember the Sabbath was to be holy. People were to do no work. And that meant all and everyone.

The Hebrew word for ‘Sabbath’ means ‘to stop’. In Genesis 1, God took his time making the heavens and the earth – and then he stopped. He slept in and didn’t show up at work the next day. When Nehemiah became governor of Judah and oversaw the rebuilding of Jerusalem, he closed-down anyone buying or selling on the Sabbath (Nehemiah 13:15-22).

So, how do we spend our Sundays? That alone might be a soul-searching question. But our OT passage shows it’s not enough just to ask that. Because we also need to ask what we do the rest of the time. Do we do all the right things on a Sunday but forget our community during the rest of the week? Or can each of us truthfully say that we love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength – and love our neighbours too? If we can’t, then we should do something about it. Amen

‘Remember the Sabbath’ was delivered by Ian Banks at Christ Church Walmersley on 24^th August 2025. It was based on Isaiah 58:9b-end and Luke 13:10-17

References:

• Taylor, B.B. (1995). Gospel Medicine. Cowley Publications.
• Heschel, A.J. (2005). The Sabbath. FSG Classics.
• Taub, D. (2025). Beyond Dispute. Hodder & Stoughton.
• https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-21-3/commentary-on-isaiah-589b-14-4
• https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-21-3/commentary-on-isaiah-589b-14-3