Jesus, the Sabbath, and Muffy Davis
A common theme in New Testament accounts of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth is how he would break contemporary religious norms in order to teach higher moral truths. His unconventional Sabbath observance of harvesting food, healing the disabled, and performing other miracles on the holy day garnered criticism from some Jewish clerics. In the Gospel of Mark, he and his disciples plucked corn on the Sabbath to satisfy their hunger. His response to questions about his apparently unlawful behavior was, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” What he meant was that this divinely mandated day of rest was created for the benefit of people’s lives, not to prohibit them from engaging in behaviors necessary to sustain life, like eating.
This story reminds us that the law is meant to serve us, not the other way around. It should be written to provide for our benefit, freedom, and security. But the law doesn’t always yield those rights and conditions for everyone who is subject to it. Sometimes it is even written to harm others, but more often than not it is written without consideration for every situation we might encounter, which may not be foreseeable to lawmakers or the public. And when we adhere to and enforce laws even when we see that they cause unjust harm, we make ourselves slaves to the law, mindlessly ignoring the pain of others in order to fulfill it, forgetting its proper purpose.
Such was the case this week, when Representative Muffy Davis (D-Hailey) motioned on the floor of the Idaho House of Representatives for a temporary exception to the rules, so that she might be able to safely fulfill her duties. When Rep. Davis was 16, she became permanently paralyzed from the chest down in a skiing accident. That didn’t stop her from becoming a seven-time Paralympic skiing medalist, and being elected to represent Idaho’s 26th legislative district.
Her condition does however, make her 37-times more likely to die of respiratory conditions caused by COVID-19, and sitting for hours at a time in a room of 50 unmasked colleagues for the next three months poses a serious risk to her life. So she asked her peers to allow her to vote from a safe location within Boise for this session only, a modest request in an extraordinary time. But the Republicans that voted on her motion, many of whom take few precautions to keep her safe in the first place, unanimously rejected her request.
Their vain commitment to tradition in light of a serious threat to Muffy’s health reminds me of those who were more concerned with Jesus’s adherence to Sabbath customs, than with the welfare of those he would unlawfully help. When a man with a withered hand presented himself in the synagogue on such an occasion, Jesus asked in anticipation of an objection to the healing miracle he was about to perform, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?”
As lawmakers it would serve us well to remember that the purpose of the laws we write and the rules we enforce are not for thoughtless obedience.They are for our own benefit, to do good, to save lives, even that of a peer, humbly seeking relief.
