I don't know about you, but I find it kind of ironic that the Supreme Court depictions of the Ten Commandments are (according to orthodox Jews, at least) an egregious violation of the second of those Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image." In any event, the Ten Commandments remain a subject of enduring controversy-not just regarding their display, but in their interpretation, as well. Today, we seem to be caught up not in their literal meaning, but in their symbolic meaning to conservatives and liberals alike. To conservatives, they represent one of the foundations of American law; to liberals, they represent an insidious undercutting of the very laws that have supposedly been built upon the Ten Commandments.

I'm not here, however, to reflect on the Supreme Court and the Second Commandment, but on an even earlier court case involving the Pharisees and the Fourth Commandment: "Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day."

In the gospel lesson we just heard, after the man born blind was healed, John tells us, "They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind." Although we can't know for certain, the Pharisees to whom the healed man was brought may even have been members of the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of first century Judaism. That this man was brought to the Pharisees would have come as no surprise to John's readers. After all, according to C. F. Moore's Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, "The Pharisees were a party whose endeavor it was to live in strict accordance with the Law…and to bring the people to a similar conformity."

As John explains, the issue before the Pharisaic judges was not primarily that the man had been healed, but that he had been healed on the Sabbath. One version of the Ten Commandments, found in Exodus 20:1-17, gives this explanation of the Fourth Commandment: "Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work-you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it."

So you see, the slapstick comedy of John chapter nine actually has a very serious premise: that Jesus, in doing something objectively good, is also breaking one of the top ten laws ever handed down to Israel, directly from God to Moses. How can such a man be from God if he breaks God's laws? Doesn't that automatically make him a sinner, and therefore disqualify him from any claim at all to being a prophet, let alone the Messiah of God?

It's important to realize how seriously Judaism has taken the Fourth Commandment. Nowadays, strictly orthodox Jews won't even flip a light switch on the Sabbath. If a light needs to be on during the Sabbath, it's turned on the day before and left on until sundown on Saturday. All food is prepared in advance, and nothing is even heated up; the Sabbath is a complete day of rest, without any work. Thus, in John chapter nine, the problem isn't even that the man had been healed on the Sabbath, but in how he was healed. Count one of the indictment reads: Jesus made mud and spread it on the man's eyes, which constitutes work. Count two of the indictment reads: Jesus ordered the man to go and do work on the Sabbath in telling him to wash the mud off in the pool of Siloam. To the Pharisees, this is an open-and-shut case. They understand the meaning of the commandment in clear and uncompromising terms: God said don't do any work on the Sabbath, making mud is work, therefore Jesus sinned by working on the Sabbath. Q.E.D.

But is it such an open-and-shut case? Jesus, in his own defense, asserts elsewhere in the gospel that "The Sabbath was made for Man and not Man for the Sabbath." In other words, the Sabbath is a gift from God to humans, and we have been entrusted with the responsibility of observing it with faithfulness. According to this way of thinking, the Fourth Commandment isn't primarily a prohibition from doing work, but an injunction to set apart at least one day a week as holy.

The commandment itself, after all, is "Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy." In Exodus, the primary example of how to keep it holy is to engage in recreation; and in particular, if you are going to kick back and relax on the Sabbath, you are not to force anyone else to take up your slack: if you get the Sabbath off, your employees get the Sabbath off. If you get it off, your spouse and children get it off, too. Even your animals get the day off. A day of rest and recreation, then, is about being free to remember God and rest in God's love for us, and it's about making sure that we let others do the same.

From this point of view, healing on the Sabbath is a way of freeing others to observe the Sabbath, too. And notice that to "observe" something, one must be able to "see" it. Once healed, the man born blind is able to see clearly, not only in a physical sense, but in a spiritual sense, as well. It is the people around him who are the blind ones. Most of his own townsfolk deny what they see with their own eyes: that this man has changed. Most of the Pharisees refuse to see God at work in this healing because they are blinded by their own legalism, and they want to make sure everyone else is blinded by it, too. In so doing, they create a conflict that leads to a division-a schism-among them.

In fact, from this point of view, if anyone is doing work on the Sabbath, it's the Pharisees. They expend a lot of energy trying to convince the healed man and everyone else that what happened was wrong. They engage in a long-winded dispute, essentially trying a court case, right then and there, on the Sabbath day! If that's not work, I don't know what is. What's more, since the commandment is that on the Sabbath you are not to work or force anyone else to work, the Pharisees, in compelling the healed man's parents to testify and in calling the healed man back not once, but twice, breaks both halves of the prohibition against work.

So, if you do want to get legalistic about the Fourth Commandment, there's plenty of ammo, not just against Jesus, but also against the legalistic Pharisees themselves! No wonder there was a schism. This is why, as I've said, the issue isn't ultimately about work, but about keeping the Sabbath holy. And when it comes to keeping the Sabbath holy, Jesus shows that there's a lot of room for interpretation.

One point that needs careful interpretation is the relationship of work to the Sabbath itself. Listen to the urgency in Jesus' voice: "'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work." At the very beginning of this story, John concedes that the healing that took place on the Sabbath was indeed a form of work. But far from asserting this work as being in conflict with God's will as expressed in the Fourth Commandment, John claims that the work that Jesus did on the Sabbath is not mere human labor, but God's work. John, in essence, is appealing to a higher court than the Pharisees' puppet tribunal. For whenever one does God's work, whatever day of the week it is, one is making that day a holy day. It is in making the Sabbath day holy that one keeps the commandment.

Not so open-and-shut anymore, is it? And that's where this story can enter our own day and age. When it comes to living God's commandments with faithfulness and integrity, there are very few open-and-shut cases. We all need to remember, especially in times of conflict, that we don't have all the answers, and that it's okay to live with ambiguity, remembering that such conflicts and ambiguities call us to deeper holiness and more faithful discipleship. When we strive for holiness of life, we cannot rely on literalist, legalistic interpretations of God's commands; rather, we must continually use discernment to distinguish between those things that are of God and that further the gospel, and those things that are not of God and hinder the gospel.

The man born blind shows a remarkable clarity of vision and discernment when he says, "We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.' We need to tap into the same discernment in our own lives.

Even when a case is open-and-shut, however, our responsibility to each other is not to split off from each other, as the Pharisees do when they find they can't agree, or to drive others out of our places of worship, as the Pharisees do to the healed man, but to engage in the costly disciplines of listening, mutual repentance, and reconciliation. After all, that's what Lent is all about. Lent gives us the opportunity to examine how well we have lived up to the Ten Commandments and to Jesus' Great Commandment that we love one another as he has loved us, and when we find that have failed in one respect or another-and we all have failed-to confess our sins, receive godly counsel, re-establish accountability and trust, and amend our lives, so that in the future, we keep not only the Sabbath day holy, but every day. Only then will we truly begin to keep the commandments.