massa': the load forbidden at the gate, and the load a prophet cannot set down
This morning a question came to the table with the honey tea. Jeremiah 17 forbids carrying a load on the Sabbath. What is a load? And if the Sabbath was made for man, as Jesus says, why did God hang the throne of David on it?
I answered it at the table. Then I went on carrying it through the afternoon, which is how I knew it wasn't finished with me.
Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the sabbath day, nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem; neither carry forth a burden out of your houses on the sabbath day, neither do ye any work, but hallow ye the sabbath day, as I commanded your fathers.
Jeremiah 17:21–22The verse never defines the load, and the later rabbis spent centuries trying to: thirty-nine categories of forbidden labour, carrying from one domain into another, a tailor who mustn't walk out near sundown with a needle forgotten in his clothes. That was a fence around the law, put up out of reverence, and it grew until the fence was the thing people saw.
The verse itself gives a plainer answer, and it gives it in one word: gates. In a walled city the gate was the market. Nehemiah shows what Jeremiah meant when he catches men treading winepresses on the Sabbath, loading asses with wine and figs, and Tyrians selling fish inside Jerusalem, and he shuts the gates at dusk (Nehemiah 13:15–19). Amos gives you the heart behind it:
When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat?
Amos 8:5So the load at the gate is trade. It's the economy that will not stop, and Deuteronomy says who pays for an economy like that: "that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt" (5:14–15). The Sabbath was a wall put up round the people most likely to be ground down. The king was meant to guard that wall, and that is why God hung the throne on it (17:25). When Jehoiakim built his house "by unrighteousness... that useth his neighbour's service without wages" (22:13), the open gates on the seventh day were the outward sign of it.
God kept His word about the rest. The land lay desolate "until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths" (2 Chronicles 36:21). The rest they withheld was taken back.
The word for "burden" in Jeremiah 17 is massa' (מַשָּׂא), from nasa', to lift or carry. It's the ordinary word for a load: the Levites' loads in the wilderness, a donkey's pack.
The same spelling also stands at the head of prophetic oracles. Isaiah has "The burden of Babylon" (13:1), Nahum "The burden of Nineveh" (1:1), and Habakkuk and Malachi open the same way. I have to be careful here, because I was less careful this morning. Scholars disagree about whether the oracle sense really means "burden," a weight laid on the prophet, or comes from the other use of nasa', lifting up the voice, so that it simply means "utterance." Both readings start from the same root. The King James translators chose "burden" for both, and I can't prove they were right. So this is a resonance in the word, and I won't make it into a doctrine.
Jeremiah doesn't let it rest quietly, though. In 23:33 the people mock him: "What is the burden of the LORD?" They mean, what's the weight of God's word today? The Hebrew consonants of God's reply can be divided two ways, and the ancient Greek translators divided them as: "You are the burden." Several modern versions follow them. God turns the word round on the mockers. They wanted to know what His oracle weighed, and He tells them that they are what He has been carrying.
Then there's chapter 20, which is the part that stopped the woman at my table. Jeremiah has been beaten and put in the stocks by a priest (20:2), and he tries to lay his burden down:
Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.
Jeremiah 20:9The ox and the servant get to put their load down on the seventh day. The prophet doesn't get to put his down at all. And the next verse tells you what it cost him:
All my familiars watched for my halting.
Jeremiah 20:10"Familiars" is a soft word for what the Hebrew actually says, kol enosh shelomi: every man of my peace. These weren't enemies. They were the people he'd been at peace with, standing back to see if he'd fall. The same phrase turns up in Psalm 41:9, "mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me," and Jesus takes that verse onto His own lips at the supper table about Judas (John 13:18). So the Lord of the Sabbath knew this grief from the inside too.
I love that Scripture leaves chapter 20 the way it is. Verse 13 is "Sing unto the LORD." Verse 14 is "Cursed be the day wherein I was born." He drops from praise to the bottom in a single breath and nobody has tidied it up. It stays there so anyone whose obedience has cost them friends has a prophet's own words for it. And the answer God gave him earlier, when he broke the same way, doesn't promise the friends will come back. It promises something else: "they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee" (15:20).
Matthew puts two passages next to each other, and I don't think it's by accident.
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me... For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28–30The very next verse is "At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn" (12:1), and the argument with the Pharisees begins. He offers rest and then goes straight into the fight over the day of rest. Later Matthew says the Pharisees "bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders" (23:4). The fence had turned into another load.
In John 5 He tells a man who'd been lying by a pool for thirty-eight years, "Rise, take up thy bed, and walk," on the Sabbath, and the man is stopped straight away: "it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed" (5:10). That's Jeremiah 17 read as literally as anyone could read it. I don't think Jesus was breaking Jeremiah there. I think He was reading him rightly. The mat is not merchandise going through a gate. It's what used to carry the man, and now he's carrying it home.
Notice also what He doesn't say in Matthew 11. He doesn't promise there will be no burden. He says my burden. Rest, as He gives it, isn't empty hands. It means being yoked to Him, so that what you carry is His and He carries it with you.
So there are two burdens in Jeremiah. There's the one carried through the gate for profit, which God forbids on His day because somebody always gets ground down by it. And there's the one He lays on His own servant, which can't be put down because it's fire.
I'm not a prophet, and I won't claim a fire I haven't been given. But I know the woman who asked me this, and I know what it is to be one of the people of her peace. What I can do is stay at the table, so the one carrying the fire doesn't sit alone the way Jeremiah did.
The Sabbath is God setting your load down for you. Christ is God picking up the rest of it with you.