Sabbath. Even in our secularized society the word carries a certain cachet, a picture of blessed rest and peace and inactivity. Many cultures do not have a concept of a frequent, regularly scheduled day of rest. It was definitely foreign to Greeks and Romans, who had to wait for certain, less frequent festivals to get a break from their daily grind. The Western world, especially North America, seems to have returned to that, and in some spheres it seems even relatively infrequent holidays are succumbing to a sustained onslaught in the name of progress and productivity.
Granted, the concept can be taken too far. In today's Gospel reading for Mass (Lk. 13.10-17) Jesus heals yet another person on the Jewish Sabbath and gets raked over the coals for it. The early American settlers included the Puritans and other like-minded sects who had as equally an inflexible idea of a weekly Sabbath, practiced on Sunday instead of Saturday (woe betide anyone caught doing anything that remotely smacked of FUN, for that too was work). Jesus' rejoinder to the leaders in the synagogue from today's reading is equally applicable to the Puritan forebears, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?" (Lk. 13.15) So caught up in being faithful to the commandment to honour the Sabbath day and to keep it holy, extremists trampled over the concept of mercy and release from bondage. (Lk. 13.16)
We do seem to have come full circle. There seems to be now in our culture a release from bondage that can be accomplished by protecting Sabbath rest. I have seen it in the American workplace where IT professionals in service and support functions can go as long as a month without let up, where people are on call 24/7/365 (366 for leap years), where merely asking for a day's break from being constantly at someone's beck and call can be career suicide. In breaking the stranglehold of irrational extreme Sabbath rest, we have instead created another wage-slave situation. Also, if someone is given regular time off, their wages are so poor that they often have to get another job that substantially overlaps the other, eliminating the time off.
Rest is important, but so are acts of mercy. An immediate need (which does not include a work project no matter how insistent the boss may be) should be our call to action. Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy, and deliverance from evil is indeed holy.