St
Luke’s,
“There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days
and be cured, and not on the Sabbath.”
I have spent most of the past week in Hamilton
at a meeting and most of the week before that recuperating from surgery, so I
knew that when I got in to the office on Friday I would have a ton of work
waiting for me and I also knew that in between answering dozens of emails, opening
scores of mail and returning a mass of messages I would have to write a sermon
for Sunday.
I mentioned this to one of my colleagues at the
meeting and he said, ‘Oh, the gospel’s easy on Sunday,
it’s just the crippled woman.’ And it’s true. I have to admit that there are
some passages I discover when it comes to sermon time and think, ‘great, that’s
simple,’ and this might have been one of them. I know the story – most of us do
– and seems pretty straight forward; a crippled woman
comes to Jesus outside the synagogue after Sabbath services. Jesus heals her
and the leader of the synagogue goes ape because he healed someone on the
Sabbath when all forms of work were banned, and healing, after all, was a big
part of Jesus’ business. Jesus, though, replies by pointing out they wouldn’t
leave their donkey without water on the Sabbath, so why leave the woman to
suffer? Easy. Jesus caring = good guy, synagogue
leader uncaring = bad guy. Done!
If only it were all that simple. Few things, in
my experience, are that straight forward when it comes to the Gospel, and I’m
grateful to an Australian for helping me to figure this one out. Bill Loader is
a Biblical scholar who’s done a number of workshops in this country and I have
to acknowledge that most of what I’m going to say this morning comes from his
ideas, beginning with putting right this idea that Jesus’ argument shoots the
synagogue leader down in flames.
“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?”
Once again, if there were ever any question why
it is that Jesus ended up on the wrong side of a cross, here’s at least part of
the answer. Without wasting time on politeness or protocol, Jesus lays into his
critics with this supposedly award winning question that, as far as I was
concerned anyway, settles the issue outright, but does it?
We could argue quite rightly, I suspect, that
taking ones animals to the water to drink was a matter of survival. Left
without in the Middle Eastern heat an ox or donkey might not last twenty-four
hours. The crippled woman, however, had been crippled for eighteen years. Let’s
be fair, the synagogue leader has a point – no one’s complaining about the
healing, but couldn’t it have waited another day?
I freely admit that if I were to honestly see
myself in this story I’d probably be the synagogue leader. He knows the rules
and the regulations and the traditions and the rituals and he knows the way
things are meant to be done, and I can respect that. I know the ways things
should be done too – usually my way!
In this case the leader is simply standing up
for the right and proper way things are done. Jesus responds with a life or
death argument, but the woman clearly wasn’t in any imminent danger of dying,
so it wasn’t a very good argument, and if this were simply a debate about
healing on the Sabbath I’d have to say Jesus doesn’t do well, but really it’s
not. At heart this is a much deeper and more profound issue which isn’t really
about what is and isn’t allowed or accepted. Jesus doesn’t really try to
counter the leader’s point effectively because their ways of approaching the
issue are based on radically different assumptions when it comes to what God
really wants.
We’re all, I’m sure, reasonably familiar with
the Jewish Law – the rules and regulations and rituals and routines that
underpinned the day-to-day life of Jewish people then and now. We can, I
suspect, get the idea from readings like this one that Jesus was somehow
uninterested in the Law, that he ignored it or deliberately set out to subvert
it and replace it with new and different understandings, but if we think that
we’re wrong. Later in the early Church things would be different. Paul without
doubt sets out to replace the Law with what he describes in our epistle reading
today as ‘a new covenant’. Jesus, though, never sets out to replace or even
ignore the Law. Just a couple of pages on from the story we’ve heard today
Jesus tells his disciples that, “it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than
for stroke of a letter of the Law to be dropped.” Jesus was a believer in the
Law, a keeper of the Law and a defender of the Law. He was also, however, a
re-interpreter of the Law.
For
Jesus the issue at the heart of today’s Gospel reading wasn’t on what days was
it permissible to heal, but rather what is the underlying foundation – the
theology behind – the role of the Law and Scripture? And for Jesus that wasn’t
simply an academic exercise, or the basis for a scholarly debate among religious
leaders. For Jesus it cut to the heart of the whole of life, and on that point
he and the synagogue leader would probably have been in complete agreement.
Ask
any rabbi what the foundation of the Law was and you would have received the
same answer; “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.” Everyone agrees on
that point and on the point that the love of God needs to show itself in
actions, no problem there. What comes next though is interpreting what that
means. For the synagogue leader, and for most other religious leaders, it meant
keeping the commandments, including keeping the Sabbath. That was the only
sensible option and behind it lies an understanding –
an image - of a God who demands obedience and loyalty and service. The focus,
then, becomes working out what it takes to keep the commandments, the means to
achieving that and then doing it, simple. Devotion to God, then, is measured by
how diligently the commandments are kept and everything else falls in behind
that priority.
Jesus
probably wouldn’t have disagreed, but with a very subtle difference. If we look
a little more closely at the Gospel as a whole what we find is that Jesus’
entire life, all his words, all his actions, are based on a vital question;
what is God really like?
How
we answer that question is vital. If the
answer is something like God is a king who demands and deserves loyalty and
obedience, then things move on in that direction. But what if God’s not like
that? What if God’s main focus isn’t on obedience, but love? Love for all of
creation? If that’s our understanding of God then loving God moves from keeping
commandments to caring for God’s creation, for God’s people. God then is not
concerned with being the boss, with being obeyed, with everything being all
about God, but rather with healing and giving and restoration and encouragement
and all the things that we do to make someone feel loved and cared for. This, then, is the assumption that Jesus works
from; an assumption that God wants us to sort out our priorities and recognize
that God’s main focus in on loving and caring for creation, including us, and
that everything else is subservient to that.
Which isn’t to say that nothing else matters. Jesus remained a supporter of the Law. Rules and
regulations and traditions and rituals are all necessary and helpful and help
to give our lives order and meaning, but they will all become burdens, Jesus
says, if we allow them to become the ends rather than
the means. When anything ceases to be seen in the light of God’s overwhelming
desire to see people loved and cared for – whether it be our traditions or
rules or even our scriptures and our prayers – they become ends in themselves
and lead to ridiculous conflicts and confusion as people try to work out
whether they need to help someone in need or serve God, and fail to recognize –
as the synagogue leader does – that these things are one and the same.
We
need to be careful, I believe, about how we use stories like this one which
deliberately set up Jesus and the religious leaders as opposites and use
stereotypes to describe them. Stereotypes are stereotypes, of course, because
they contain some truth, but it is exaggerated truth. If we start to judge or
caricature all Jewish leaders and Judaism itself on this story we will end up
on dangerous, offensive and wildly inaccurate ground.
But
then we don’t need to look any further than the Christian Church to find the
same issues. How do we understand the scriptures? What’s more
important, obeying God or providing healing and hospitality to people?
The list could go on and we find each and every one of its points in our
churches today, as we do the most important issue of all, which is that how we
imagine God is still shaped by how we imagine what people should aim to be.
For
centuries people with money, with education, with political power or social
status have been the people most valued in our culture. Whether consciously or
not those people, and the values they usually represent, have been seen as
having more worth than those without the money or education and so on. They are
the people we want our children to grow up to be. And as this was seen, whether
deliberately or not, as the pinnacle of achievement that is how we imagined God
as well, because God must represent the most that we can imagine.
Much
of what Jesus taught and did was based on changing the way God was imagined,
which is why it was so unpopular among those who were comfortable with the
status quo and much more accepted by those who weren’t in that crowd. Jesus
dared to imagine a very different God. Rather than an all-powerful king or
strictly disciplined father, Jesus imagined a mother searching for a lost coin
and a grateful parent running down the road to greet a long-lost son. Obedience
and servitude gave way to affection and caring. It was a very different way to
imagine God which led to very different ways of understanding human life and
scriptural tradition. It changed everything and it changed nothing.
We
have to accept, I believe, that both sides portrayed in this gospel story
reflect a deep and genuine devotion committed to protecting things of
everlasting value. Both are based on scripture. Both claim divine authority.
Both believe they represent God. It all looks spookily like so many conflicts
we find today. Perhaps we can find some ways forward here?