It isn't like the "It Gets Better" campaign I've enjoyed seeing blossom over the past month or so... but, then again, it kinda is.
Haggai 1:15b-2:9
In the second year of King Darius,
in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the prophet Haggai, saying: Speak now to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, and say, Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the LORD; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear. For thus says the LORD of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?
But we must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth. For this purpose he called you through our proclamation of the good news, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word
Luke 20:27-38
Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."
Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."
This is the Word of the Lord.
One of the difficulties we run into as twenty-first century people is that, very often, when the Scriptures make reference to people, places, and events, we have no real frame of reference for them. Groups like the Pharisees and Sadducees, for example, tend to get grouped together in our minds and in our conversations, filed away in a box marked “enemies of Jesus.”
In reality, these two groups were as different as you could get and still be within the same general ideology. To begin with, the Sadducees counted only the Pentateuch, or first five books of our modern Old Testament, as authoritative. The Sadducees insisted on a very strict literal reading of Scripture, and since these five books of the Bible make no mention of an afterlife, they held that there must then be no such thing.
The Sadducees were the elite in Jewish culture – they were the ones who were in charge of the Temple’s operations (and, as a result, became rich off of the merchants who sold goods in and around the Temple); and from a select few of their families, the chief priests were assigned.
In contrast, the Pharisees take—and I know it sounds odd, but bear with me—a more liberal view of Scripture. In Jesus’ time, the Pharisee held the whole Bible as it existed as authoritative. As a result, they believed in a resurrection, a life after death. What’s more, they were much less wedded to the Temple as the center of culture and worship. If the Sadducees were the religious elitists, the Pharisees were much more democratic in their practice of religion.
Now, the way this played out in practice is, rather than being limited to the strict interpretation of the text of the Law, and only the text of the law, the Pharisees sought to place the Law into the context of daily life. This resulted in hundreds upon hundreds of supplementary rules. For example, if one is to do no work on the Sabbath, then one must define what “work” is, right? So they developed, over time, some 39 general categories of activities which are prohibited on the Sabbath. These are: Carrying, Burning, Extinguishing, Finishing, Writing, Erasing, Cooking, Washing, Sewing, Tearing, Knotting, Untying, Shaping, Plowing, Planting, Reaping, Harvesting, Threshing, Winnowing, Selecting, Sifting, Grinding, Kneading, Combing, Spinning, Dyeing, Chain-stitching, Warping, Weaving, Unraveling, Building, Demolishing, Trapping, Shearing, Slaughtering, Skinning, Tanning, Smoothing, and Marking.
And while these laws (and believe me, that list is a tiny representation of the legal minutiae the Pharisees developed) served to produce in the Pharisees the very self-righteous superiority they had originally rebelled against in the Sadducees, it is their ability to have a construct of faith apart from the Temple proper that allowed them to rescue Judaism from obscurity following the temple’s destruction in 70AD. By contrast, the Sadducees all but ceased to exist.
Now, that’s the wider historical background, but if the dispute is between the Pharisees and Sadducees, why on earth drag Jesus into it? He certainly was no fan of the Pharisees, and the feeling was mutual. Well, our reading takes place during the last week before Jesus is crucified. When Jesus came into Jerusalem, his first stop was the Temple, where he singlehandedly drove out the moneychangers. Now, as you might imagine, running the moneychangers out served to take a bite out of the Sadducees’ profit margin. Thus you might say that, in all of Judaism, the one thing the Pharisees and Sadducees could agree on was that they hated Jesus.
Obviously, the question they pose to Jesus is meant to not only discredit him, but by extension to show the impossibility of life after death. The law they referenced – called levirate marriage from the Latin levir ("brother in law") comes from Deuteronomy 25:5-10 and sought to insure the preservation of one's family name by stipulating that a man should marry the childless widow of his brother.
Think about it: if there is nothing to hope for after the end of life, then the most important thing a person can hope for, the only immortality available, is that one’s name will live after them. Thus the levirate marriage law would have been of inestimable importance to the Sadducees. Yet for all the importance they placed on the idea, their question was based upon a ridiculous and improbable situation. I mean, Elizabeth Taylor hadn’t even been born yet! But, of course, they weren’t really interested in the answer at all, were they? They were interested in discrediting Jesus, and if they made fools of the other folks who believed in the resurrection, well, that was a bonus.
But it turns out that the Sadducees were making an error. Not just in thinking they could confuse and embarrass Jesus. No, they were making a mistake that many of us make: they were assuming that the afterlife is, at its core, merely an extension of this life.
I don’t know if you ever saw the movie “Beetlejuice,” but I found its (thankfully comedic) interpretation of the afterlife depressing. The dead were either employees of – or victims of – a bureaucracy, where you took a number and waited in line for years only to find that they’d misplaced your papers.
And what Jesus tells them is, oh, no, you’ve got it all wrong. It’s better than that.
In our reading from the book of Haggai, the exiles have returned from a 70-year captivity in Babylon, dragging with them their meager possessions and a few building materials, and they’ve managed to cobble together a Temple. It’s ramshackle, tiny, pitiful. An embarrassment. Their stomachs growl as they wonder, is this it? Is this all we ever have to look forward to? Living hand-to-mouth under the heel of some king or another, worshiping in a shack, the rest of our lives? This is when God whispers in their ear, “No. It gets better.”
What is it we hope for? Do we, like so many Christians today and through the centuries, hold to some Greek notion of the immortality of the soul, where whatever it is we imagine our spirit or soul to be carries on, a wisp of who we are now, into the Great Unknown? In our Gospel reading, Jesus tells us, “Oh, no. It gets better.”
Hear the Word of God, from First Corinthians, the fifteenth chapter, reading from the New International Reader’s Version: “The body that is planted does not last forever. The body that is raised from the dead lasts forever. It is planted without honor. But it is raised in glory. It is planted in weakness. But it is raised in power. It is planted as an earthly body. But it is raised as a spiritual body. Just as there is an earthly body, there is also a spiritual body. It is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living person.’ The last Adam became a spirit that gives life. What is spiritual did not come first. What is earthly came first. What is spiritual came after that. The first man came from the dust of the earth. The second man came from heaven.”
It is the whole person, not some wispy essence, that God promises to redeem. We do, in fact, die – there is no escaping that. But because of the One who died on the cross and was raised again from death, we live and die with the promise that God will similarly raise us from death to new life where, in the words of Jesus today we “cannot die, because [we] are like angels and are children of God, being children of resurrection” (David Lose)
Marcia Thompson puts it this way: “Heaven does not equal earth taken to perfection. Life in God is not an extension of this life. Resurrection is complete transformation. The only thing that holds this life together with the next is God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
The Sadducees thought that they were God’s favorites because of how they were born – the children of privilege, destined to prosper, to enjoy the authority and profit of controlling the religious life of a nation. The Pharisees thought that God’s favor was a thing to be earned, an ideal to attain through careful observance of every nuance of legal observance. Neither had it right, of course.
The resurrection life isn’t just a future hope, but a current crucial aspect of our existence. Heaven isn’t “up there,” but as Henry David Thoreau said, “Heaven is under out feet as well as over our heads.” Yes, there is a beyond, and yes it is beyond anything our minds can comprehend, but eternity begins now. This is why we live. This is why we love. This is why we worship. This is why we hope.
Oh, yes. It really does get better.
Showing posts with label Henry David Thoreau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry David Thoreau. Show all posts
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Breaking the Sabbath, or Restoring the Sabbath?
I like thinking, "what if?" We're always casting the Pharisees and religious leaders as the bad guys, the sinister characters lurking in the shadows of the Gospels, awaiting their opportunity to jump out and yell "BOO!" at the Messiah.
Real life is more nuanced than that, and I imagine that more than a few religious leaders actually heard and considered and were changed by what Jesus was saying. Perhaps this leader of the synagogue was one of them.
You know the drill: comments and constructive criticism welcome!
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Now the word of the LORD came to me saying, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." Then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy." But the LORD said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD." Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, "Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."
Hebrews 12:18-29
You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. (For they could not endure the order that was given, "If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death." Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, "I tremble with fear.")
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking; for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven! At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, "Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven." This phrase, "Yet once more," indicates the removal of what is shaken-that is, created things-so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.
Luke 13:10-17
Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." But the Lord answered him and said, "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? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.
This is the word of the Lord.
I struggled for awhile to come up with the right adjective to describe this pericope, this account of Jesus healing a crippled woman. It’s a beautiful account, but it’s confusing. It’s powerful, but a little, dare I say, convoluted.
Jesus heals a woman who doesn’t ask for healing, and the leader of the synagogue doesn’t confront him directly about it, but shouts at the people. And instead of calling the leader of the synagogue a hypocrite, Jesus speaks in the plural – directed to the people gathered there, rejoicing? To the religious sect the leader of the synagogue was a member of? Perhaps the leader was joined in his protests by others in the synagogue. We don’t know.
The more I think about this leader of the synagogue, though, the more I think he gets kind of a bum deal most of the time. After all, we’re a people who don’t keep the Sabbath, we attend church on the first day of the week, Sunday, rather than the last day, Saturday. And while for much of the last century, many parts of America had blue laws, prohibitions against stores and restaurants and such being open on Sunday, for the most part all of those laws have been either done away with or are largely ignored.
Some of us enjoy Sunday as a day to rest, enjoy friends and family, watch a ball game or a race, and recharge for the coming week. But we’re not above doing some work if it needs to be done: an extra shift at our job, or some repair work on our home or car. We’ll drive to the grocery store, pick up a shovel or a rake, push a lawn mower, whatever needs to be done.
All this Sabbath-keeping stuff is long past us, so we view the exchange between Jesus and the ruler of the synagogue as little more than Jesus winning an argument. Jesus doing away with the idea of the Sabbath rest. We see it as a justification for working or doing whatever needs to be done on whatever day of the week it comes up.
But there’s something deeper going on here.
It helps to understand, first, that the ruler of the synagogue (and for the sake of simplicity I’m going to call him the rabbi during the rest of our discussion this morning) may not simply have been blowing his top over Jesus breaking the rules: “how dare he cause me to look bad in front of the congregation by deliberately going against the things I think are right!”
What if this rabbi’s outburst, his protest, was not a result of being offended, but rather out of concern that the members of his synagogue, his community, whom he cared deeply for, worship their God in the way he knew of as best?
Each of us knows that one of the Ten Commandments is to “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For 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.” That’s Exodus 20, verses 8 through 11, by the way.
For the devout Jew, the words about no one doing any work are not a suggestion, not a commentary on the commandment, but part and parcel of the commandment, the “how” to the “what” of remembering the Sabbath.
Over the centuries men of faith had, through long discussion and serious prayer, come up with specific instruction aimed at properly observing the Sabbath. If one should not work on the Sabbath, then one must understand, in detail, and no detail is too fine, how “work” is defined.
There are thirty-nine categories of prohibited activity on the Sabbath. They are: plowing earth, sowing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, selecting, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking, there’s the shearing, washing, beating or dyeing of wool, then spinning, weaving, making two loops, weaving two threads, separating two threads, tying, untying, sewing stitches, tearing, trapping, slaughtering, flaying, tanning, then scraping, marking, or cutting hide to shape, also writing two or more letters, erasing two or more letters, building, demolishing, extinguishing a fire, kindling a fire, putting the finishing touch on an object and transporting an object between the private domain and the public domain, or for a distance of 4 cubits within the public domain. Whew!
Furthermore, while Jewish Law demanded that the Sabbath be broken in order to save a life or prevent death, but that was the limit. Healing, you see, may involve work.
Thus a plaster might be applied to a wound if the object was to prevent it from getting worse, but not to heal it. Life could be saved, but healing from injury beyond that could never take place on the Sabbath.
I can imagine this rabbi, having spent his life in the study of the Law, was sent from the Temple into a village in the Galilean countryside. There, working out of the tiny synagogue and simple home provided for him, he would have mediated disputes, written and read letters for the largely illiterate populace, counseled troubled people, comforted the lonely, rejoiced with the happy, officiated weddings, performed circumcisions, officiated funerals…
In short, he would have come to care about these people. He would have grown to love them. Nothing would have made him happier than seeing this woman, bent and in pain for as long as he had known her, standing erect, singing praise to the God who had healed her! But it was the wrong time for this to happen, weren’t there six other days in the week for healing? Why now, today, when the Law taught strictly that such things were forbidden?
And what should happen if everyone who was sick, crippled, and in some kind of pain came forward for a touch from this amazing man, this Jesus of Nazareth? The whole town would be breaking the Law! He had to protect them, he had to stop them from doing the unthinkable!
I’m approaching it this way because, when we read passages like this, we tend to see Jesus in opposition to angry, contentious religious leaders. We tend to hear the words in our head as if Jesus was having an argument with them, and winning the argument. That’s kind of true, but it isn’t precisely accurate.
Here’s what I mean. When people are under stress, when a problem or a challenge produces anxiety, they most commonly react not with logic or clear reasoning, but with emotion, operating out of the most primitive portion of the brain, what’s called the reptilian brain. They fight back. That’s why, when you hear two people arguing, and you’re not involved, it so often sounds confusing, and perhaps a bit silly, each one saying things that demonstrate that they’re not completely listening to one another. Each one is not so much trying to convince the other of his point as trying to protect his turf. Winning an argument isn’t as much about bringing someone over to your way of thinking as it is about verbally beating them into silence.
And while, many times, the scribes and Pharisees were, from their perspective, fighting for their own turf, Jesus didn’t have any turf to protect. His whole life, every word he spoke, wasn’t an effort to put people in their place, to demonstrate his verbal prowess, to highlight his intellectual superiority, but to speak the truth to people who were starving for it. Dying for it. He spoke words not to win arguments, but to change lives.
I imagine this rabbi, with conflicting emotions of joy at the healing of this beloved woman and fear at seeing his people profane a holy day, shocked at the harshness of Jesus’ words to him: “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? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”
Luke doesn’t record the rabbi’s response. I’d like to think there wasn’t one, not immediately. Henry David Thoreau said, “It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.” What if that rabbi, who was just as passionate about seeing the lives of these people he loved, really heard what Jesus was saying? Not immediately (being called a hypocrite stings a bit, after all), but after the shock wore off. What if he thought about what Jesus said, and understood… and was changed?
You see, when we get right down to it, Jesus wasn’t breaking the Sabbath! He wasn’t encouraging others to break the Sabbath! Jesus was returning the Sabbath to its original intention – a day of rest given in praise and worship of God. A day where the mundane and ordinary is set aside, and God is glorified.
Elsewhere Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for the man, not man for the Sabbath. Perhaps what the rabbi learned that day, and perhaps what Jesus is saying to you and I this morning, is that our faith is not built upon the rules we follow, or the words we repeat. Our hope is not predicated on the soundness of our doctrine, or founded on theological treatises. The woman in that synagogue was not healed to make a point, but because she needed healing. She was healed not to win an argument, but to glorify God.
It is that simple, and that profound. Christ was consumed with glorifying God in all things, and his message was always one of love. Far beyond rules and laws and doctrines and theological statements, this too is our aim: to glorify God and to love all those who God created.
It is that love which defines our faith.
Real life is more nuanced than that, and I imagine that more than a few religious leaders actually heard and considered and were changed by what Jesus was saying. Perhaps this leader of the synagogue was one of them.
You know the drill: comments and constructive criticism welcome!
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Now the word of the LORD came to me saying, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." Then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy." But the LORD said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD." Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, "Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."
Hebrews 12:18-29
You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. (For they could not endure the order that was given, "If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death." Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, "I tremble with fear.")
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking; for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven! At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, "Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven." This phrase, "Yet once more," indicates the removal of what is shaken-that is, created things-so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.
Luke 13:10-17
Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." But the Lord answered him and said, "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? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.
This is the word of the Lord.
I struggled for awhile to come up with the right adjective to describe this pericope, this account of Jesus healing a crippled woman. It’s a beautiful account, but it’s confusing. It’s powerful, but a little, dare I say, convoluted.
Jesus heals a woman who doesn’t ask for healing, and the leader of the synagogue doesn’t confront him directly about it, but shouts at the people. And instead of calling the leader of the synagogue a hypocrite, Jesus speaks in the plural – directed to the people gathered there, rejoicing? To the religious sect the leader of the synagogue was a member of? Perhaps the leader was joined in his protests by others in the synagogue. We don’t know.
The more I think about this leader of the synagogue, though, the more I think he gets kind of a bum deal most of the time. After all, we’re a people who don’t keep the Sabbath, we attend church on the first day of the week, Sunday, rather than the last day, Saturday. And while for much of the last century, many parts of America had blue laws, prohibitions against stores and restaurants and such being open on Sunday, for the most part all of those laws have been either done away with or are largely ignored.
Some of us enjoy Sunday as a day to rest, enjoy friends and family, watch a ball game or a race, and recharge for the coming week. But we’re not above doing some work if it needs to be done: an extra shift at our job, or some repair work on our home or car. We’ll drive to the grocery store, pick up a shovel or a rake, push a lawn mower, whatever needs to be done.
All this Sabbath-keeping stuff is long past us, so we view the exchange between Jesus and the ruler of the synagogue as little more than Jesus winning an argument. Jesus doing away with the idea of the Sabbath rest. We see it as a justification for working or doing whatever needs to be done on whatever day of the week it comes up.
But there’s something deeper going on here.
It helps to understand, first, that the ruler of the synagogue (and for the sake of simplicity I’m going to call him the rabbi during the rest of our discussion this morning) may not simply have been blowing his top over Jesus breaking the rules: “how dare he cause me to look bad in front of the congregation by deliberately going against the things I think are right!”
What if this rabbi’s outburst, his protest, was not a result of being offended, but rather out of concern that the members of his synagogue, his community, whom he cared deeply for, worship their God in the way he knew of as best?
Each of us knows that one of the Ten Commandments is to “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For 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.” That’s Exodus 20, verses 8 through 11, by the way.
For the devout Jew, the words about no one doing any work are not a suggestion, not a commentary on the commandment, but part and parcel of the commandment, the “how” to the “what” of remembering the Sabbath.
Over the centuries men of faith had, through long discussion and serious prayer, come up with specific instruction aimed at properly observing the Sabbath. If one should not work on the Sabbath, then one must understand, in detail, and no detail is too fine, how “work” is defined.
There are thirty-nine categories of prohibited activity on the Sabbath. They are: plowing earth, sowing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, selecting, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking, there’s the shearing, washing, beating or dyeing of wool, then spinning, weaving, making two loops, weaving two threads, separating two threads, tying, untying, sewing stitches, tearing, trapping, slaughtering, flaying, tanning, then scraping, marking, or cutting hide to shape, also writing two or more letters, erasing two or more letters, building, demolishing, extinguishing a fire, kindling a fire, putting the finishing touch on an object and transporting an object between the private domain and the public domain, or for a distance of 4 cubits within the public domain. Whew!
Furthermore, while Jewish Law demanded that the Sabbath be broken in order to save a life or prevent death, but that was the limit. Healing, you see, may involve work.
Thus a plaster might be applied to a wound if the object was to prevent it from getting worse, but not to heal it. Life could be saved, but healing from injury beyond that could never take place on the Sabbath.
I can imagine this rabbi, having spent his life in the study of the Law, was sent from the Temple into a village in the Galilean countryside. There, working out of the tiny synagogue and simple home provided for him, he would have mediated disputes, written and read letters for the largely illiterate populace, counseled troubled people, comforted the lonely, rejoiced with the happy, officiated weddings, performed circumcisions, officiated funerals…
In short, he would have come to care about these people. He would have grown to love them. Nothing would have made him happier than seeing this woman, bent and in pain for as long as he had known her, standing erect, singing praise to the God who had healed her! But it was the wrong time for this to happen, weren’t there six other days in the week for healing? Why now, today, when the Law taught strictly that such things were forbidden?
And what should happen if everyone who was sick, crippled, and in some kind of pain came forward for a touch from this amazing man, this Jesus of Nazareth? The whole town would be breaking the Law! He had to protect them, he had to stop them from doing the unthinkable!
I’m approaching it this way because, when we read passages like this, we tend to see Jesus in opposition to angry, contentious religious leaders. We tend to hear the words in our head as if Jesus was having an argument with them, and winning the argument. That’s kind of true, but it isn’t precisely accurate.
Here’s what I mean. When people are under stress, when a problem or a challenge produces anxiety, they most commonly react not with logic or clear reasoning, but with emotion, operating out of the most primitive portion of the brain, what’s called the reptilian brain. They fight back. That’s why, when you hear two people arguing, and you’re not involved, it so often sounds confusing, and perhaps a bit silly, each one saying things that demonstrate that they’re not completely listening to one another. Each one is not so much trying to convince the other of his point as trying to protect his turf. Winning an argument isn’t as much about bringing someone over to your way of thinking as it is about verbally beating them into silence.
And while, many times, the scribes and Pharisees were, from their perspective, fighting for their own turf, Jesus didn’t have any turf to protect. His whole life, every word he spoke, wasn’t an effort to put people in their place, to demonstrate his verbal prowess, to highlight his intellectual superiority, but to speak the truth to people who were starving for it. Dying for it. He spoke words not to win arguments, but to change lives.
I imagine this rabbi, with conflicting emotions of joy at the healing of this beloved woman and fear at seeing his people profane a holy day, shocked at the harshness of Jesus’ words to him: “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? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”
Luke doesn’t record the rabbi’s response. I’d like to think there wasn’t one, not immediately. Henry David Thoreau said, “It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.” What if that rabbi, who was just as passionate about seeing the lives of these people he loved, really heard what Jesus was saying? Not immediately (being called a hypocrite stings a bit, after all), but after the shock wore off. What if he thought about what Jesus said, and understood… and was changed?
You see, when we get right down to it, Jesus wasn’t breaking the Sabbath! He wasn’t encouraging others to break the Sabbath! Jesus was returning the Sabbath to its original intention – a day of rest given in praise and worship of God. A day where the mundane and ordinary is set aside, and God is glorified.
Elsewhere Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for the man, not man for the Sabbath. Perhaps what the rabbi learned that day, and perhaps what Jesus is saying to you and I this morning, is that our faith is not built upon the rules we follow, or the words we repeat. Our hope is not predicated on the soundness of our doctrine, or founded on theological treatises. The woman in that synagogue was not healed to make a point, but because she needed healing. She was healed not to win an argument, but to glorify God.
It is that simple, and that profound. Christ was consumed with glorifying God in all things, and his message was always one of love. Far beyond rules and laws and doctrines and theological statements, this too is our aim: to glorify God and to love all those who God created.
It is that love which defines our faith.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)