Luke 13:10-17
If
you were here last week and recall the Gospel reading, you will know that this
is our 2nd week in a row of Jesus calling the religious leaders
hypocrites. It is easy to villainize the
Jewish religious leaders---the Pharisees.
That has been done for millennia and unfortunately has led to considerable
anti-Jewish sentiment. I am not sure
that it is fair to beat up on the Pharisees.
I will admit that as a religious leader, I take it a tad
personally. I cringe a little every time
I hear Jesus call someone out for being a hypocrite. That is what he is doing…he is calling them
out—in front of everyone.
This
was the Jewish Sabbath at the local synagogue.
Everyone in the town was present.
While Jesus had no official standing in the community that we know of,
he must have been fairly well respected as he was allowed to teach in the
synagogue on the Sabbath. While he had a
certain amount of authority, he was still expected to follow the laws of the
Jewish faith. These laws were essential to the faith. No matter how great a
teacher, preacher or healer he was…he still had to follow the laws. One of the really important laws was that you
did not work on the Sabbath. That wasn’t
just any rule or law--that was a commandment.
When
we hear the word Sabbath, we think of going to church, relaxing a little, maybe
having a lazy day at home. That does not mean that we do any of those things,
but we assume that is the goal. When God
told us to rest on the 7th day, surely that is what he had in
mind…binge watching Netflix all day. Not
quite.
One of
the reasons that the fourth commandment mandated that people keep the Sabbath
was to recognize that the Hebrew people were no longer slaves and thus no longer
forced to work every day. Moses
delivered the 10 Commandments after the exodus.
The Hebrew people were released from bondage and free to rest. God was demanding not only that the people
who were listening rest from their labor, but that they make sure that their
servants don’t work. It’s a justice
issue. The nice thing about the Blue
laws (where businesses were closed on Sundays) was not just that church
attendance was higher but that these forced closures allowed everyone to have a
day off…everyone.
That
might explain why the Pharisee was a little upset. He was not against someone being healed. There were 6 other days that Jesus could have
healed this woman. Why did Jesus have to
do it on the one day he was not supposed to?
Now you might think there should be some wiggle room in the
commandments, especially given this particular situation.
There
was. That was why Jesus called the leader a hypocrite. He was reminding the Pharisee that they
already did work on the Sabbath when they untied their oxen and led them to the
manger for water. You would not deny
your animal water just because that would cause some work. Why then would you withhold healing from
someone who so desperately needed it? The Pharisee was a hypocrite because he
was making an exception for a purpose that made his life easier, but refusing
to make an exception for another person whose life was exceptionally hard.
The
Pharisee seems unreasonable, but I bet we all have little rules in our life
that we don’t break. Some of them are
really important rules that have important reasons. Some of them were important once, but are no
longer relevant. Yet we follow them
because it is habit. Think about your
rules. It might be that you always make
your bed, or you always wear a jacket and a tie to church, or you always wash
your face at night. You could skip a day
and it would not kill you. But what I
always worry about is the slippery slope.
Once you break the rule once, there is a good chance you will break it
again. Then it is no longer a rule, it’s
a recommendation and recommendations are very easy to ignore.
I
believe this is what the Pharisee was worried about. He was worried that we would start making so
many exceptions that the commandment would no longer be relevant. People would forget what the purpose of it was---that
it was not just about rest, it was about justice. That is exactly what happened. The Sabbath is
now a quaint memory.
That’s
why I feel for the Pharisee. I can see
that slippery slope all over the place and it scares me. I see Jesus’ point as well. We have tons of rules in the church. Most of them have really good reasons behind
them. Some of them were originally based on practical needs but those needs
changed and we kept the rules because they became tradition. Do you know why some churches have rails
around the altar? Hundreds of years ago,
there would be dogs that would wander through the church. The rail kept out the dogs. Now the rail gives us a place to kneel so
that we can be in community around the altar. Having this rail has become a
rule for us. People would be in an
uproar if we took it out. The rail is
one of our unwritten rules.
But we
also have lots of written rules in the church.
We call them canon law. We have
rules in the Book of Common Prayer. They
are called rubrics. Do you know why we
finish the wine at the end of the service instead of pouring the dregs in the
bushes? Page 409 of the prayer book tells us that the sacrament must be
reverently consumed by the clergy and communicants. That makes sense to me because it’s a
sacrament. It’s the body and blood of
Christ. Yet there are some rules that do not make sense to me and sometimes I
wonder why we keep doing them…why it all matters. On the one hand I see that slippery slope
that the Pharisee was worried about. On
the other I hear Jesus calling me a hypocrite.
Why
does all this matter? Often times, rules (whether they are written or not)
cause us to exclude people and things.
They give us excuses not to change, not to take risks. They keep us isolated. There was once a church rule that African
Americans could not sit in the same pews as a white person. That’s not in the Bible. It was a rule created by people. You might think, ok, well that seems like a
good way to judge, we’ll follow the rules in the Bible. There was a long standing church law that
women could not be ordained. That rule
came from a Bible passage. It’s tricky
isn’t it?
However,
I do believe that there are guides to help us interpret the laws of our church. Holy Scripture provides an awesome
guide. If we read it literally, we will
find a lot of rules. If we read it in
community with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we will find the same rules but
we will discover ways to determine what is and what is not truly critical to
our faith.
The
most important guide is Jesus. Some
people like to portray Jesus as this big rule breaker who thumbed his nose at
authority. He didn’t break the rules; he
reinterpreted them. Thankfully he
provided some divine guidance while he was still on earth. When someone asked him what the most
important commandment was, he responded, “You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And
a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On
these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” He interpreted
everything through a lens of love. He
healed the woman because he had compassion for her. He could not let her go one more day in
agony…not one more day. That was what
the Pharisee failed to see. For him, the
laws became more important than the people they were created for.
It is vital that we as a church look at our
written and unwritten rules and traditions.
We look at them through a lens of love for God and our neighbor. If we open ourselves up to that exercise of
seeing things through a lens of love, our
church will become more open, loving, and authentic. Because when Jesus calls out the
hypocrites. I don’t want to be the one
he is looking at.