Sermon: “A Time to Heal”

Text: Luke 13:10-17

21^st Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

August 22, 2010

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is from the 13^th chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the story of Jesus healing the bent-over woman on the Sabbath day.  When it happened, Jesus was in the “synagogue” which is a Greek word that means “gathering place.”  As such, it was the local place of worship and also the place where the village elders would have gathered to study, interpret, and argue about Scripture.  In came an unnamed woman who had suffered for eighteen years from a condition that caused her to be bent over—unable to stand up straight.  Jesus saw her and called her over to him, telling her that she was now “set free” from her ailment.  Then he laid his hands on her, a common gesture of blessing.  Immediately the woman “stood up straight.”  Actually, the King James Version has the better translation: she was “made straight.”  She, herself, didn’t do it; rather, the straightening was done to her.

The leader of the synagogue, supported by some of the other observers, publicly criticized Jesus for healing the woman on the Sabbath.  The leader argued the healing was a violation of one of the Ten Commandments, which reads, “[T]he seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work.”  (Exodus 20:10)  Like the faithful Jew that he was, Jesus responded publicly by making a good argument about the interpretation of Scripture, using a very common technique of the rabbis—arguing from the “lesser to the greater.”  Pointing out that even the synagogue leader’s interpretation of the commandment allowed the unbinding of a thirsty animal and leading it to water, Jesus reasoned that unbinding the woman from her eighteen-year long affliction also should be allowed.  We’ll consider this further in the sermon, but now let’s read the lesson.

Sermon.  At least three things have come together to produce this sermon.[1]  First, I have just finished a book by Amy-Jill Levine entitled The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus.[2]  Dr. Levine, who is herself Jewish, is a professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt Divinity School.  When I was in seminary, a generous Jewish couple paid my way to a meeting of a council on Jewish-Christian relations, at which Dr. Levine was a provocative and engaging speaker.  The second factor in the sermon is the death this week of Jerry Einstandig, one of the most generous and civic-minded of all the citizens of our city.  Some of you attended his funeral services at the United Hebrew Congregation.  His death has reminded me how we all have benefitted from the commitment of Jews to philanthropy and public service.  Finally, I am trying to digest what I heard in the exit interview we had with our former youth director, Noah Coley.

At the outset I want to address what I believe is a very common—but incorrect—interpretation of this story.  Too often, when we read in the New Testament of Jesus’ Jewish opponents, we jump to the conclusion that all the Jews were his opponents.  We come across a story like this morning’s, and we make a lot of wrong assumptions.  The first thing we assume is that the Old Testament law was oppressive, grinding down the Jews of Jesus’ day.  We read of a synagogue leader who objects to the healing of a woman, and we say, “Aha!  See, the Jews had a defective faith because their laws were oppressive and they would rather enforce an absurd interpretation of the Old Testament law than to allow the woman to be healed.”[3]  We could easily conclude, and millions of well-meaning Christians have concluded, that it was Jesus on one side and “the Jews” on the other side.  But let’s slow down for a moment and use our common sense.  We must remember that Jesus, himself, and all the twelve disciples were Jewish.  They were Jewish when they started, and they remained Jewish even during the earthly ministry of Jesus. 

The big mistake is to assume that all the Jews (other than Jesus and his followers) were alike and shared the same views.  Our common sense tells us that there must have been many disagreements about matters of faith and practice among the Jews of Jesus’ day.  From the New Testament and from the writings of the historian Josephus, for example, we know that the Pharisees, the Essenes, the Sadducees, and the Zealots all had very different perspectives on how their religious obligations as Jews bore upon their daily lives as residents of the Roman Empire.  And these were just some of the main groups.  Within groups there must have been even more opinions.

The commandment that was cited by the synagogue leader is relatively simple: “Don’t work on the sabbath day.”  But what, exactly, constituted “work”?  Different schools and different teachers in ancient Judaism came to different conclusions.  Debating these questions may have been a large part of what the elders did in the synagogue when they were not actively worshipping.[4]  If we take a closer look at the exact question that Jesus was debating with the synagogue leader, and if we assume that it was not “Jesus against the Jews,” but rather Jesus the Jew arguing with other Jews, the story as Luke tells it makes more sense.  And we need not conclude that Jesus was a breaker of the Sabbath—even under the interpretations of his day.  The basic question is, did Jesus do any “work”?  We can imagine that when the story began he was sitting on one of the benches that ringed the large meeting room.  The woman came in, and Jesus motioned her over to him.  So far, no work.  When she came close, he told her that she was set free from her ailment.  All he did was to speak.  He mixed no potions, and his did not do any of the other things that a doctor of his day would have done.  Then he laid his hands on her.  I imagine him placing his hands on the head of the woman, like we do when we ordain deacons and elders, in a simple gesture of blessing.  There was no prohibition against this gesture, and it certainly was not work.  Then the woman was healed, and she praised God.  She understood God to be the source of her healing.  The other witnesses would have understood it the same way, as this was clearly a divine healing.  Even the Greek syntax subtly makes this point, for the verb for her healing is in the passive voice—she “was straightened.”  The point is, in the whole story Jesus never did any physical work.[5]  Perhaps the law would have prevented a doctor from mixing medicine or applying some healing apparatus on the Sabbath,[6] but Jesus did not do any of that.

When Jesus does respond to the accusations of the synagogue leader, he doesn’t even make the case I just outlined, although surely all the people in the room would have been thinking of it.  For the sake of the argument, Jesus actually grants that what he did might have been work.  But he quickly pointed out that the synagogue leader and those who agreed with him routinely untied their oxen and their donkeys on the Sabbath in order to lead them to water.  This was considered legal by their own interpretations of the commandment.  At this point, do you remember what happened?  Jesus won the argument with those Jews who were opposing him.  The rest of the crowd, who also were Jews, rejoiced at everything he was doing.

Well, so now it is our responsibility to interpret the Bible.  What is the meaning of this passage for us?  One way to look at it, one that I have heard from pulpits most of my life, is to place ourselves on Jesus’ side and to cheer with the crowds against the Jews whose interpretation of the Torah commandment was narrow and joyless.  This is emotionally easy for us to do because it demands no change from us.  But it also gives a false picture of the Judaism of Jesus’ day and can even lead to our looking down upon the Jews of our day, people like Jerry Einstandig, who worked joyfully for the good of our community.  A more accurate interpretation, one that takes seriously that there would have been many viewpoints among the Jews of Jesus’ day about the Sabbath commandment, would be to see Jesus the Jew arguing with some of his fellow Jews.  In this interpretation, Jesus is on the “inside” of Judaism, arguing from within the tradition.  So, to put the interpretive question in modern Christian terms, how is it that Jesus is arguing with us from the inside?  Is there any sense in which we could see ourselves—even a little bit—as the leaders of the synagogue? 

In his interpretation of the commandment against working on the Sabbath, Jesus used the rest of Scripture to help him understand God’s desire for wholeness that underlies all the law.  He used Scripture to interpret Scripture.[7]  What scriptural interpretations are we insisting on as a church or a denomination that go contrary to the message of love and wholeness in the gospel?  If Jesus came to our church this morning and participated in worship, what might he argue with about our practice of worship or interpretation?  How would he insist, over against our practice, that God’s desire for wholeness and the human need for wholeness outweigh some traditional interpretation of Scripture?  We may have our own answers to this question, but in my view that is one very honest way of making this morning’s story relevant to our lives. 

Let me give you one example in closing.  It’s not a huge theological issue of biblical interpretation, but it is very important to the life and worship of our congregation.  This week several of us met with Noah Coley to receive his views about our joint youth program with Centenary Methodist Church.  Very courageously, and very directly, he told us that our youth get almost nothing from our Sunday morning worship services—Presbyterian or Methodist.  The expository sermons are generally boring and uninteresting to them, and the hymns are worse than neutral.  They are off-putting.  I must tell you that this was hard news to hear.  I want to talk to our youth and corroborate what Noah told us, but I suspect there is much truth in it.  I don’t see how I can give up expository preaching, for that is one of my principal functions in the church.  But I’m really thinking about the criticism of our hymns.

Now, I know what you are thinking.  “Thank goodness!  Lant is about to stop choosing all those hymns we don’t know and will finally select the ones that are familiar to me.”  Well, here’s a news flash.  The youth probably don’t like your favorite hymns, either.  If Jesus walked into my office and asked the question: “Reverend Synagogue Leader, why do you insist on your traditional hymnody when you know it is impeding the worship of the youth I love so much?  Can’t you make some adjustments that would accommodate their worship needs?”, what would I answer?  What would you answer?  Let’s all be thinking about this in the weeks ahead, as, together with our youth, we design the next phase of the youth program.  And may we resolve together never to allow a narrow interpretation of scripture or practice to block the gospel.