August 26, 2007
(Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 16)
Keeping the Sabbath Scandalous
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Isaiah 58:9b-14 • Psalm
103:1-8 • Hebrews
12:18-29 • Luke 13:10-17
(From
The Lectionary Page)
One thing’s for sure. When Jesus said in last week’s gospel that he came not to bring peace but division, he wasn’t kidding. If you wanna bring division in the name of God, a great place to start is by violating the Sabbath in a sacred space. That’ll get you all the division you could ever hope for.
The Sabbath was, and is, one of the most important identifiers of Jewish life as over against that of its neighboring cultures. The injunction to keep the Sabbath holy is one of the commandments given by God to Moses, but long before the commandments were given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, the people were already well acquainted with the concept of a day dedicated to God – hence, the double-dose of manna on the day before the Sabbath. We’ve come to understand the Sabbath as a day of rest, but “rest” in English doesn’t fully capture the spirit. God rested on the seventh day of creation not because God was weary of God’s labors but because all was complete and all was good. God sanctified creation, but didn’t stop there. God sanctified Time as well, and set apart a portion of it so that humankind, made in God’s image, might enter fully into the goodness, the delight, that was God’s purpose in calling forth the cosmos. That was Israel’s heritage. And so a whole host of lesser laws came into existence to guard its sacredness, not because Israel was especially legalistic but because in a culture that limited its sacred symbols, the Sabbath stood out as one of the most important symbols of their relationship with God.
So we’re not talking about Jesus chafing against some inconvenient Blue Laws here. Now granted, the synagogue leader was completely out of line in talking ABOUT Jesus rather than TO Jesus (apparently, indirect communication in a religious setting is nothing new), but his complaint itself was not entirely off base. In truth, there were six days in which to heal. A far less scandalous approach by Jesus might have been to go to the woman’s house the next day and in the presence of her family heal her. Or Jesus could have first gathered the people of the synagogue together and done a teaching series on healing and God’s purposes for creation, and then healed her. He could have taken the Synagogue leadership out to lunch and picked their brains about how best to respond to people who show up on the Sabbath with an unclean spirit. To put it bluntly, the woman had been suffering for 18 years. That’s over 6,500 days. What difference would one more day have made, more or less? Especially when so much was at stake?
Jesus, of course, saw things differently. And he is nothing if not consistent in the scandalous action he takes. After all, he had inaugurated his ministry ten chapters earlier in a different synagogue by reading from Isaiah – the portion about being anointed by God to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And then he set about putting that commissioning into action. The sick are healed, the sin-filled are forgiven, those oppressed by unclean spirits are restored, the marginalized are gathered in, the hungry are fed, the dead are raised. This is nothing less than God acting as God acted in Creation – bringing order and goodness out of chaos and darkness. To restore a woman to wholeness on a day set aside to celebrate the wholeness and goodness of creation is absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the Sabbath, even if doing so violated the letter of the law and offended the sensibilities of the faithful.
We don’t know anything about the bent-over woman. Luke identifies her only as a woman with a spirit that had crippled her – the clear implication in Greek being that the spirit was unclean. Such persons were on the margins of society because they were perceived as somehow dangerous to the status quo. Her condition threatened their well-being, and it was all spelled out in Holy Scripture. It wasn’t that the synagogue leadership was particularly callous. They interpreted the priorities differently. In a showdown between a historically faithful observance of the Sabbath and a woman possessed by an unclean spirit, the conclusion was obvious to them: the possessed woman could wait. The system worked quite well, so long as you were not one of the unfortunates on the margins of society. Ironically, Jesus was more of a threat to the synagogue leadership’s well-being than the woman was, at least insofar as his healing of her on the Sabbath called into question old assumptions and long-held orthodoxy.
We’re talking about orthodoxy. Not orthodoxy with a capital “O,” specifically as it relates to ritual practices in Judaism. We’re talking about orthodoxy with a small “o.” As in, correct speech, or more loosely put, right thinking.
AAs one of my favorite writers asks, what's good about orthodoxy? [Barbara Crafton, “The Almost Daily E-mo,” Sept. 24, 2007] Lots of things. It holds us together, joins the living to the dead, reminds us that God endures when nothing else does. It teaches us to love and learn from learn from the past. It joins people from different places, different linguistic groups, different cultures and gives them a common way of responding to the grace of the God who makes them all one.
And what's bad about it? It can encourage in us the belief that God is not free. That God cannot do a new thing. That we somehow have understood God when we have mastered the tradition. That anyone who perceives that God is doing something new is necessarily heretical, or apostate, or sinful.
Even a cursory reading of the gospels suggests that Jesus is far less interested in right speech or right thinking than he is in restoring the least, the last, and lost into right relationship with God. As the Church continues to sort out what it corporately holds to be orthodox-with-a-small-o, we may do well to remember the whole of the gospel, including the scandalous portions such as we heard today.
