Proper 16 -- Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
A homily by Fr.
Gene Tucker, given at Trinity
Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois on Sunday, August 25, 2013.
“FOLLOWING THE RULES, LIVING LIFE DAILY”
(Homily text: Luke 13:10-17)
All of us
are familiar with rules.
We live
with the rules of the road as we drive a vehicle, for example. Failure to follow these rules can cause
accidents, injury, or even death, to ourselves and to others.
The same
can be said for most of the rules, the laws, of our society. They are meant to allow us to live with one
another in safety and with security.
The Ten
Commandments[1] fall
into this pattern….the first four commandments allow us to live with God. The
remaining six allow us to live with one another.
In today’s
gospel reading, Luke shares with us an incident that took place in a synagogue
on the Sabbath day. There, Jesus heals a
woman who was bent over for 18 years.
Touching her, the Lord heals her.
The ruler of the synagogue upbraids the Lord for doing this act of mercy
on the Sabbath, saying, “There are six days in which work ought to be
done. Come on those days and be healed,
and not on the Sabbath day.”
Jesus’
response falls into what scholars call a “lesser-to-greater”[2]
category, as He cites provisions in Deuteronomy 22: 1 - 4 which allow relief to
be given to an animal on the Sabbath day.
The Lord says that, if someone is allowed to care for an animal on the
Sabbath day, then shouldn’t someone be allowed to care for a human being on the
Sabbath day, as well?
Of course,
the answer to this question is obvious:
Yes, in this case, human need trumps the requirement to keep the Sabbath
day holy.
In Jesus’
day, many Jews seemed to be consumed with relentless passion to keep every
little aspect of the Law of Moses. The
rabbis of Jesus’ day spent hours and hours debating just how the Sabbath
regulations and the other provisions of the Law were to be applied in daily
life.
More than
once, Jesus and His disciples came into conflict with the Pharisees and others
for breaches of expected behavior on the Sabbath day. For example, in Luke 6: 1, we read that the
Pharisees noticed that Jesus’ disciples plucked heads of grain and ate them on
the Sabbath day. In another instance
which is quite similar to the healing we read about in today’s gospel, the
issue of healing on the Sabbath would come up again in Luke 14: 1 – 6, as the
Lord heals a man with dropsy on the Sabbath.
Such a
scrupulous concern for proper behavior was a source of national identity for
pious Jews whose identity was threatened by the Roman occupation of their
country. Oftentimes, when human beings’
identities are being threatened, the identifying markers of nationality, race,
or associations assume very prominent places in their thinking and their behavior. So we shouldn’t be too hard on the Jews of
Jesus day for behaving the way they did….they were simply doing what most human
beings would do, given similar situations.
But what about the rules?
What about
living with the complexities of daily living?
How do
these two realities fit together?
Do they fit
together at all?
Perhaps one
way to explore the relationship between keeping the rules and the living of
daily life would be to look at what happens when one of these two realities are
separated from the other, when one reality is the sole focus of life. We will begin by looking at what happens when
the rules, and the rules alone, matter.
Here, we
see the prevailing attitude of the ruler of the synagogue and the
Pharisees….Their attitude was that no work, none at all, was to be done on the
Sabbath day, period. Their approach to
living seems harsh, uncompromising and inflexible.
In
contemporary art, this is the attitude of the uncompromising Inspector in the
musical (and play) Les Miserables, as
he relentlessly pursues Jean Valjean. The Inspector’s approach is that the
requirements of the law must be completely fulfilled, regardless of any other
consideration.
This
attitude places the structure that the law, the rules, provide, above and
before any human need.
Now, let’s
turn the tables and look at the other end of the spectrum of human life: living without rules at all, allowing human
need (or whims) to dictate behavior.
Here, we
come to what scholars call an antinomian
attitude toward living, a word that comes to us from the Greek, where it means
(literally) “against laws”.
At some
times in Christian history, such an attitude has manifested itself. We need only look at some Gnostic behaviors
in the early centuries of the Church’s life to see that some Gnostics believed
that, since they believed that our physical nature was only a mirage, it didn’t
matter what we did with their bodies.
Some, in response, engaged in all sorts of immoral behavior.
As
Christians, we might be tempted to think that, since we have received God’s
grace, mercy and love, we should be able to do whatever we want, since God will
forgive us anyway. St. Paul addresses
this reality, as he asks, in his Letter to Romans[3],
that if we are freed from the Law, shouldn’t we sin all the more so that we may
enjoy God’s grace? (I am paraphrasing
Paul’s argument.) The answer Paul
provides is the obvious one: No, God
expects us to live holy and upright lives.
Sometimes,
the rules are sacrosanct, and are binding in all circumstances.
One such
example would be the first of the Ten Commandments, which reads, “I am the Lord
your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”[4]
The
commandment to put God first, and to have nothing in life that would take God’s
place, is binding in every situation.
And yet,
there are times when the reality of human need asks us to make difficult choices
between the requirements of law and the welfare of others.
One such
example might be the reality of those who sheltered Jews during the period of
the Second World War. Many, when the
Nazis came looking for Jews, lied to the Nazis about the presence of Jews in
their homes. Here, the need to protect
innocent human lives from destruction took precedence over the requirement to
be truthful.
When
conflicting needs meet one another, we are asked to make mature judgments,
using the gifts God has given us, the gifts to be able to reason, the gifts to
weigh the importance of one need against another, the gifts apply the rules we
live by to the realities of daily life with compassion and wisdom.
In so
doing, we uphold the importance of keeping the rules, and the importance of recognizing human needs, holding both in
tension.
Jesus seems
to summarize this relationship when He said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not
man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)
[1] See Exodus 20: 3 – 17.
[2] The term in Hebrew for this sort of a
lesser-to-greater comparison is qal
wehomer.
[3] Romans 6: 1 – 7: 6
[4] Exodus 20: 2 - 3
