A little weird illustration, but whatever. Enjoy!
Luke 13:10-17; Hebrews 12:18-29; Psalm 103:1-8; Isaiah 58:9b-13
As I’ve admitted several times, I am a geek. I make no secret of this; I’m really quite obvious about it. One of the highlights of my geekiness is a table-top role playing game called BattleTech, in which one commands a force of giant humanoid robots against each other. See, I told you I was a geek. To help create the game world, there are of course several many novels set in it, to give the players an opportunity for a little bit more immersion. This is all a good deal of background to basically tell you a quote from one of these novels that has stuck with me for a long time.
It’s said by a character who is frustrated by her culture, which she had been away from for thirty years, after returning home somewhat unexpectedly. She says, “Slavish adherence to formal ritual is a sign that one has nothing better to think about.” Today’s gospel text reminded me of this quote, because it’s kind of what Jesus is saying.
You have to remember, the Sabbath was a big deal in Jesus’ time. Today, most of us would have no issue with, say, mowing the lawn on a Sunday, or something like it, but for the Jews, not doing work on the Sabbath was one of the most important things to worry about.
You can get a sense of this from Isaiah’s reading; it ends (and for reasons I don’t quite understand stops at verse 13, so I’ll keep going) with “If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the Lord’s holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, then you will find your joy in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
Keeping the Sabbath was considered one of the most important outward signs of following God, so there were very strict rules about what one could or could not do on the Sabbath. For example, one could not start a fire on the Sabbath. Oddly enough, in modern interpretation for Orthodox Jews, turning on electricity counts as starting a fire, so they make special “Sabbath lights” that don’t actually turn on or off the electricity, but instead raise or lower a shade over the light bulb. It’s just one thing among many to show the importance of keeping the Sabbath to Jews – both modern and ancient Jews.
So Jesus caused quite a stir when he encountered a woman at church one day and he healed her. Apparently, healing someone on the Sabbath would be considered work, and the head of the church called Jesus out: “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.” By the way, it is considered perfectly acceptable to break the Sabbath if a life is in danger; I just want to throw that out there. There is also nothing to prevent a doctor from diagnosing a patient on the Sabbath, even in a non-life-threatening situation, so long as he has a non-Jew do whatever would violate Sabbath law.
All I’m trying to say is, Jesus did just fine to heal a person on the Sabbath, even according to Jewish law. So Jesus knew that the synagogue ruler was just calling him out for the sake of calling him out, and answers by saying, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham … be set from what bound her?”
The head of the church was more concerned with the “ritual” of the Sabbath, than with following God. It mirrors the quote from my BattleTech book, “Slavish adherence to formal ritual is a sign that one has nothing better to think about.” Instead of celebrating that God healed a woman, they found fault that Jesus healed on a day of rest.
The head of the church at which Jesus healed this woman had his own understanding of the right and wrong way to follow God and, it seems at least, was more concerned with making sure everyone followed God in the right way than he was with actually having them follow God. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one.
Sometimes we get so caught up in the “right” way to be Christians that we miss what God is doing. We focus more on the way we follow God than on actually following God. This has played out innumerable ways throughout history, from the discussion about how “Jewish” a Christian should be, through the discussion over from which direction you get the head wet during baptism, to if or not spiritual gifts are present today or not. By themselves, these have little bearing on the actually following of God, but when Christians started to actively oppose one another about their (correct) expression of their faith, problems happen.
I’ve heard people say that if you’re not baptized with immersion you’re not really baptized, and I’ve heard people say that if you speak in tongues you’re just faking. I’ve heard people imply that I’m not a Christian because I was baptized as an infant and don’t speak in tongues. The focus came away from God and toward things.
I think this is what we’re being reminded of today: we shouldn’t be worried about how we follow God, but that we do follow God. When we focus too much on the how, it becomes our god, and not the one who created us, loves us, and forgives us. It’s God who is most important in our lives, and when we follow Him, everything else tends to fall into place.