The Gospel for TUESDAY, May 17, 2005
Luke 13:10-17
One Sabbath day he was teaching in one of the synagogues, and there before him was a woman who for eighteen years had been possessed by a spirit that crippled her; she was bent double and quite unable to stand upright. When Jesus saw her he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are freed from your disability,’ and he laid his hands on her. And at once she straightened up, and she glorified God. But the president of the synagogue was indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, and he addressed all those present saying, ‘There are six days when work is to be done. Come and be healed on one of those days and not on the Sabbath.’ But the Lord answered him and said, ‘Hypocrites! Is there one of you who does not untie his ox or his donkey from the manger on the Sabbath and take it out for watering? And this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan has held bound these eighteen years—was it not right to untie this bond on the Sabbath day?’ When he said this, all his adversaries were covered with confusion, and all the people were overjoyed at all the wonders he worked. -- The New Jerusalem Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1995, c1985
A Study
Micah's injunction to "do justice, to love mercy ..." seems to have missed its target here. The president of the synagogue had prioritized religious rules ahead of YHWH's rules. William Barclay sums it up:
"Strangely enough, this worship of systems commonly invades the Church. There are many church people—it would be a mistake to call them Christian people—who are more concerned with the method of church government than they are with the worship of God and the service of men. It is all too tragically true that more trouble and strife arise in Churches over legalistic details of procedure than over any other thing." -- The Gospel of Luke. 2000, c1975 (W. Barclay, lecturer in the University of Glasgow, Ed.). The Daily study Bible series, Rev. ed. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press.
A Reflection
The Decalog declares some sane rules of life for a nomadic people, or for any population, for that matter. The sabbath restriction is a wise one. We know in the engineering world, for example, that an engineer can produce somewhere between 40 and 50 productive hours worth of engineering labor in a week. She can work 75, but the result is likely going to be 50 hours worth of good engineering, with 25 hours worth of defect-ridden work interwoven among the good. And you can't tell the difference until it's much later in the design!
In an agrarian or hunter-gatherer society, people surely recognized that pushing the body past a certain limit caused lack of awareness resulting in death from wild beasts, falling off a cliff, or some other misfortune. Moreover, a human body given no opportunity for regeneration will decline more and more over time.
Hence, the Sabbath. It is a rule based in reality. So are the other "secular" commandments. Coveting leads to theft. Adultery leads to children of unknown fatherhood, something that could not be tolerated in a patriarchical society. And so on.
That Israel attached religious overtones to some basic laws of living together, and called them the Law, is part of Israel's heritage and ours.
Even Jesus failed to see the significance of the sabbath in other than real-world terms: the sabbath was meant for man, not man for the sabbath. When we allow small-minded men to get a monopoly on religion, we get what we deserve. Religion exists to serve humans, to provide rational bases for how we think about theology, for how we understand our being in relationship with the divine, and other weighty and important reasons; it does NOT exist to dictate to us what we must or must not do.
And that is precisely the point that Jesus made to the president of the synagogue.
A Collect
Untie us, Lord God, from the sins that anchor us to this world, that we may be free to be in your world, as full citizens of your kingdom. Amen
5:26:17 PM 
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