Reading: Luke 13:10-17
At times, often, in fact, Jesus seems to be deliberately and unnecessarily provocative, and never more so than his attitude to Sabbath keeping. One sympathises with the leader of the synagogue and I want to ask “Do you have to heal people on Saturday- wouldn’t the day before or after do just as well, and cause less offence?” Jesus’ answer to that would, I think, be that most of his miracles are a personal and instant response to immediate circumstances and especially to the need of an individual who has sought him out. It would not have done to tell the poor afflicted lady doubled up in pain to come back the next day.
Jesus’ actual answer is not so convincing; that the Leader of the Synagogue may have been hypocritical, doesn’t affect the value of his criticism. In fact, watering your animals or pulling them out of a pit were the sort of activities permitted by the highly complex rules and exceptions around the prohibition on Sabbath work. Those rules may have been hypocritical, or inconsistent, but it would have been perfectly legitimate, in their own terms for the leader to plead them; choosing to heal a sick person is not a parallel case. It is justified on the quite different ground that Jesus is acting pursuant to a higher law, a more profound obligation, one which exemplifies the unconditional love of God for his creation and his desire to put it right where it has gone wrong. That imperative is not strictly a law at all; it is based in mercy not justice and it is, of course, the essence of the Gospel and before it rules about what you do and don’t do on Saturday or Sunday, and what you can eat or even wear, pale into insignificance.
What hurt the religious leaders most, and what made them want to do away with Jesus was his constant flouting and criticism of the rules which defined Jews and distinguished them from their neighbours. This was exactly Jesus’ objection to them; in defining, the rules excluded those who did not fit; they made hard and complicated what should be obvious, simple and easy; they generalised and dealt in categories, while his Gospel was chiefly addressed to individuals, and to all individuals without distinction.
Rules come about we need to refine laws; laws like Thou Shalt not kill or Thou shalt not Steal create injustice if applied absolutely in all actual circumstances. This is not to say that we may not feel morally wrong or an emotional repugnance in making exceptions, but in practice there are occasions when most people feel it may be legitimate to kill to save more lives, or to take another’s property to satisfy the needs of more people (not many of us, after all object to the principle of levying income tax). Behind most of these exceptions is the concept of community, the interests of which override those of the individual.
But rules do not just protect the community, to do so they need to define it; to decide who is in who is out, just as the rules of Football define whether the way you are kicking a ball around is the game of Soccer or not. They also decide how you win the game. Similarly, we have rules, which we know as customs or mores or social expectations which lay out the structures for success in society; rules which decide who is in and who is out and who is on the top and who on the bottom. These may seem, and often are, trivial, but in societies threatened by their neighbours, or threatened from within, the risk of losing perceived integrity and thereby identity is indeed a threat to the very existence of the community. We can see this in the stresses caused by our globalised world and anxieties felt in some quarters of the cosmopolitan cities in which we live. We have seen their effects in recent political developments.
To do this rules have to deal in generalisation and categories; they are not meant to accommodate the individual. They may become complicated and intricate (none more than the system developed by the Rabbis), but they are dealing in cases that have similarities and can be treated in the same way. If a particular instance or individual person falls outside the category that is too bad.
I hope it is fairly obvious from this rather superficial and somewhat selective, analysis, why Jesus wasn’t much in favour of rules. His good news spoke to everyone, insider, outsider, winner and loser; it is addressed to each individual as exceptional, and strived to create a society- the Kingdom of God- in which each person was uniquely valuable. He protested that he had no intention of changing the Law and one might say his strap line was the essence of the Law distilled to “Thou shalt Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and thy neighbour as thy self” This overriding obligation and its reciprocation, the overpowering love of God for each us, could not be hedged or diverted by mere rules.
That Jesus chose the Sabbath rules to break so frequently and openly, was I suppose, because the imposition of the Sabbath, the fourth commandment, requiring a weekly rest, was plainly a good idea (and I would say still is) but equally it’s a law which can remain in principle unhurt by many necessary exceptions. To apply it monolithically would begin to destroy its point. We all need a rest, but getting that rest means others need to work. But the Sabbath had become a means of defining and excluding; to observe the Sabbath properly assumed you were wealthy enough to have foreign servants to work for you-although strictly they were meant to be resting too. The fourth commandment is, like all the commandments addressed to everyone, not just the Israelites or Jews, but it was the one which perhaps more than any other defined the Jews, and still does. It’s no wonder that Jesus constant and ostentatious breaking of the Sabbath really got up the Chief Priests’ noses. They had allowed a principle of universal application to become a defining mark of their special status, promoting exclusivity rather than embracing all in God’s love. They did not want an itinerant Galilean holy-man threatening that status.
This friction between rules and the Gospel continues into the Early Church with its debates on the need for circumcision and whether the dietary laws should be observed (and not so long ago eating fish on Friday was seen as what made you a Roman Catholic) Later the church became obsessed with exclusive controversies about what should be believed- it seems to have been rather less concerned with what one should do.
We are, I think, a fairly open church here at St John’s; we certainly try to be, but we should be vigilant that we do not develop practices, traditions, rules under any guise which diminish the force of the Gospel in our life as church and in our taking of that Gospel outside the churchyard walls into a society in which misplaced fear of the different or foreign and perceived threat of diluted identity turn us in on ourselves and turn us away from accepting God’s love. That is our task. Amen.