SunAug222010
Scripture: LUKE 13:10-17
In the gospels, all sorts of stories are told by and about Jesus. There are healings and teachings and parables and exorcisms. And one of the categories of stories about Jesus is controversy stories: Jesus has it out, usually with a religious authority, about some subject of the faith. And, as in any story of controversy, the implicit invitation to the listener is: which side are you on; what’s your position on this?
So today, as Jesus walks along on his journey, he heals a woman who has been stooped for most of her life. She doesn’t even ask for his help. He just walks up to her and tells her she has been freed from her weakness. And then the controversy erupts: the leader of the synagogue condemns Jesus for working on the Sabbath, and Jesus fires back that healing is more important. Jesus basically says, “What’s more important, your silly rules, or healing someone who’s sick?”
For us who are listening, this is, of course, a no-brainer. We all know—any third-grader knows—that it’s much more important to heal someone than it is to follow some random human rule. So we breathe a little sigh of relief, and realize we can go home happy: Jesus thinks just like we do, not like those ridiculous religious zealots who get all hyper about believing the right things and performing the right rituals, the ones who forget about the simple necessity of loving people. “Whew!” we think; “we got it right.”
I wonder if it’s quite that simple, though. Yes, on its surface this seems like a slam-dunk story. Of course Jesus rails against an obsession with rules and affirms the necessity of love. And we do, too. So what’s the issue? What more is there to say?
The issue, I suspect, is that usually when Jesus questions some behavior, we’re more like the people he questions than we are like him. When there’s a controversy in the gospels and we stand back contentedly, crowing “Me and Jesus: we get it, while those poor others are way off the mark”—if we find ourselves thinking Jesus and we are the ones who understand while everyone else is sadly mistaken, then the likelihood is that we’ve missed the log in our own eye and assumed we’re a lot purer than we really are.
So here’s where the rub is: our culture is certainly not overly obsessed with keeping the rules of the Sabbath. Most Christians I know don’t stop all their work on Sunday. They don’t feel bound not to shop or drive a car or do any work on Sunday. There’s some shopping I have to do with our younger son Taylor this afternoon as he gets ready to return to school tomorrow. We’re not strict about the Sabbath. We’re free of those silly habits, we think. We know it’s better to heal than it is to insist on following the rules.
So, yes, in that way, we are like Jesus. We get that, when push comes to shove, healing trumps a narrow religious rigidity. Like any cultural critic who’s taken a swipe at persnickety religious rules, we have our priorities straight.
There is, though, perhaps another angle to this. While we may not sacrifice compassion on the altar of religious practice, I wonder if we don’t sacrifice compassion on other altars. We often have other priorities that impede our passion for the work of care and generosity that were and are so crucial to Jesus.
We may not be zealots for religious law, but we are often zealots for other obsessions. Many of us are devoted, for example, to our things. We spend a lot of time anticipating them and dreaming about them and procuring them. And that preoccupation with our stuff can keep us from the work and the values of Jesus. If we’re about to get a nice new pair of pants or a cell phone or a car, for example, we may get a little sense of excitement that helping a beggar on the street just doesn’t do.
Our consumerism, in other words, gets in the way of our seeing the woman who is stooped. Who of us doesn’t get excited at an upcoming golf game, or a vacation in the Finger Lakes, or a meal at a chic new restaurant? We’ll spend hours researching our next cell phone—and this is as true of me as it is of anybody—and neglect the IHN family who may be buoyed by our presence or the poorer family who could use our help with Habitat for Humanity in building them a new home.
We may not be religious zealots, but we can too easily be consumer zealots. And in that controversy with Jesus, we, too, stand indicted. We’re also, many of us, work zealots. The computer and the smart phone make us available twenty-four hours a day. Demanding jobs push our limits. Leaner workforces ask more of us. Mary and I walked to a coffee shop one morning when we were on vacation this summer. While we were sitting there, a forty-ish couple came in with their five- or six-year-old son. Before long, each parent had pulled out a laptop and was busily at work. I suppose it’s possible they were both playing computer games or briefly checking their Facebook pages. But their son sat at the table with his book of exercises for the brain, so I suspect this was supposed to be a working vacation for all of them. And it struck me as sad: here they were, a family away from the daily grind, with a chance to laugh and play and reconnect, and instead they were each mired in their work. Many of us adore our work, but even for us a balanced life requires also reading and reflection on our lives and mindless play, in addition to attending to needs beyond our own. We can too easily be work zealots. And in the controversy, Jesus indicts us.
Or entertainment zealots. A couple of weeks ago, in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, a UCC pastor lamented the increasing desire of congregations to be merely soothed and entertained, rather than to be stimulated and to grow. In the early 2000s, he says, “the advisory committee of my small congregation in Massachusetts told me to keep my sermons to ten minutes, tell funny stories, and leave people feeling great about themselves. The unspoken message in such instructions is clear: give us the comforting, amusing fare we want or we’ll get our spiritual leadership from someone else” (G. Jeffrey MacDonald, “Congregations Gone Wild,” August 7, 2010). I’m reminded of the prophetic title of Neil Postman’s incisive book of several decades ago: Amusing Ourselves to Death. We can be entertainment zealots. And I suspect we’re indicted by Jesus in that way, too.
So we’re more like those first-century religious zealots than we sometimes think we are. We may not keep the letter of the law in a religious sense. But like them, we, too, lose ourselves in lesser pursuits, clinging to secondary allegiances and forsaking our truest vocation. We, too, miss what would fill us most deeply as we buy too much and work too hard and amuse ourselves to death. So Jesus’ words are for us, too. They’re harsh words, and they cut us to the quick.
But remember, the controversy isn’t all there is here. At the center of this story is the amazing power of Jesus to heal. His focus is on restoring what’s broken, mending what’s not whole. All the woman can see, when Jesus comes to her, is her feet and the little bit of ground in front of her. When Jesus heals her, though, she can stand up straight. She can see the wider world beyond her. She can see the stars overhead. She can see the hopes and dreams and pains and joys of her family and friends.
If we’re open to it, this is what the holy power of God will do for us, as well. As consumers, for example, it’s not evil to enjoy the richness of the things God gave us. There’s something wonderful about fine fabric and mind-blowing technology. I think these are gifts from God, and we’re meant to enjoy them. What we’re not meant to do is to hog those things, or to let our enjoyment of them crowd out our response to the needs of others. So maybe we could do as one family I know of does: when they make a purchase that strictly speaking isn’t necessary—a new dress, say, or more of a computer than they really need—they put 10% of the purchase price in a kitty. And when that kitty reaches a certain point, they decide together what worthy organization should be its recipient. Together with enjoying their world, they also then reach beyond themselves to transmit the love of God to people in need. Consumer zealotry is transformed into generosity—healing, both for the giver and the receiver.
Passion for work can be tempered, too. How about a cell-phones-free dinner, for example—a time simply to focus on each other’s day, to hear the stories of each other’s lives, to laugh about and work through the issues that consume us?
A church member forwarded to me earlier this month a piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks, who wrote about Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and about the time when Christensen was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. While in an extremely demanding program, Christensen says, “‘I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth.’
“‘That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.’
He knew, though, that he had to make decisions about how to allocate his time, and he says that driven people often misallocate their resources. “If they have a spare half-hour, they devote it to things that will yield tangible and near-term accomplishments. These almost invariably involve something at work—closing a sale, finishing a paper.
“‘In contrast,’ he adds, ‘investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. . . . It’s not until twenty years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or daughter.”’ As a result, the things that are most important often get short shrift” (August 2, 2010, “The Summoned Self”).
Part of the way God’s holy healing power alights in our lives is when we spend uninterrupted and leisurely time with each other. One night, on that vacation of ours in Michigan, our family went mini-golfing. As we finished the first hole, we looked back to see who was following us, and who should we see but the same family we had seen working so intently in the coffee shop that morning. For them, too, there had been a kind of healing.
Just as we can temper our consumerism and our devotion to work, we can also temper our tendency simply to want to be amused. When I was in college, a legendary professor named Robert Gaudino died, and recently one of his students filmed a documentary of his life and his enormous influence on generations of his classes. One of his students says that Gaudino “shook students to their core. He took students from warmth and comfort to the unsettling place he called ‘otherness’” (Williams People, August 2010, p. 69). On the surface, it sounds awful. Who wants to leave the cocoon of warmth and comfort, and to be shaken into a place of otherness? Why is that better than the safe and happy cocoon? Well, clearly warmth and comfort matter, too. But these students remember Prof. Gaudino precisely because he was willing to encourage them to go, as well, to that place of otherness.
A father said to me just this week that he had spent a lot of time over the last several months with his just-graduated son, a son who was not at all sure what to do with his life. And the father says, “The big challenge for me was not trying to resolve the questions prematurely. He needed to stay in that ambiguity until there was a genuine resolution for it.” And I think he’s so right. The temptation for us, so often, is to force a direction or an answer that has not yet ripened. The only real option is not to anesthetize ourselves with mindless amusements, but to live, instead, with the questions. And maybe that’s the richest place of all, that place where we’re rattled and have to find new ground to stand on.
Here, in this place, we say that the new ground, of course, is a place of grace. It’s a place where we may have been shaken, but we come out OK. It’s where we may have “erred and strayed” from the ways of God, but we’ve been offered forgiveness. It’s a place where we may have been preoccupied with superficial stuff or work routines or mindless amusements, but God offers us a deep and lasting healing. Grace, as we say, is at the core. Again and again comes healing. To which we can only say, “Thanks be to God.”