Rules vs. Wholeness

Luke 13:10-17

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

Imagine the scene:  there in the synagogue is Jesus, the exciting teacher who has stirred things up all around, and he is there teaching and preaching.  It’s the sabbath, and therefore the synagogue is full of people, all there to fulfill their religious requirements.  All eyes are on Jesus.

All eyes, that is, except for a pair of a woman, probably hiding in the back, as she has done for the past 18 years.  Her eyes are focused downwards, toward her feet which has been the only way she’s been able to look for almost 2 decades.  Her view for all those years has been of the area around her feet and slanted glances in other directions.  She has been bent over at the waist permanently.  After 2,000 years it’s a little difficult to make a diagnosis; her condition may have been medical or it could have come from too many years of difficult labor.

Luke, the author of our gospel, was a doctor and he says that she was crippled by a spirit that kept her that way.  Luke, by the way, is the only one of the gospel writers to include this story in his account.  Luke the doctor remembers this story and includes it in his gospel.  Perhaps his training had made him more attuned to the healing stories of Jesus.  Luke also includes more women in his gospel.  So it’s natural that a healing story about a woman would catch his attention more so than the other gospel writers.

Jesus is teaching and notices the woman who likely has spent years trying not to be noticed.  Illness and crippling diseases were seen as caused by sin, so the bearer of any ills has not only to deal with the disease but also the social stigma.  So keeping a low profile was probably a part of this woman’s life: keeping out of people’s way, as best you can when you can’t see them, was standard operating procedure for her. 

Jesus, for whatever reason he chooses, decides to heal the woman.  Why this woman, we have to wonder.  Surely there must have been plenty of other people there who needed healing. Don’t we all need some sort of healing, after all?  Was she the most noticeable, hunched over as she was at the back of the room?  No friends or relatives approached Jesus about her.  He just picked her out of the crowd that was gathered there that day. 

Now we don’t notice it but Jesus stepped over the bounds of the rules of their society in two ways that day:  first, he healed on the sabbath, healing being a form of work and working on the sabbath is definitely not allowed; second, he touched the woman, which is something a man just doesn’t do, at least not a woman to whom he’s not related.  We can almost feel the shock and excitement in the air as the crowd witnesses this act that crosses boundaries and breaks open rules that have long guided their world.

Maybe this is what Jesus was talking about in some of the verses that precede this passage, which were the lectionary reading from the gospel last week.  In those verses, Jesus spoke about bringing division into the world, confusing words from the one we call the Prince of Peace.  But certainly Jesus divided the crowd that day into two parties:  the crowd who was electrified by his boundary-bursting healing and the religious leaders who could only see the laws that had to be followed…and weren’t being followed.  Division was clearly a part of Jesus’ ministry, at least it was on this day. 

In the controversy that arises, the leader of the synagogue, no doubt urged on by his fellow religious leaders, says that healings can happen any day of the other six days of the week besides the sabbath.  Following that comment, Jesus then lets loose on them.   He calls them hypocrites, which is as strong an accusation then as it is now.  He points out that the rabbis have taught that it is permissible to untie an ox or a donkey so as to give them a drink of water on the sabbath, another activity that is considered work.  Surely if God cares about donkeys and oxen that much, God will care enough about one of God’s daughters to heal her, sabbath or not.

Actually, Jesus refers to the woman as a “daughter of Abraham” which is the only time that term is used in the whole of the New Testament.  In any case, she is worthy of Jesus’ attention as a child of God.  She is worthy of Jesus’ healing ministrations whether its the sabbath or not.

Jesus breaks all bounds to unloose this woman from her own bounds; that which has bound her in her stooped condition for all these years.  She couldn’t wait another day for her healing and Jesus knew that.  The healing must come now, on the sabbath, on the day when no work is to be done.

The critics of Jesus could fume and fret all they wanted.  But Jesus was not going to give an inch.  This was an important event that needed attention right now.  Jesus chose healing, and caring, and wholeness over the rituals and rules that had governed his culture for centuries.  Jesus opted to bring that daughter of Abraham to completion over the strictures that would have bound him as tightly as that woman herself was bound by her condition.


How often do we choose rules and rituals over healing and wholeness?  How often do we opt for the status quo rather than bringing our world a little closer to God’s realm?  I think it’s more often than we’d like to admit.  I think too often we take the attitude that it’s just easier to get along than it is to stir up trouble.

Oftentimes our rules are around possessions for example and what we own being what we are.  The unspoken rules of our culture are that more is better:  the more you possess the better you are.  There’s even a movement within Christianity called the prosperity gospel which says that if God really loves you, God will reward you with greater wealth and more possessions.  And too often, we do like to think that’s true.  For many of us, in fact, it might be a comforting thought. 

Though we might disagree with the premise of this belief, we don’t often act like it.  We too often go along with the rules and rituals of our culture and work hard at accumulating rather than seeking the justice that God would have which distributes wealth among all of us, throughout all of God’s children.

Jesus healed the woman who was bent over at the waist against several proscriptions of his day.  But he saw a chance for wholeness for one of God’s children and he seized the opportunity.  May we be watchful to guard against ways that we might be more like the religious leaders of Jesus’ time, holding tightly to rules and rituals of our culture that no longer serve us.  May we be more like Jesus, bursting forth through boundaries that serve no purpose other than to keep things as they are.

Sermon, Sunday, 1 February 2009

Mark 1:21-28

A few years ago, Allen and I went to see a strange, fun little movie called The Queen of Outer Space which was playing at the time in San Francisco at either the Castro Theatre or the Red Vic Theater. Wherever it was that we saw it, The Queen of Outer Space’s star was none other than the glamorous and fabulous Zsa Zsa Gabor. It was released over 50 years ago now in 1958.

The film was memorable, to me at least, for how silly it was; what little plot it had was quite odd and, of course, if you’ve got Zsa Zsa Gabor as your star, as the Queen of Outer Space herself, the camp factor is bound to be high. The story, as related on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) is that American astronauts are “mysteriously” drawn to the planet Venus, which is inhabited, naturally, by beautiful women and their “despotic” queen.

The scene I remember the best, and pretty much the only scene I can actually conjure up in my memory of the moive, was a shot of a spacecraft hurtling through space. Now remember, this was 1958:

• special effects master George Lucas was only 14 years old;
• the Soviet Union had sent Sputnik up only one year earlier;
• and in fact, NASA, our country’s space program, only came into being in 1958, the very same year that Zsa Zsa was alluringly ruling over all those beauties on Venus.

So the shot of the spacecraft that I’m remembering was out of the imagination of the Hollywood movie makers of what space travel might look like.

Sadly though, the reason that this scene with the spacecraft is so memorable is not because it is a forward-looking vision of things to come from the vantage point of 1958. No, it was the fact that up there on the big screen, you could see that the spacecraft hung on strings as it hurtled its way to Venus. Yes, there were strings or wires or threads or something attached to that spaceship which were very much in plain view for all of us in the audience to see. Those strings really required a lot of suspension of disbelief. One can only surmise that that 14-year-old George Lucas went to see the movie and thought to himself “I can do better than that.”

Of course, the San Francisco audience in which we sat some forty years after the film was released howled when they saw that. (Actually, we all got a pretty big kick out of most of the movie because it is so ludicrous.) In those four decades though between the original release and our viewing, we, the audience, had become more sophisticated…more discerning as viewers. I have no idea how Zsa Zsa and her fellow actors were received in 1958 because I was toddling about and not really interested in movies yet. Most of us though have grown up on the Star Wars movies and have advanced along with them and the special effects they employed. We expect our special effects today to be seamless; we don’t see the strings and can’t tell that the crowd scene is actually made up of colored q-tips. In our sophistication and discernment, we have left behind some of the innocence that the 1950s movie-going public enjoyed.

Well, if that kind of shift can happen in 40 or 50 years, a mere half century, imagine what two millennia can do. We hear stories like the one from Mark this morning and our 21st century minds immediately look for and chuckle knowingly at the strings we think we see. In the meantime though we miss some of the magic and the mystery that was a part of these narratives originally.

So today we’ve got Jesus in a synagogue in Capernaum. Now, we don’t really think much about Capernaum these days. In and of itself, it really wasn’t all that important. It sat on the Sea of Galilee and was probably established about 200 years before Jesus came along. From the gospels, we know that several of the disciples whom Jesus called were from Capernaum.

It’s the town where Jesus moved and set up his ministry from the beginning. Nazareth, where he grew up, was too small, too insignificant really for what he needed to do. He needed a more populated setting; a somewhat more urban location so that he could reach people, which was the point of him being here, after all. Sure Capernaum wasn’t Jerusalem, but it was a far cry from provincial Nazareth.

Mark is our most concise and terse gospel writer. He takes just 16 chapters to cover the same story about Jesus as the others take in 28, 24, and 21 chapters. Mark wastes little or no time in his writing and his favorite words or phrases are “immediately” or “just then” or “at once.” Mark keeps the story moving and allows us little chance to catch our breath. He has his purpose in telling this all this that he spells out right at the beginning in verse one, chapter one: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” and Mark is off and running.

The wheres and whens of Mark’s version of things are important. In this case, in the sparse verses preceding, Mark tells us how Jesus is baptized by John, is immediately driven into the wilderness where he is tempted and then he begins his Galilean ministry. He then calls his first disciples: those fishermen, Simon, Andrew, James, and John, who dropped everything right away in good Markan fashion to follow him. They go to Capernaum where, we heard, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath and was teaching.

Our account this morning is really two stories intertwined. We start off with is the teaching that Jesus was doing. Mark, unlike the other writers, does not actually tell us what Jesus was saying. We’re either supposed to know that already or it’s just not important to Mark. What is important in this first narrative is the effect of Jesus’ teaching on those sabbath synagogue goers: they are astounded, Mark says. Jesus teaches with authority, and, getting a jab in at the local ecclesiastical authorities, Mark lets everyone know that this teaching is not like that of the scribes.

That story, about Jesus teaching, is abruptly interrupted, just as the proceedings that day were interrupted. We hear Mark’s trademark “just then”, cluing us in to a shift in the narrative, as a man disrupts the synagogue by crying out accusations about Jesus. This man with the unclean spirit loudly questions Jesus: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” Notice the use of the plural there—what have you to do with us. Who is the us? The people of Capernaum? One might think that he’s referring to the unclean spirits, but Mark, just a few words before, clearly states that the man has an unclean spirit…singular; no s at the end. Who is this us?

The story continues on in the plural: “Have you come to destroy us?” is the very next thing that the man barks out. Everything and everyone in the synagogue is in an uproar at this point, without a doubt. They don’t have the luxury of reading this account and noticing little things like grammatical number usage.

And right about here is where those strings that we saw in The Queen of Outer Space come in to play: we want, in our sophisticated 21st century way, two thousand years after this narrative first made it onto paper or papyrus or however it was captured, to categorize that shrieking, pitiful man with our own contemporary label so that we can grasp onto the story better. We smile knowingly as we nod our heads, stroke our chins, and say,”oh, he must have been suffering from dementia, poor guy” or schizophrenia or any number of modern maladies. We take comfort in assigning something we can recognize onto the situation. We think we see all too well the strings that Mark uses in this story.

But I think we miss out if we do that. I believe we have to do the best we can to go back as we encounter a story like this to a time and place as different as different can be from our own and just let the story be what it is. Mark had a point to make in his rush of immediacy to get his gospel out. And that point, echoing Mark’s very first words in his gospel, comes this time from none other than the one whom we’re ready to say is mentally ill or unbalanced. After the pandemonium that occurs in the synagogue, and the man with the unclean spirit confuses everyone with his use of ‘us’, out of his mouth comes “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

Whoa! Right there and then, with everyone standing around with their mouths agape and ready to dial 911 on their cell phones, right at the very start of Jesus’ ministry, Mark has him proclaimed the “Holy One of God”, by someone we’re ready to discount and ignore because we think we see the strings. Mark doesn’t wait for Peter to figure it out and make some grand proclamation or for Jesus to have been around for awhile teaching, preaching, and healing and getting his credentials. No, Mark in his immediacy puts Jesus’ identity out on the table right away. Whatever strings we thought we saw in this story turn out to be merely chimera; illusions that throw us off guard and make us the unbalanced ones.

Of course, in this very public setting, in which Jesus has already impressed the locals and really didn’t need to do more, he orders the unclean spirit (back to the singular again) out of the poor guy, which happens with convulsing and yelling in a most dramatic way that would make George Lucas proud. As if the authority of Jesus’ teaching before all the commotion wasn’t enough, this little scene really gets the synagogue crowd’s attention and they can’t wait to get out of there and tell anyone who will listen what they just witnessed, incredible as it is. “There’s a new thing happening” they’re proclaiming, “wait til you hear it for yourself.”

If you encounter these marvelous, mystery-laden stories which make up our bible and spend your time looking for the strings, you’re missing out. Jesus teaches with a new authority, Mark reminds us several times in these seven short verses. It’s different from any preacher or teacher you or I have ever heard undeniably. If you see the strings, if you see the strings though, don’t worry about it. Sit back and marvel instead at the new authority that is right before you.

Artwork credit: Healing the Sick, metal relief sculpture by Ulrich Henn
St. James Cathedral, Seattle, WA 2008
Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN, https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-search.pl