Several years ago, on National Public
Radio, a Jewish man remembered being on a train to a Nazi death camp as a young
child. He and his siblings are hungry, so his mother buys them food, but all
that’s available is non-kosher meat. Her son asks her why she’s crying; she
tells him that she has kept kosher all of her life but now she’s going to die,
and she’s crying because her children are young and have not had a chance to
live. His mother was a devout Jew, but nevertheless knew that, kosher or no, it
was her duty and right
to feed them what she could. In fact, Jews have never permitted Torah observance to override
decisions to save life.
And you’ll notice that in today’s
passage, in neither case is the situation dire. The disciples aren’t presented
as starving, or as even particularly hungry:
they’re just wandering through a field, idly plucking cobs along the way.
Neither was there anything urgent about the man with the withered hand. As far
as we know, he’d had one for a long time; it surely wouldn’t have hurt anything
to wait until after the sun went down to heal him, until after the Sabbath was
over. These stories are not
about emergencies overriding Torah observance: there was no necessity for Jesus
to break Sabbath rules.
But that’s how I’ve heard it preached,
as a way of distinguishing between compassionate, life-giving Christianity and
lifeless, heartless, rule-bound Judaism. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Jesus
is deliberately provoking the religious authorities in this story—he even has
the gall to compare himself to David, that greatest of Jewish kings, whose
glorious return every good Jew awaited. And he doesn’t just heal the guy on the
Sabbath, he does it in the synagogue,
the local center of Jewish life. Taken together, the whole episode—the Sabbath
corn-picking and healing—seems designed to say to the Pharisees “Put that in
your (corn-cob) pipe and smoke it!”
It helps to understand that these are
the final episodes in a series of conflict-stories that begin Jesus’ ministry.
After calling his first disciples, he hit the road, healing the sick and
casting out demons. In the Capernaum synagogue, he cast an unclean spirit out
of a guy, then healed Simon’s mother-in-law at her own house, along with a
whole bunch of other Capernaum-ites. And after embarking on a preaching and
healing tour, his fame spread, so that by the time he returned to Capernaum,
people were coming from far and wide to be healed.
His fame began to catch the attention of
people other than
those in need; in particular, the local religious authorities. And as he holed
up in Capernaum, the place he’s staying was mobbed
by desperate people and a few synagogue employees—scribes—to boot. And as they
lowered a paralyzed man down through the roof, Jesus casually said “Son, your
sins are forgiven.” And the scribes were thinking “how dare he! Only God can forgive sins” and
Jesus, in a perfect state of non-dual oneness, knew exactly what they’re
thinking, and healed the guy anyway.
Then, on a pleasant lakeside stroll,
Jesus came across Levi and said “Follow me.” Now, Levi was a tax-collector, a
Roman collaborator, and therefore unclean, and don’t think the lurking
religious authorities didn’t notice that,
and don’t think they didn’t notice when he sat down for supper at Levi’s house and broke bread with other unclean
people—sinners, in the parlance of the times—as well. And Jesus just looks at
them and says: “I’ve come to heal sick folks, not those who are well.”
Finally, some religious types noticed
that although John the Baptizer’s people were fasting, Jesus and his people weren’t. “Why do John’s and
the Pharisees’ disciples fast, but your’s don’t?” And he answered them with a
wedding metaphor—you only fast after the bridegroom (that’s him) has left—and
one about new wine in old wineskins, a sure sign that he didn’t think that the
old religious rules didn’t fit the new stuff he was teaching.
And it’s clear that none of these things
are forced errors, none of them are things he had to do. He didn’t have to throw in that
incendiary comment—Son, your sins are forgiven—that threatened the scribes’
power. He didn’t have
to eat at Levi ’s house, stuffed to the gills with tax collectors and other
miscreants just guaranteed
to make pharasitical blood boil. He didn’t have
to give up fasting . . . it certainly wouldn’t have hurt him, and everybody
knows it’s good for the soul.
And now, as we’ve seen, he doesn’t have to let his disciples
pick that corn or heal that guy—in the synagogue,
for Pete’s sake—on the Sabbath. It’s almost an in-your-face kind of thing,
designed to catch the religious authorities attention.
It’s almost like . . . a demonstration.
Mahatma Gandhi, the famous leader of
Indian independence, was well known for his philosophy of non-violent
resistance, What is perhaps less well-known is that he based it largely on the
teachings and actions of Jesus Christ. And in the past, when I’ve thought of
this, I’ve thought of the usual suspects: turn the other cheek, which Gandhi particularly
quoted, which forces your attacker to treat you as an equal. Go the extra mile,
which causes the oppressors to break their own laws. And give your
undergarments up as well as your coat, to embarrass oppressive lenders.
But I’ve slowly come to realize that
almost every public action he did amounted to non-violent resistance. Healing
the twelve lepers. Feeding the five thousand. Even turning over the tables in
the Temple, which hurt no one, freed a bunch of innocent creatures, and made
his point that the sacrificial system was coming to an end. All of these
episodes went against the grain, against the religious and secular powers that
be.
And the last one, with the tables,
underscores an important point: although Jesus—and Gandhi’s—resistance was non-violent,
it most certainly wasn’t
passive. It always
involved doing, it always involved action. Turning the other cheek. Going the
extra mile. Turning over the tables. All things you have to do, actions you have to
take. That’s one reason Gandhi called his philosophy satyagraha which can be
translated “truth action” or “truth force.”
And there’s one other thing: many of
Jesus’ actions, including sabbath corn-picking and healing, were against the
Jewish law called Torah, especially as interpreted by the religious
authorities. It was against the law for anyone other than a priest—as the duly
constituted representative of God—to forgive sins (aka declare someone clean).
Associating with sinners—aka those who were
unclean—made ones own self
unclean, a cast out from society. And before you say these are religious rules,
not civil, so it’s not the same thing, remember: everything was civil in those days, there was
no separation of state and religion. Jewish laws were civil laws, and vice versa. What Jesus was
engaged in was civil
disobedience, as Henry David Thoreau called it: breaking a law to
demonstrate or prove a point.
Well. If Jesus was demonstrating, if he
was actively—but non-violently—resisting, what was he demonstrating against?
What was he resisting?
His famous statement “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for
the sabbath” gives us a clue, but it’s more broad than that. Look at the
pattern of his first days in ministry. He heals Simon’s mama and a bunch of
others at her house, and tours the countryside, curing people of their demon
possession and leprosy. He establishes his home base in Capernaum, then heals
some more.
And what are the religious authorities
doing during this time? They’re griping about Jesus usurping their priestly authority
by declaring the forgiveness of sins. About him associating with people
they—and their religion—don’t want him to associate with. About him doing—and
not doing—what their religion would have him do and not do. While Jesus is
healing, the religious authorities are worried about their religion.
Part of this is the very human desire to
hang onto authority. In a real sense, they are trying to keep their jobs. After
all, even scribes and Pharisees have to eat. But underlying all that, there is
the matter of what they actually worship. The great theologian Jiddu
Krishnamurti put it this way: “You use a typewriter to write letters, but you
do not put it on an altar and worship it. But that is what you are doing when
organizations become your chief concern.”
We Christians have a name for that,
don’t we? We call it idolatry, the worship as if it were God of something that
is not. And we
Presbyterians are really good
at doing that. Take it from me, as someone who has served on sessions and
Presbytery committees for a very long time, we Presbyterians are second to none
in worshiping their religion—and our local churches—rather than God, right up
there with Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.
Sisters and brothers, we often divide
our strivings into content versus process, into what we do versus how we do it. In his public ministry, Jesus
showed us how to fuse the two. He was a rabble rouser, a demonstrator, using
tactics, using processes
copied and used to great effect by folks like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He
knew that without pressure, and public
pressure at that, nothing ever changes.
But at the same time, he embodied what
he preached, he demonstrated—in his acts of resistance—the very thing that he
was advocating. His public actions—against the powers that be—embodied the
message he was sending. Healing the sick, feeding the poor, forgiving the sins
is what religion is for, not the other way around. Religion is the typewriter,
not the one who is doing the typing. Religion is for humanity not humanity for religion.
Amen.
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