Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "Religion or Compassion?"

Text: Luke 13:10-17

but I had never noticed before now

that Luke tells three completely different stories

about occasions when Jesus

healed someone on the Sabbath

and got in trouble because of it.

In chapter 6, there’s the man with the withered hand,

a story we also find in Matthew and Mark . . .

In chapter 14, a man with dropsy is healed . . .

And here in chapter 13, it’s a woman

who has been bent over for 18 years,

unable to stand upright.

Two of the healings take place in a synagogue,

one in the home of a notable Pharisee.

There are a couple of things

that all three seem to have in common.

One is, that in each of these cases

the encounter appears to have been purely accidental.

In today’s reading,

Jesus happened to be teaching in a synagogue

where the woman apparently attended regularly.

There is no indication

that she sought him out specifically.

They just happened to be

under the same roof at the same time.

The second thing that the three episodes have in common

is that none of the three sick or injured persons

asked to be healed.

I don’t mean they would necessarily have turned it down

if Jesus had asked before he acted . . .

simply, that they didn’t initiate the process.

The woman came to the synagogue,

probably sat in the same place she sat every Sabbath . . .

and Jesus noticed her.

He called to her;

he laid hands on her;

he healed her.

And Luke tells us she was grateful and praised God . . .

but the healing wasn’t her agenda;

it was Jesus’ agenda.

He looked for the opportunity,

and he did it.

Why?

Also in this passage,

and the other two as well,

Jesus does not make a connection

between healing and forgiveness of sins,

as we see him do in other places.

So unlike in some of those other encounters,

he’s not making a point here about

his authority to forgive sins.

It seems to be just a straightforward physical healing.

Except, of course, that he does it on the Sabbath.

A day when the law requires you to rest,

to do nothing that even resembles work.

Even today, the most observant Jews

will not cook on the Sabbath;

everything must be prepared ahead of time.

The Law has been interpreted to mean

you may not flip a light switch on the Sabbath.

Elevators in buildings with a lot of Jewish residents

are often programmed to stop at every floor on Saturdays,

because pushing the button to choose your floor

is considered work by the most orthodox.

In the past. locations of synagogues had to be chosen carefully –

in some parts of the world, this is still the case –

because you weren’t allowed to walk

more than a certain distance on the Sabbath.

Otherwise, it ceased to be recreation and became work!

And you couldn’t ride your donkey to synagogue,

because the Law was clear that

the Sabbath was also to be a day of rest

for your work animals

and, in those days, your slaves as well.

As if to say,

if even God had to rest on the seventh day,

then, buddy, so do you!

And to heal someone on the Sabbath

would be considered a form of work.

Even though it wasn’t much of a physical labor for Jesus –

He spoke to her, he touched her,

something happened.

Therefore, work was done.

On a day when it was forbidden to work.

Now, rabbinic tradition and interpretation

had made an exception to the Sabbath law

if saving a life were involved.

So if you, or your child, or your sheep,

were sick, or injured, or fallen down the well . . .

if immediate attention was needed to save that life,

then that work was permitted on the Sabbath.

To haul you out of the well,

to bind up wounds, to administer medicines.

But if a life was not at stake,

you were supposed to wait for the Sabbath to end.

The law could be bent,

but only so far.

So in one sense,

the leader of the synagogue was right.

If the woman had been at death’s door,

it would have been fine for Jesus

to have healed her right then and there.

But she had had this condition for 18 years.

It may have been uncomfortable, inconvenient,

perhaps even painful . . .

but it wasn’t life-threatening at that moment.

Jesus could have waited to heal her,

and according strictly to the Law, he should have.

But to Jesus, that doesn’t make sense.

We care for our animals on the Sabbath, he says.

Even if it involves untying them and leading them to water.

That’s work!

But we do it because it is a need,

and they cannot do it themselves.

If we have compassion enough on our animals

to bend the rules for them, says Jesus,

how much more should I have compassion

on this daughter of Abraham?

It’s only in Mark’s gospel that it is precisely quoted

that Jesus said,

the Sabbath was made for humans,

not humans for the Sabbath . . .

but that’s more or less his point in all the stories.

The law . . . in a sense, the Jewish faith . . .

was given after humans were created,

in order to help guide and structure our lives.

God did not first create

a huge abstract system of laws and religion

and then create humans

in order to conduct a grand experiment

to see whether they could succeed at living by the laws.

We came first!

The creation in Genesis

comes before the Ten Commandments in Exodus.

Not just in the pages of the Bible,

but chronologically as well.

That has two implications.

The first is this:

Because the Sabbath was made for us –

the rules, the religion, the faith, were made for us –

I think we have an initial obligation

to take them very seriously.

God created the rules,

not out of some divine neurosis of control needs,

not out of an abstract sense of justice.

God made us,

and then watched us do all those things

we humans do to hurt ourselves and each other,

and God said, "You all are nuts!

You need some rules!"

So God set boundaries,

defined right and wrong for us more clearly.

God handed out blanket-kinds of rules –

always do this, never do that –

and also rules for specific cases only,

such as, if your neighbor’s ox tramples your garden,

then this is what should happen.

God gave us, at least initially,

a religion filled with rules,

with guidelines for ordering human life,

because we had proven ourselves to be

incapable of ordering it on our own.

So far, so good.

The rules were created with human being in mind,

so we as members of the human race

need to honor them and to take them seriously.

The second implication, though, is this:

If a rule is not serving a particular human need,

then the rule needs to be set aside,

not the person having the need.

If a person comes on the Sabbath and needs healing,

then, for as long as it takes to achieve the healing,

you set aside the rule that says

you are not to work on the Sabbath.

You don’t throw out the rule altogether;

it was made for a reason.

But it serves you;

you don’t serve it.

I think this is especially important

because at our present point in time

there seem to be many very sincere Christians

telling us that the way to be faithful to God

is always to keep the rules.

And that if you bend or break one of the rules,

then you’re not a good Christian.

It doesn’t matter what the reason was.

It is your religious duty to keep the rules.

I can’t square that with what Jesus taught.

If he believed that,

he would not have healed this woman on the Sabbath.

He would not have shared meals

with tax collectors and prostitutes.

He would not have asked for water

from a Samaritan woman at a well.

For Jesus, the call of God means

that compassion trumps religion every time.

To keep the rules and ignore human suffering

is to be unfaithful to God

who made the rules in the first place.

Human life is complex.

There is no one set of rules

to tell us what to do in every circumstance, no matter what.

Except perhaps this:

Whatever compassion requires, that is what we must do.

It’s what Jesus did . . .

and that’s an example I can live with.

How about you?

Amen.

© 2004 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)