FINDINGS II
Proper
16 - C - August 22, 2010
Luke 13:1-17
Luke 13: 10-17 While Jesus was
speaking in one of the synagogues on Shabbat a woman with a psychosomatic ailment that had crippled her for 18
years showed up. She was bent double and hardly able to lift her head. When
Jesus caught sight of her, he called her to him and said, "Lady, you are set
free from your ailment." Then he laid hands on her and she stood up straight
then and there and began to praise God. But the leader of the synagogue was
indignant because Jesus had performed a curative work on the day of rest.
"There are six days in the week on which this can be done, so why don't people
come on one of those days and be cured rather than bother us on Shabbat?" At
this Jesus replied, "You play actors! Don't you people untie your ox or ass
from the manger and lead it to water on Shabbat? So can't this woman, a
daughter of Abraham whom the Evil One held in bondage for 18 years, be set free from her burden no
matter what day it is?" With that, Jesus' opponents were ashamed, but the crowd
rejoiced in the wonderful things he was doing. (Translated and paraphrased by
Harry T. Cook)
 By Harry T. Cook
8/16/10
RUBRIC
Heads up, scholars. In the passage above, Luke has served up
a full plate of ideas and terms that cannot be passed over lightly. We will
revisit the Shabbat controversy, the difference between "miracle" and "work,"
the mind-body connection, the mystery of the curative arts, the oppositional
presence of evil in an otherwise good world and the suggestibility of a crowd
that will generally applaud what appears to them to be an extraordinary
bread-and-circuses kind of thing with thumbing of the nose at authority into
the bargain. -- Your adult forum or Tuesday bible study class will have much
business with this passage.
WORKSHOP
He's back. Satan (or the power of evil) is said in Luke 4:13
to have left Jesus alone "until an opportune time." Maybe this is an opportune
time. "Satan" or the "devil" derives from the Hebrew and Aramaic "stn" and the
Greek "diabolos" both of which mean something like "block" or "impediment" as
in something crossing or intersecting one's path to frustrate forward movement.
"Stn" is not necessarily a conscious force of evil as depicted in various media
by various writers and artists. The biblical analysis is neither Manichean nor
generally dualistic.
I quote from FINDINGS II for Lent I-C: "Human beings are
wont to see pearls of what they think are of great price and just as wont to
climb over anything and anyone in their headlong rush to obtain them. Sometimes
those pearls are fake and of very little price, sometimes things not good for
those who pursue them.
"That's a good time for what Luke calls 'diabolos' to throw
a cross-body block on the pursuer and make him stop. And if he is stopped for
long enough, he may have thrust upon him that all important moment in which to
ask, 'Why and I doing this?' Thus "stn" may not be all bad."
We say in the translation/paraphrase above that the woman in
question suffered from "a psychosomatic ailment." The Greek of the passage said she suffered from "a
spirit of infirmity." Luke depicts her as "appearing" in the synagogue,
supposedly in the middle of whatever Jesus was saying.
We need to keep in mind that the "synagogue" was what the
word in Greek means: assembly. It was not a holy place as such. What was "holy"
as the story goes was the day of the week -- Shabbat, that seventh day whose
observance as a day of rest which had been intrinsic to Jewish identity in
post-exilic centuries. See the Priestly version of creation (Genesis 1:1-2:4a,
and especially 2:2-3) for the establishment of Shabbat. If the ones (elohim)
who labored in the calling of light and life out of darkness and chaos of the
primordial abyss took a day off, so in their honor did the good Jew do
likewise.
So by that standard Luke's Jesus was not a good Jew. The
sense of the text is that Luke means to depict Jesus acting spontaneously,
responding to suffering by ending it. To do so, the text implies, he needed to
lay hands of the crippled woman. Because that gesture effected something -- the
cure of her ailment -- it was a work. Indeed, it was as the Greek text clearly
states by the use of a verb form of the noun "ergon," meaning exactly "work."
Not only was it a "work." It was also not a miracle. The
leader of the synagogue is depicted as being disgusted by what he had seen
rather than dazzled by it. The crowd was said to be dazzled, but crowds -- the
Greek word "ochlos" can mean "rabble" or "common folk" -- often operate in a kind of mass hysteria.
Not the leader of a synagogue. His job was to keep order, to follow rubric and
to keep local religion compartmentalized. He not only had no patience for a
"work" on Shabbat, but no expectation for or tolerance of any act of power
outside of what the reading and exegesis of Torah might provide. The leader of
the synagogue in this text has had many a descendant in many a pulpit.
What constituted the "work"? It is interesting that Luke has
Jesus say to the woman that she was
delivered of her infirmity before he is depicted as laying hands on her,
wherewith, Luke says, she was instantly made whole. The spoken word effects a
result. See Genesis 1:3: Fiat lux! John the evangelist weaves a dense web of
academic locutions in the prologue to his gospel to assert that Jesus was the divine
Word. Luke does it in a single word-picture.
A word about the word "hypocrite." The word is lifted
directly from the Greek and means literally "one who acts" -- a pretender or a
dissembler. Why did Luke depict Jesus as calling his opponents, chief among
them the leader of the synagogue, "hypocrites"? In Luke's imagination he must have figured that the
pharisaic reaction to an outreach of mercy as wide and as deep as what Jesus
tendered to the crippled woman had to be a put-on, that the synagogue leaders
must have been as impressed as the crowd was but dared not display it for
propriety's sake.
Luke could just as well of had Jesus say: "Get a life, you
people! Get your heads out of the prayer books and see what can happen when you
are paying attention to what's real."
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
Two matters:
1) The curing of the woman's disability. Who knows what the
author(s) of According to Luke may ever have witnessed like unto what is
described in the passage at hand? A 21st century person can turn on the
television set in any living room in America at almost any hour and see some
flamboyant evangelist "cure" people of this ailment and that infirmity. There
are gullible believers and cynical doubters of such things.
Taking a person, any person, seriously is in itself an act
of love and mercy. Paying attention to a person's suffering, needs and
aspirations has a definite curative effect on that person. I've seen the look
on the face, even that of a dying man or woman just grateful that someone is
there at hand to take to heart the complications of their leaving. It is said
that people in America would die to have any attention at all that their
elected representatives in Congress would deign to give them beyond the
recorded message and the franked letter. Taking a constituent's concerns
seriously would cure a lot of the alleged anger that media pundits insist is
consuming the American electorate.
2) The Shabbat controversy. Human beings have a fatal
weakness for unthinking devotion to ideas and institutions that should serve
them rather than the other way around. Shabbat, according to the best Jewish
thought, was, indeed, "made for man," but it has turned out to be just the
opposite. Legalists come in all sizes and shapes. Sabbath legalists who are
strewn here and there in the synoptic gospels apparently could not see through
the gauze of custom and ritual to the human condition arrayed before them.
Jesus is depicted as having been in more or less constant difficulty with them.
The message of the passage from Luke above is that
legitimate human need trumps even and maybe especially religious observance.
The question was, "Don't you people untie your ox or ass from the manger and
lead it to water on Shabbat?" It was a rhetorical question at that, and the
obvious answer was, "Yes."
The question these days might be, "Don't you people find
love where you find it, in consensual, faithful and fulfilling relationships?"
The answer, if they're lucky, is "Yes." So why deny such fulfillment to two men
or two women who find all that in homosexual union? Because two or three random
and largely misunderstood clauses in so-called holy writ can be twisted in a
way that holds such unions ungodly? Not a bit of it.
Or the question might be, "Shall the church muck around in
doctrinal splitting of hairs and pinhead angel counting, or shall it take hold
of major life issues and try to make a difference?" I dare anyone to affirm the
former and deny the latter.
|
|
