Text: Luke 13:10-17 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
Jesus Heals a Crippled Woman
10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And there was a woman who had had a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years; she was bent over and could not fully straighten herself. 12 And when Jesus saw her, he called her and said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your infirmity.” 13 And he laid his hands upon her, and immediately she was made straight, and she praised God. 14 But the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on the sabbath, said to the people, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be healed, and not on the sabbath day.” 15 Then the Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger, and lead it away to water it? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?” 17 As he said this, all his adversaries were put to shame; and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
The old bit of conventional wisdom that tells us “no good deed goes unpunished” seems to have been as true in Jesus’ day as it is in ours.
Here’s Jesus, in a synagogue – a church, in other words (more or less) – a place where people worshipped God, and where they sought to understand what God wanted them to do in the world for his glory and the betterment of the human condition. In front of the entire congregation, Jesus does exactly that – he heals that woman, who for the past eighteen years had only been able to look sideways up at people. He removes her infirmity; he erases her pain; and she stands erect and praises God.
But apparently, no one else does. In fact, we read that the “ruler of the synagogue,” the head honcho, the Big Kahuna, does the exact opposite of praising God – he gets all hot under the collar and tells the assembled worshippers that, in effect, office hours are over. You want healing? Come back tomorrow when we’re open!
Jesus had broken the rules!
Rules. They had enough rules back then to choke an elephant. We’re familiar with the Ten Commandments; but the Ten Commandments were just the tip of the iceberg. There were somewhere around 637 commandments at the time of Jesus – 637 rules that people were expected to follow without deviation or exception. Who could possibly even remember all these rules?
Nobody, as it turns out. That’s why they came up with the idea of writing down all these rules on a very small piece of parchment, rolling that scrap of parchment up, sticking it in a tiny little box, and carrying it around on their wrists like a Timex watch, or on a string around their foreheads, just so those rules were always available for consultation.
Can you even imagine living like that? At any given moment, on any given day, people simply assumed that they were sinning in at least some minor way. And all this was on top of the normal, day-to-day activities of making a living, raising children, and going about your routine tasks. It can’t have been a very joyful existence.
And there, to make sure that you were following the rules, and to take you to task when you weren’t, were people like the president of the synagogue we just ran into, people for whom the rules were set in stone and could not be broken for any reason. The phrase, common today, that “rules were made to be broken,” did not exist back then.
But it exists now, and it does because we, too, have rules. I have a lot of personal rules, and I’ll bet you do, too. Businesses have rules. The government has rules, many of which go by the name of “laws,” but they’re rules, just the same.
And we need rules. We need laws. Can you imagine what life would be like without them? What if there were no such thing as traffic laws? Driving to the grocery store for a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk would be a death-defying adventure! The purpose of rules and laws, then and now, is to help us live with each other.
But sometimes these rules – or maybe it’s better to say, our strict adherence to these rules – get in our way. They become a stumbling block, a hindrance to living together, rather than a help.
Three years ago, when I preached on this same text, I quoted a true example of what can sometimes happen when following the rules too closely. It’s a good story, so here it is again:
Greyhound Bus Lines once had a rule that no pets were allowed on their buses. Period. One late night at a rural truck stop in Florida, a Greyhound bus driver kicked an 87 year old woman off his bus. Her “crime”: She was returning from her birthday party with her present – a tiny puppy she’d named Cookie. The driver refused to make an exception, and so this poor elderly woman was left about 80 miles from her home at 3 in the morning. No doubt the bus driver tried to justify his actions by saying, “Sorry, Lady. We have a rule. We have a rule!”
A security guard who was summoned by the driver called the police to escort her away, and that only made the poor woman even more frightened. Can you even imagine this? Imagine if that had been your elderly mother or grandmother!
BUT – what could have been a terrifying ordeal for the woman, who walked with a crutch and had trouble seeing and hearing, instead became an inspiration. After getting her a sandwich and something to drink, police from five different jurisdictions teamed up to get her home. “I’ve never seen so many people so nice to me, an old lady,” she said. “They gave me love, respect, attention. Love has a lot of names,” she continued, “compassion, respect, friendliness.” Greyhound apologized and gave her a refund. The unidentified driver, who was a 20 year Greyhound veteran, was suspended. (Craig Condon, Sermons from My Heart, 17 November 2012, adapted)
Maybe that rule shouldn’t have been in force in the first place. You and I might shake our heads and say, “Well, of course the bus driver should have let the woman stay on the bus! It was 3 a.m., and she was 87 years old!” But the fact is that rule was in place, and the driver did follow it. We weren’t there; we don’t know what pressures the driver might have felt he was under; we don’t fully know the circumstances of the incident. All we know is that a crippled 87-year-old woman’s birthday celebration was ruined – fortunately, just temporarily – because she just wanted to take her puppy home.
Rules. Sometimes they’re a necessary evil. Sometimes they’re just an evil.
A prayer that every one of us could offer up once in a while might go like this: “O Lord, save us from hardness of heart;” because that’s really what the moral of the Greyhound bus story and the Gospel lesson is today.
Rules can cause us to be insensitive to the needs of others. Rules can cause us to miss chances to represent Jesus to another human being who desperately needs to feel his presence.
When we have a choice between strictly following a rule and maybe giving someone the benefit of the doubt, or cutting them a little slack, well, why not cut them a little slack? How many of us have been stopped for speeding? We maybe weren’t paying attention, maybe we were in just too big a hurry – and the traffic cop nailed us, got us dead to rights. We knew it; he knew it – but then he let us off with just a warning. According to the law – the rules – we should have gotten that ticket. But we didn’t.
Sometimes it’s true that making an exception to a rule makes us respect that rule even more.
And sometimes you have to break a rule – written or unwritten – for the greater good.
Sure, Jesus could have said to the woman, “Come back tomorrow, and I’ll be glad to heal you.” But that just didn’t cut it. There was more at stake here even than the pain of the woman – here was an opportunity for a teaching moment, a way to show that God’s love transcends rules.
This was an impossible concept for the leader of the synagogue to grasp. His religion had long since ceased to be about a transcendent, loving God, and had become a religion of rules, which is to say that it really wasn’t a religion at all. It had to do more with accounting than it did with faith.
And then Jesus showed up and turned his world inside-out and upside-down. Jesus showed that God is not about checklists. God is about love and compassion. Suddenly, the leader of the synagogue found that he was the one thrown off the bus.
Last week, I mentioned the book Why Nobody Wants to Be Around Christians Anymore, and I talked about the four reasons people have given for not wanting to rub shoulders with Christians. Adhering to rules to the exclusion of mercy, love, and compassion fits right in with those four reasons.
But the whole title of that book is: Why Nobody Wants to Be Around Christians Anymore, and How 4 Acts of Love Will Make Your Faith Magnetic.
What are these 4 acts?
- Radical hospitality. This is accepting and loving people unconditionally, as they are, who they are, wherever they are in life.
- Fearless conversation. This is the kind of conversation in which people in our lives count on us to listen and be willing to talk about what they want to talk about; their thoughts and their doubts are welcome.
- Genuine humility. This is a toughy. It requires us to admit that, no, we actually do not know everything, that we do not have all the answers, that we all have something to learn, and that we are all in this together.
- Divine anticipation. As Thom and Joani Schultz put it, “What if we trusted the Holy Spirit to work and looked for signs of God’s hands in our everyday lives? God is here, ready to connect with us in a fresh way.”[1]
There they are. Four practical, simple, and authentic acts that show others that Christians – that we – do indeed take our faith seriously and we do indeed really do love them. Four kinds of love that Jesus himself displayed in his own life time and time again, like in today’s lesson. Every one of us can easily do every one of these things. We don’t need an advanced degree. We don’t need to spend a dime. And we have all the experience we need to show these qualities in our lives and in our community.
Friends, the takeaway for us today is simply this: Observe the rules of life, as we all have to – but don’t let them prevent you from being compassionate! If you have the chance to show God’s love by bending or even breaking a rule, then do it!
Let’s live out those four acts of love in our lives! The world won’t know what hit it!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Adapted and quoted from Why Nobody Wants to Be Around Christians Anymore, and How 4 Acts of Love Will Make Your Faith Magnetic, © 2014 Thom and Joani Schultz, Group.com, p. 23