No Illegal Healings

No Illegal Healings--October 23, 2018

"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." [Luke 13:10-17]

The complaint always goes something like this: "I'm all for letting people improve their lives--I just want them to follow the proper process and abide by the rules to do it."

And the challenge of Jesus in reply always goes something like this: "If your interpretation of the rules does not allow for helping the person God has put in your path at this very moment, then your interpretation of the rules needs to be broken."

This is one of those stories I have come to love more and more as years pass, but also one which unsettles me, too, if I pay close attention.  Jesus very clearly sets up a situation where he willfully, deliberately, and consciously breaks the rules (or at least, he defies the interpretation of the rules that the Respectable Religious Authorities have set forth) in order to bring healing to a woman who has been sick and bent over for nearly two decades.  And Jesus understands that his actions force everybody in that room--and everybody who hears this story now, two millennia later--to make a choice: if it comes to it, does our allegiance lie with our current understanding of "the rules," or is our higher calling to assist the person in our midst without putting her off for another day to fade back into the woodwork?  And if we are willing to love the person more than the current interpretation of the rules, then are we willing to defy the official position of the rule-makers in order to make sure that the real human faces are not erased from view? Because that's really what this is all about.  And that's really what Jesus' challenge is all about.

I say that with confidence because Jesus has numerous "outs" he could have taken to make this a less confrontational scene, and he deliberately does not choose them.  He could have found a way to help this poor woman and not have poked a thumb in the eyes of the Respectable Religious Crowd, whom I can't help but picture carrying angry signs and chanting, "No Illegal Healings!" Jesus could have found a compromise, or a win-win sort of scenario, where the religious rules would not have been violated, and where this lady could have been healed eventually.  For one, this woman has been hunched over for eighteen years--clearly this is a chronic, but not life-threatening, condition.  Jesus certainly could have waited a day--just one more measly day!--and said to her, "Come back here tomorrow and I'll heal you, and everyone will applaud me for doing it! They'll praise God, not just that you have been healed, but that you have been healed legally, going through the proper procedures, channels, and protocols."  This would have been a fine way to avoid an "illegal" healing, and everyone would have been happy to see their system of rules preserved intact.  Or, if it were so important to heal this woman that very day, he could have found her after the synagogue service, or told her to meet him in the parking lot where no one else would have seen it, and then again, he would have avoided a direct confrontation with the official Rule-Keepers, who seem oh-so-obsessed with making sure no unapproved healings slip in under the radar.  Jesus could have even just waited for the woman to come up to him and ask for the healing--maybe she wouldn't have even asked him for a miracle that day, and he could have found her on a different day, when it wouldn't have gotten him in trouble.

All of these are clearly options for Jesus, but instead, Jesus deliberately sets this confrontation into motion with his own choice to call to her and heal her right there in the synagogue, provocatively flouting the rules, and refusing to make her wait even one more day for the healing he knew she needed.  And Jesus does this, not naively or unaware that this will ruffle some feathers and cause a scandal, but deliberately intending to do just that.  

And that is because Jesus has come to heal everybody in that room--not just the woman whose back was hunched for eighteen years.   The rest of the congregation needs healing of their hearts and minds and eyes, because the rest of them had grown comfortable with a system that said the rules were more important than this human life.  Everybody else in that synagogue had been taught to think in line with the prevailing logic of the leader there, who says clearly that he thinks the rules about the days of the week preclude coming to the aid of this woman at that moment. And Jesus has come to heal everybody there, whose hearts are getting twisted into valuing order, rules, and protocol over the well-being of this human life.  Jesus knows that when we are more interested in making sure people stand in the proper line for the proper amount of time to be helped than in actually helping people, something has gone wrong inside our hearts, and we are in need of healing, too.

So Jesus has to cause a scene like this, really--because his view is not just on this woman, but on everybody else.  Everyone in that room needs to know, Jesus insists, that God's commandment for sabbath rest was always about giving and restoring life, and never a tedious bean-counting measure meant to prevent healing or helping.  Otherwise, everyone in that room will come to the mistaken conclusion that God loves rules more than people, or that God is more concerned with proper protocol than with the human face in need at the moment.  It is imperative to Jesus that the healing happen now, both for the sake of the woman who has suffered enough already, and also for the sake of everyone else who needs to have their hearts straightened out.  

The urgency is an important piece of the healing, too, because as Martin Luther is reputed to have said, "How soon 'Not now' becomes 'Never'."  And similarly, a namesake of his, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, "For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied'."  Both Luther and Dr. King would point out in this story, as Jesus does, that the waiting this woman has had to do already was evil.  And for the Respectable Religious Leader to try and use God's Law to insist that she must wait even longer?  That, too, is evil, Jesus says, because there are, from God's eyes, no illegal healings.

There comes a point, Jesus insists, when we must decide whether we love the comfort and familiarity of "but that's what the rules say" more than we love our actual neighbor who is right before our eyes.  There comes a point where we need to ask if we are not using "the importance of the rules" as a cover for erasing people from being seen.  After all, if Jesus had quietly kept to himself that sabbath day and whispered to the woman that he could heal her on another day, she would have been forgotten by everyone else and treated like she didn't matter. 

So here is the challenge for us on this day: will we love and honor people more than we do our interpretations of rules and systems of order?  Will we recognize that, as tempting as it may be to put actions off with a simple, "Just wait a little longer... get in line!", that our "Wait your turn" attitude smacks of the privileged position of never having been told to wait?  Will we complain like the Respectable Religious leader does here, and insist to the world that we're "all in favor of people getting helped and improving their lives"... but that it just doesn't matter to us as much as being gatekeepers who control access to who gets the help and when their lives can be improved?  Or will we let Jesus' reply be our reply: "If your interpretation of the rules does not allow for helping the person God has put in your path at this very moment, then your interpretation of the rules needs to be broken."

Will we, in this day, contribute to the power of "what the rules say" to erase people, or will we, with Jesus, insist on seeing, on loving, and on helping the people God sends to our doors?  Will we be willing to risk being labeled rule-breakers, being accused of not caring about law and order, because we are committed to working for good now, and not just when it's convenient or waiting until everyone thinks it's a good idea?

Will we love our neighbors more than we love the safety of looking like we are staying inside the lines?

That is what Jesus challenges us to on this day.  What shall we say?

Lord Jesus, enable us to love you more than our understanding of the rules... and to love the people you send across our path more than getting to be gatekeepers.