If the story we have just heard sounds familiar, there is a good reason for that! There are at least six occurrences in the Gospel of Jesus healing on a Sabbath Day (Healing of Simon Peter’s mother in law, the man with a withered hand, the crippled woman, the man with dropsy, the man at the Pool, the man born blind), and since the different authors of the Gospel often shares the same stories, I did the math and found out that there are not less than thirteen passages about Jesus healing on a Sabbath. So it looks like God is trying to get our attention…as we say “God is trying to tell us something”!
1- Jesus healed on a Sabbath Day to tell us something…about the Law
I actually really like it that we have this passage of the Gospel today because we have debated in Bible study this week whether Christians should always obey the law and we had to acknowledge that the Bible has different responses to that. It’s well known that in Romans 13:1, Paul says “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.“, but then in Acts 5:29 Peter and the Apostles defend themselves in front of the religious authorities saying that they must “Obey God rather than men“, and then in Revelation, we have this picture of an Empire that has become so evil that resistance is for Christians the only path to salvation. We ended up concluding that it was all kind of confusing! So again it’s good we have this example of how Jesus dealt with the religious law, and how he was accused, not for the first time, not for the last time, of breaking the Sabbath.
Now to understand what is going on in our passage, we need to turn to Exodus 20:8–11 where we read the Fourth Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.Six days you shall labor and do all your work,but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God.In it you shall do no work (…) For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth (…) and rested the seventh day.” I think we know that. What we may not understand in our story, is that healing people was considered as work. It is all the more difficult to understand because the leader of the synagogue is accusing the people, rather than Jesus. He says: “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day“. He does not directly confront Jesus, but this is what it’s all about: Jesus works on the Sabbath Day, which is forbidden. And Jesus responds by saying that they themselves authorize acts of compassion on the Sabbath that involve some type of work, like untying their cattle to lead them to water, all the more should he untie a woman from her spiritual bondage, and it’s quite a striking metaphor. For this reason, theologians often say that Jesus did not actually break the Sabbath or the Law, rather he fulfilled it, bringing it back to its real meaning, which is so clearly stated in the passage we have just heard from Isaiah: “Remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, (…) offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted“. God’s Law is about setting free, refraining from personal revenge, doing good, removing the causes of suffering in the people. God’s Law is mean to be life giving: “Choose life, that you and your offspring may live“(Deuteronomy 30:19)
What is the law about? Even our civil laws, even our most simple, everyday laws, are indeed about protecting life. We talked with the group about whether we should always respect the speed limit. And it seems quite obvious that we should, and have never a reason to break it. Well, if my wife is giving birth in the passenger seat, maybe. The speed limit is about saving a life, but in this case, maybe I need to go above the speed limit in order to save a life, or two. I think that would be acceptable in court because the fulfilling of the law is protecting and defending life. Now we don’t have the same understating of what it means. For some, abortion is always wrong because we should protect the life of the unborn, for some it should be legal to protect the mothers when their health is endangered by their pregnancy. Some also value quality of life over the mere fact of being alive (See the debate around euthanasia). But that’s why we have “case law”, and why law is debated in court based on the real life of real people. We cannot just apply the law, we have to think about what it means. And sometimes it’s not just that a civic or religious law does not apply, sometimes some laws enable evil and destruction, and therefore lose their purpose. We have many examples in our days about how the laws around protecting property (meant to protect life, which is good) can turn evil when they protect companies that harm the environment and those same laws punish citizens who try to oppose this pollution. So we see that there is no way around using common sense, compassion and taking responsibility. By the way, that what the rabbis did (and still do all the time): they studied God’s law (The Torah) to understand how to apply it. And again, the passage we have just heard from Isaiah really help us to understand that. We shouldn’t bend the law for the sake of “own ways, serving [our] own interest, pursuing [our] own affairs“, it’s not about “finding loopholes”! It’s about again “removing the yoke”, and it’s really what Jesus seems to be doing with this woman: lifting the weight off her shoulders, setting her free. There is this saying that, whatever rule we have, we should always err on the side of love, of compassion.
2- Jesus healed on a Sabbath Day to tell us something…about Compassion
The word compassion is never mentioned in our passage, and yet this is really what should jump at us. Actually, we see Jesus getting upset at the leader of the synagogue, because he does not see that compassion is at the heart of God’s Law. And Jesus says something quite terrifying, that we may not pay attention to at first: Jesus accuses those religious people to have more compassion for their animals, for their cattle than they have for certain people. It reminds me every time of a heartbreaking story that happened to me, or rather that I was a witness to a few years ago.
As most of you know, I started my ministry in downtown DC, and one day I met a homeless person in the street who seemed quite distressed, and when I asked him what was going on, he told me that on that morning the shelter pushed everybody out at 6:00am because they were closing even though it was pouring rain outside. And he told me: They wouldn’t have done that to a dog. And he kept on repeating that, in shock and disbelief: They wouldn’t have done that to a dog. I didn’t know what to say because I knew he was right: Good people” don’t treat dogs like that. Or if they did, I am quite sure it would be posted on social medias and everybody would be horrified: At dawn, shelter leaves dogs in the pouring rain.Basically this is what Jesus says today: What I did for this woman, you would have done it for your ox, for your donkey, for your dog. You don’t leave them tied up all day, even on the Sabbath. You have enough compassion to give them what they need.
This is interesting because when we read the Gospel we often assume Jesus asked people who had no compassion to show compassion. But what we see is that they already were able to show compassion. It was certainly not in their best interest to let their livestock die, but it was probably more than that: they didn’t want them to suffer. Now don’t get me wrong Jesus is not endorsing animal cruelty, like when some say: Don’t you care about animals, care about people instead. The care of animals needed to be honored, but what Jesus wants them to understand is that if they were to make exceptions to the law for the sake of their animals, how much more should they have done an exception for people in need! God takes care of animals, and he cares even more for people. See Luke 12:24when Jesus says:Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!
The hard truth is not that we don’t have compassion, it is that our compassion is specific, targeted and exclusive. Often we have compassion for our own, and then there are others people. Of course we cannot save the whole world, but what Jesus hates, what he denounces as our hypocrisy, is how our hearts pretend to be soft (don’t we care for our cattle and our pets?) when they can be really hardened towards certain people, in this case an old and deformed woman, a nobody who for 18 years seemed to have been invisible to all, her sufferings ignored. But she was bounded by a spirit, maybe she had done something bad to deserve it? It’s easy to become hardhearted towards those we assume are responsible for their own failings and sufferings. We have compassion towards the people we assume are deserving, the law abiding, the hard working, and then, what kind of compassion do we have left for the poor but also for the losers and the sinners? Don’t we often hear “Good people” claiming that offenders should “rot in prison”? The truth is that we only have one heart to love all people and all things. Either our heart is genuinely compassionate or it isn’t. Now having compassion does not mean we are to be enablers. Jesus was certainly not an enabler. His compassion was about healing and forgiving, it was also about telling the truth to people about their need for repentance and how they could amend their lives. We see this understanding of compassion in other places in the New Testament, when Paul is called in a dream by a man of Macedonia to “come and help them”, Paul understands he have to go preach the Gospel to them (Acts 16:9–10 )
3 – Jesus healed on a Sabbath Day to tell us something…about work
A concluding way in which we can understand why Jesus healed on a Sabbath Day is because he wanted us to see that his work, his mission was urgent, necessary and suffered no delay. More than a healing, the miracle we hear about today is about exorcism in the sense that Jesus came to set people free from spiritual bondage. In Romans 8:21, Paul tells us that in fact the whole creation: “(…) will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Jesus’s mission is to include all people in God’s Sabbath, God’s Day, God’s Kingdom, by bringing God’s deliverance from all sin and from the power of death. It is very telling that Jesus cures a “bent over” woman who “couldn’t stand straight“. He came to raise us up, physically and spiritually. This story is a foretelling of what will happen later in his death and Resurrection. The question Luke asks to us is not so much what work we accomplish for God, rather Luke asks how will we let Jesus operate salvation for us. How we will welcome his work? Like the crowd who rejoiced in the things he was doing, or will his compassion put us to shame like it did for the “good” and yet heartless people?