Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
And answering them, he said: Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fall into a pit, and will not immediately draw him out on the Sabbath day? And they could not answer him these things.
In today’s Gospel from St. Luke we hear of an occasion when Jesus went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees on the Sabbath day to eat bread. There was a man there who had dropsy and Jesus spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees present, asking them if it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath day. They did not answer him, but Jesus took the man and healed him, before sending him away. He challenged them by asking if one of them had an ox or an ass fall into a pit he would not immediately draw him out on the Sabbath day. The lawyers and the Pharisees were unable to answer him.
Who were the Pharisees and why was this incident so challenging for them? The Pharisees were strict observers of the Jewish Law. The name “Pharisee” is usually thought to mean separated, and it seems that they regarded themselves as the righteous remnant of the Jewish nation. They formed fellowships for mutual support and instruction. They were respected and influential, but also open to the danger that often befalls those who seek to be more righteous than those around them. They saw themselves as separate from the “lesser breeds without the Law”, not only blatant transgressors (“the tax collectors and sinners”), but also those who were less strict in the observance of the Law than themselves. They made a “fence around the Torah”, by devising further laws to prevent them transgressing the biblical commandments. The lawyers or scribes were the teachers of the Jewish Law. Many of them belonged to the Pharisaic school of interpretation, which is why the scribes and Pharisees are so often associated in the Gospels.
Jesus’ healing was so controversial to them because it occurred on the Sabbath day. The Sabbath was one of the most central and distinctive markers of the Jewish religion. Observance of the Sabbath day was one of the Ten Commandments. It was a day of rest for the whole people, and applied to all, whether they were high and low, rich and poor. It was a clear biblical commandment that no work was to be done on the Sabbath day. The issue then became what constituted work. It was necessary for the learned expositors of the Jewish Law to devise further rules to clarify exactly what did and did not constitute work on the Sabbath day. It was generally agreed that the commandment not to work on the Sabbath day could only be breached if life was in danger.
But what should happen if there was someone who needed healing whose life was not in danger? This was the reason for the controversy over the observance of the Sabbath in today’s Gospel (which is similar to many other controversies recorded elsewhere in the Gospels). Jesus argued that, contrary to the received scribal interpretation, it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath even if life was not in immediate danger. After all many of the lawyers and Pharisees would themselves have recognised that if an ox or an ass fell into a pit, the animal should immediately be drawn out, even on the Sabbath day.
At first sight this may look like simply a debate about the need for greater flexibility in the observance of the Sabbath. But what was at stake goes far deeper than an argument about the correct observance of the Law such as the scribes and Pharisees regularly had among themselves. Jesus proclaimed that in his person and ministry, the Kingdom of God, when his will would finally be done on earth as it is in heaven, was now breaking into history in his words and mighty works. It was the fulfilment of the hope of the prophet Isaiah about the eyes of the blind being opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame walking and the poor having the Gospel preached to them. The Sabbath, the weekly day of rest, anticipated the messianic age, when the whole creation would finally be redeemed. Far from being a day on which healing should be prohibited unless life was in immediate danger, Jesus proclaimed that since the Kingdom of God was now breaking in to history, the Sabbath was now in fact an appropriate day for his ministry of seeking and saving the lost to take place. The restrictions about not healing unless life was in danger no longer applied.
It is always difficult to find the right balance between recognising the need for rules that should be observed and also occasions when exceptions have to be made to the rules. If we are solely preoccupied with making our religion exclusively about the strict observance of rules we will find ourselves in danger of becoming self righteous and censorious towards others. We will be making the same mistake as the scribes and the Pharisees in the Gospels. On the other hand, there is the opposite danger of making our religious observances virtually meaningless by allowing so many exceptions to the rules that our faith ceases to be the distinctive marker of our identity and we simply become indistinguishable from the world around us.
It is here that Jesus’ saying about the Sabbath being made for man and not man for the Sabbath can help us. The danger for the religious traditionalist is that he becomes so preoccupied with the strict observance of rites and ceremonies that he loses sight of the weightier matters of the law, and becomes harsh and censorious towards others. At the opposite extreme the theological liberal or self styled progressive is in constant danger of so reducing the standard to what is acceptable to people in the present age that it becomes meaningless. The conservative is in constant danger of forgetting that the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath. The liberal is in danger of overthrowing the existing system altogether and putting nothing in place that distinguishes our faith from others.
It may be helpful to remember that, while we often associate radicalism with subversion in fact the word radical comes from the Latin word radix, meaning root. In other words, the true radical is not someone who distances himself from his roots, but one who more deeply immerses himself in them. The radicalism of Jesus’ teaching was not the consequence of an attempt to be fashionable in the eyes of the world, but rather to stand against wordly attitudes and compromises. He stood for something absolute, the Kingdom of God. He proclaimed that he had not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but rather to fulfil them, a righteousness higher than that of the scribes. They were primarily concerned with the outward observance of the Law. Though they did not altogether neglect inner attitudes (after all the law against covetousness was one of the Ten Commandments), it was not their primary emphasis. But Jesus proclaimed the time of the new covenant when the law would no longer be written on tablets of stone, but in the hearts of men had now dawned. His message to seek and save the lost, including on the Sabbath, was not that of a free floating iconoclast or a warm hearted humanitarian, but the consequence of the inauguration of the Kingdom of God in his own person and ministry.
The Church should continue to follow the radicalism of Jesus’ proclamation today. But it cannot be emphasised enough that, contrary to much current opinion, true radicalism is not about becoming more like the world around us, but rather standing against fashionable contemporary attitudes and compromises. Jesus’ message about seeking and saving the lost, above all on the Sabbath day, is what being truly radical is about, for it is from speaking the truth in love that the Church’s proclamation draws its strength.
Let us pray for grace to strengthen us to be faithful to the true radicalism of the Gospel message in our own time and place.
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