Readings:
Isaiah 58:9b-14, Luke 13:10-17
We pray: may the
words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your
sight, O God, our rock and our sustainer.
Amen.
We have a phrase
in our language – we talk about conversations or encounters where whatever is
said just ‘passes us by’’ – conversational ships in the night – where we both
think we are talking about the same thing but actually are on completely different
subjects, at cross purposes. The people
that Isaiah are talking to are somewhat like that in their relationship with
God. If we look at the verses preceding
the Old Testament reading we heard today, we find a genuinely bewildered people
–‘why O God will you not draw near us when we do everything you ask of us?’ and
a frustrated God – ‘you say you do this but in fact……’
The dialogue goes
something like this:
God: day after day they seek me as if they were a
nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their
God.
People: Why do we fast but you do not see? Why humble
ourselves but you do not notice?
God: look, for a
start, you serve your own interests on fast day – you quarrel and fight, this
will not make your voice heard on high, why don’t you get it? This is not what I ask of you…this is what you
are to do if I am to hear you – stop pointing the finger, doing evil, trampling
on the Sabbath, pursuing your own interests.
The people are
genuinely bewildered at this charge of hypocrisy. They do not see what they are doing wrong.
From the Hebrew scriptures,
we learn that there are two type of emphasis on how it is that God’s people are
to approach the Sabbath, the day of the sacred when all eyes are turned to God. From Genesis and Exodus[1]
we have the ordinance to bless and consecrate the Sabbath as a day of rest – the
Lord rests from the work of creation therefore we too are to rest –refraining
from working so we can contemplate and reflect and praise God.
From Deuteronomy[2]
we hear that we are to observe the sabbath day and keep it holy,
as the Lord your God commanded
you. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God
This complementary understanding, set in the light of
deliverance from Egypt, commands the people to observe the day and keep it holy
– in other words undertake a holy work
Relinquishing work for self and active holiness for God.
Keeping the Sabbath
holy did not mean only resting but also doing the work of the kingdom – active holy
practice on the Sabbath.
And that practice
was around justice and service and caring for each other – doing the Lord’s
work. Through Isaiah, God told the people
that by not living in active holiness, their worship and rituals were worse
than nothing. God and the people were
talking past each other, neither in the same conversation.
In our Gospel
reading the Pharisees too had bound up the Sabbath with rules for refraining
from work and had lost sight of the Deuteronomy teaching – that of holy
practice.
Hypocrisy was rife,
rules were rigid, consequences were immediate.
How, Jesus asks them somewhat angrily, does your unwillingness to
condone the healing of one of God’s chosen on the Sabbath fit with your remembrance
and honouring of the liberation of God’s people from Egypt, of your
understanding of active holiness? Not at
all. More than that, you have made even
these days of rest a place of bondage, where people’s wholeness and strength is
constrained, diminished by your finicky rules, your lack of flexibility and compassion
Yet again the
conversation that the people are having with God, where they think they have
got it right, is missing the mark completely.
Jesus here is pointing
out their hypocrisy. He is upset that they
do not see suffering that this woman is under and are willing to place rules of
rest above the need for healing and restoration. This is not living in a meaningful and
engaging relationship with God – this is witness gone wrong, he says. And they themselves are living in bondage to
the rules, unable to see that they have lost sight of a meaningful dynamic
living out of God’s love.
How many of you
have read C.S. Lewis’s book The Great
Divorce?[3] I have – a long time ago. In it a busload of people leave hell on a holiday
to heaven. One of them, in her earthly life, was a washerwoman in Golder’s
Green, wringing her livelihood from the soil of the clothing of those who hire
her for a pittance. In her life in the
kingdom of God, she is herself clothed in a white gown and a tiara, with ladies
holding her train and laughing in the bright sheen of God’s new day. Most of the people who board the bus for their
holiday in heaven, away from hell, instead of staying, choose to return to the
lower world. Bent on going back to hell,
the return trip is difficult, because the journey requires them to find what is
a very small crack in the expansive green pastures of the kingdom, and to
travel back in a shrinking coach that crushes passengers into insufferably
cramped quarters until they themselves grow small enough to have wide spaces
between them. The washerwoman, the
crippled woman in Luke, however, chooses to stay on holiday, in the kingdom.
It is a sobering
premise. The smallness of self
containment, blindness against the expansive freedom that is wholeness and
healing in God.
There are two
parts to the Gospel story – the healing of the woman, a healing that leads
immediately into praise and witness and the smallness and rigidity of the rule
keepers, unable to see their own hypocrisy and their need for living in a
vibrant full relationship with God.
And it seems that
the question to us is equally pointed. Do
we live in well meaning but unfaithful hypocrisy, turning people away, comfort
our priority, immersed in our ownness, overwhelmed by our business and captured
by our regulations?
Or are we aware of
our need to be on the same page as Jesus, to have our conversations with God focussed
on that which brings the kingdom to pass, that which allows us to witness to
the love of God in active holiness as well as Sabbath rest?
What might this
look like?
Well when we
listen for and hear the voice of God, a voice strong enough to tell us when we
are getting it wrong, as we inevitably do, we are constantly assessing our
witness against the teachings of Jesus, not so much slipping into that place of
hypocrisy, where our living does not reflect the teaching we purport to follow.
We are better able
to see how to live into and beyond our limits.
To neither attempt to do that which is not asked of us nor to be held
back from that which God asks us to be in faith.
We are open to and
aware of the many rhythms of community and conversation, moving always to the
drums of justice and compassion, service and holy action in our obedience to
the love of God.
We welcome
nurturing and prodding rather than contentment and smallness. We find our gifts and abilities and be
encouraged to live them to the full in Jesus name, knowing when it is time for
sacred rest and sacred activity.
We place substance
above form, compassion above unfeeling rules, people above empty ritual and God
above all.
And when we do
this – allowing our conversations, our relationships with God and each other to
connect and flourish in the one understanding of obedient love, that is where
we would be with the crowd, rejoicing at all the wonderful things that Jesus
was doing in the world and our lives. Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Margaret Garland
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