How Can Anyone Think God Is Like That? Part ONE

Sometimes the most profound theological rebuttal is "Oh, Baloney!"

I was in a good mood this morning until I reached Luke 13:10 in my daily Bible reading. What I read there troubled me.
It's about a Sabbath day when Jesus was teaching in a synagogue. In the congregation was a woman, unnamed, "bent over" (osteoporosis?), "crippled by a spirit for eighteen years."

When Jesus spotted her (he rarely seems to miss these kinds of people), he called her forward, and with a touch of his hands and a simple statement—"Woman, you are set free from your infirmity"—he healed her. Eighteen years of misery: vanquished.
"She straightened up and praised God," the story says. For a moment I speculated on how her praising of God differed from the "praising" that might have been going on among the rest of the crowd? I bet this lady had no need for a microphone or an invitation to speak. I wonder if she danced?

One would think that this healing event would thrill everyone in the building. That everyone would dance. But that would be wrong. The synagogue ruler for one, the writer says, was "indignant." His comment? "There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath."

Don't you just love this guy? As I read my Bible this morning, he's the one that got my irritability going.

Having been a pastor for a lot of years, I asked myself how I would have reacted should this healing have happened during a worship time where I was the leader.

I can tell you how I'd like to think I'd react.

First I'd be ecstatic, full of joy, for the healed person. And I'd thank God too.

Then I'd delete her name from the pastoral care list in my PDA.

Oh, I'd also add her name to the program-recruiting list. I am a practical person. She's now capable of serving in ways she hadn't been before. Programs and program staffing are very important.

Finally, I'd be relieved that I no longer had to feel guilty about my own good health and wholeness in contrast to her previously pitiable condition.

But apparently the synagogue ruler didn't think like this. For him something had gone awry in his system, and he was mad. Tradition, law, rules—doing things decently and in order—had been threatened. And—oh, the horrors of this—his own influence was at risk.

I'm guessing here, but I have the feeling that this "ruler" was quite used to the congregation (soldiers/adherents) knuckling under, doing things his way … immediately. Thus, he wasn't prepared for what was happening when Jesus didn't play by the ruler's rules.

Jesus' response to the ruler's injunction: "You hypocrites! Doesn't each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham (italics mine), whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?"

I think Jesus' shows a bit of brilliance in his way of handling the moment. Using the art of sermon illustration, he alludes to the larger world outside the synagogue: a place of donkeys and oxen with which people make their living. Show this woman the same courtesy, even on the Sabbath, that you show your farm animals. This seems a worthy idea.

It's also worth noticing how the Lord enlarges the importance of this woman and her plight: a daughter of Abraham, he calls her … bound for eighteen years … set free. There's a bit of the dramatic in the Son of God. I like it.

The writer says that the leader was humiliated by Jesus' reasoning, and that the people were delighted. It would appear that a system of religious (or theological) thinking had been exposed in terms of the absurdity of its logical outcome. And the hold of the synagogue leader over his people was broken.

This is not a large story in the Gospels. Only Luke tells it. But as I read it this morning—and I read it through several times—I kept asking why it bothered me so much.

Then I realized that, on occasion, I've been there, done that. I have known, experienced, perhaps even, regrettably, contributed to this kind of dead, out-of-touch kind of religion. Not always, but sometimes.

I thought about how the kind of institutionalized religion in this story slowly loses all of its humanity, its compassion, its ability to flex in the moment of great surprise. And that is exactly what Jesus brought through the door of the synagogue that day: humanity, compassion, and flex. What bothered the ruler was that the woman's healing wasn't done his way, according to his theological understanding, at a time that didn't interrupt his Sabbath. But for Jesus, even a sermon was "interruptible" if a person like this woman was in the room.

Gordon MacDonald