Saturday, September 03, 2016
Pentecost 14, Year C, Proper 16 August 21, 2016
Sermon for The Fourteenth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 16 ~ August
21, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
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?
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
First let us dispense with the mistaken notion that the Judaism of
Jesus’s time was altogether legalistic - devoted to the letter of the law, oblivious
regarding the spirit. Jesus was not the only rabbi to teach that performing an
act of righteousness or mercy – a mitzvah
– on the Sabbath was not a violation of its observance. Jesus’s dispute was not
with Judaism but with a certain kind of religious mentality, found in all religions,
that concerns itself with external, surface matters and ignores what He called the weightier matter of the Law.
This weightier matter in question today, the deeper underlying principle
beneath the commandment to observe the Sabbath, is that every creature needs to
remember God, and that every creature is entitled to rest and time for
recollection. There is more to life than work and preöccupation with our own
affairs. The Sabbath, by commanding rest, ensures the opportunity to stop, to
recognize that our time is limited, and to remember the infinite and eternal
context of all our endeavors. Part of the intention here is to make sure
everyone has a day off to pay some attention to what is really important in
life. Not just those who can afford it, but everyone gets the day off – hired
hands, slaves, even animals and the earth itself. That is already a meaning
deeper than the literal observance.
If the first deeper level beneath
the surface of the commandment is to give everyone and everything a rest, we
hear today that the violation of the letter may sometimes fulfill the spirit.
Think of the poor old woman – think how much WORK it was to have to go around
bent over all the time. Aside from her suffering, she had to exert lots of effort
to compensate for her affliction, and she NEVER had a day off. So, in healing
her, Jesus gave her a rest. It could even be said that He actually KEPT the
Sabbath on a deeper level by violating it on the surface, since He made it
possible for the woman to observe the Sabbath for the first time in eighteen
years. Furthermore, helping someone by relieving their suffering, cannot
violate the Sabbath, since it honors God in the divine image on earth.
This was the kind of
argument the rabbis loved, and the whole dispute is typical of Talmudic
scholarship. As I said it would be a mistake to think it illustrates a
difference between Judaism and the teaching of Jesus. Plenty of contemporary
rabbis would have agreed with Him, taking the view that a mitzvah does not violate the Sabbath. What the dispute does illustrate is a difference in
mentality or consciousness that is to be found among adherents of any religious
tradition. Those who do not penetrate the weightier
matters of the Law, are to be found, sadly, in every tradition, including
our own. I am afraid that there may be lots of us who share the mentality of
Jesus’s critics. Today’s Gospel warns us to examine ourselves for such a
tendency.
That is not to say that externals are of no importance,
or that they are nothing but an evil hindrance, to be renounced. We cannot do
without them. They are the door, the entrance to the deeper chambers. We need a
framework on which to hang those weightier
matters, or to use other metaphors, we
need channels to deliver the spirit, earthen vessels to carry the treasure. No
channels, the spirit disappears; no earthen vessels, the treasure is lost. It
is just as bad to renounce all the surface matters of spiritual life as is to
attach ourselves to them as if they were the goal of the whole business. They
are not. But neither are they simply dispensable. They may be only the beginning, but we
are all beginners.
Surely, the external rules and practices of religion
are not ends in themselves; they are only the beginning of our journey to God.
But they ARE the beginning: the door the strait
gate through which we pass to enter on the Way. Jesus’s healing on the
Sabbath shows us not that it is OK to ignore the rules, but that all externals
point to a deeper spiritual reality. Keeping the Sabbath may sometimes involve
an observance more profound than surface compliance. We are all called to deeper and deeper
observance – not laxity or forgetful indulgence, but ever deeper immersion in
the Reality to which the external matters of religion point and to which they
are the door.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
