Hilton Head Island, SC – March 11, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 13:10-17; Luke 14:1-6
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – As he said this, all his adversaries were put to shame; and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him. – Luke 13:17 (RSV)
In the Gospel of Luke, the leisurely journey of Jesus from the region of the Galilee in the northern part of Palestine to Jerusalem in the south contains a number of incidents and sayings of Jesus which are not recorded in any of the other three Gospels. To read Luke 9:56 through Luke 19:27 is almost like reading a small Gospel within a Gospel that is unlike most of the material contained in Matthew, Mark, or John.
The Jesus we encounter in those ten chapters seems to be more confrontational, but also more open to other people and other concerns, than the Jesus we find in the other Gospels. This is not to say that Jesus was a mealy-mouth milquetoast in any of the other Gospels. But the Jesus of Luke seems even more edgy and more inclusive than in the other Gospels.
Why might that be so? It may be that Jesus realized by the end of his ministry in Galilee that he had made all the progress there he was going to make. Furthermore, the longer he stayed in the north, the more his progress might dissipate. It would be like a military commander concluding that his invasion of enemy territory had accomplished everything possible, and that it would be wise to begin a tactical retreat. However, Jesus was not an army commander fighting a military war. He was a theological reformer battling the forces of the normative Judaism of his day.
It is impossible to validate this, but I choose to believe that Jesus realized that whatever effectiveness he had in his home region of the Galilee had reached its peak. To remain longer in the north might mean he might possibly experience stronger resistance to his teachings, particularly his teachings regarding what Jesus called “the kingdom of God.” What Jesus proposed when he talked about the kingdom of God was so revolutionary that were the people to adopt it enthusiastically, it would result in a thoroughgoing upheaval in the religious, social, and political fabric of Israel. Make no mistake about it: Jesus of Nazareth was a radical religious reformer.
Religious leaders often lock horns with other religious leaders. Luther and Pope Leo X were anything but the best of pals. John Calvin and the Unitarian Michael Servetus differed greatly on biblical and theological matters, and Servetus ended up burned at the stake. Calvin didn’t light the match, but he didn’t prevent it either. In the 1920s, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City and John Gresham Machen of Princeton Theological Seminary had a falling out which resulted in the establishment by Machen of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It was a small powerhouse for a time, siphoning off many Presbyterians who thought the primary Presbyterian denomination had become far too liberal. Now the Orthodox Presbyterian Church has a total of only 30,000 members.
From the time Jesus began preaching and teaching in the Galilee, his primary theological foes were what are often collectively called in the Gospels “the scribes and Pharisees.” The scribes wrote lengthy commentaries on the Mosaic laws of the Old Testament, and the Pharisees were the proponents of their ideas. Both groups were very conservative in their thinking, meaning that they believed everything written in the Torah had to be followed to the letter of the law.
On the issue of biblical law, there is a tendency among ultra-conservative people to minor in majors, and to major in minors. This is what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 23:23-24 when Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” They put too much emphasis on minor things, and too little on major things. They put the em-pha-sis on the wrong sy-llab-les. Conservatives focus too much on swearing and sexually provocative clothes and sexual behavior, and too little on seeking justice for the downtrodden and being fair to awful people and taking care of the poor rather than telling them they must take better care of themselves.
Religious conservatives often get too worked up about sabbatarian laws as well. We see an example of this in our first reading for today. Jesus healed a woman of what apparently was some kind of orthopedic problem. The leader of the synagogue in which this healing took place was indignant, because it happened on a sabbath day. The sabbath was originally established to give everyone a day of rest as much to give people a day on which to worship God. But the synagogue leader was put off because he said it represented labor to heal the woman. Jesus responded by saying that people gave their animals food and water on the sabbath without hesitation, so why should he hesitate to heal the woman of her infirmity if he could? (Jesus was a miracle worker; of that the Gospels are very insistent.)
The ordinary people who listened to Jesus were delighted by what he said and did, but many religious leaders were burned up by it. Luke wrote, “As (Jesus) said this, all his adversaries were put to shame; and all the people rejoiced at the glorious things that were done by him” (13:17). The Pharisees were peeved, but the ordinary Jews were pleased. When a truth has been exposed that too long has been deliberately hidden, we are happy to see it. It is no wonder that common people flocked to Jesus and ultra-religious people were highly skeptical of him. It was the ultra-religious who hid biblical truths rather than to proclaim them.
In both of our readings for this morning, I suspect Jesus very deliberately healed someone on the sabbath to suggest that his theological enemies misunderstood sabbatarian law. In the second reading, to validate his action, Jesus said to the Pharisees who were angry at him, “If you have a farm animal that falls into a well on the sabbath, would you not pull it out, rather than let it drown?” Luke ends the episode by saying, “And they could not reply to this” (14:6).
William Blackstone was a brilliant eighteenth-century English jurist. He wrote several commentaries on the English common law, parts of which are still required reading in every law school in the English-speaking world. But like many Christians, Blackstone may have put too much legal stock in sabbatarian laws. On the bulletin cover, there is a quote from Sir William; “A corruption of morals usually follows a profanation of the Sabbath.” What we call blue laws were the result of a too-strong cultural commitment to the perceived proper observance of Sunday in Christian culture. Up until the 1930s and 40s in many American states and communities, and later than that in the South and elsewhere, theaters were not open on Sundays, nor could alcohol be sold anywhere. In homes, children were forbidden to play outside, and henpecked husbands or roosterpecked wives were forbidden to read the comics in the Sunday paper. What in heaven’s name those prohibitions had to do with the sabbath only heaven knows.
Did those things illustrate a corruption of morals? Is it not more immoral deliberately to neglect the poor or to cheat on tax returns or to support political tyrants? And anyway, do those breaches of God’s laws have anything to do with breaking sabbatarian laws? Is the purpose of laws, whether secular or religious, to make life better for everyone, or to keep people in line from the standpoint of the self-appointed lines-keepers?
Listen to some quotations about the sabbath from several writers. Here is a much more balanced one from William Blackstone: “The keeping of one day in seven holy, as a time of relaxation and refreshment as well as public worship, is of inestimable benefit to a state, considered merely as a civil institution.” How true that is! Culturally, we have virtually destroyed half of the purpose of a day of rest by undermining Sunday as a day of rest. Sunday has become like every other day. Fewer people work on that day, but far more work now than worked one or two centuries ago. It is not good for people not to have a day of rest, and too many poorly paid people have to work seven days a week just to make ends meet. No rest for the overworked.
Emily Dickinson: “Some keep the Sabbath by going to church/ I keep it by staying at home/ With a bobolink for a chorister/ And an orchard for a dome.” Emily is my Number One Favorite Poet, but for her sake I wish she had gone to church more than she did. However, she was one of God’s greatest saints even if she didn’t attend church much at all. And maybe her poetry is as brilliant as it is because she steadfastly refused to attend church. But I’m not recommending that for you!
Henry George, American economist: “I believe that the institution of the Sabbath is one of the greatest benefits the human race ever had. I believe in the strict enforcement of the law that prevents servile labor being carried out on the seventh day.” Yes to the first, but only Sort-Of Yes to the second. Feeding and watering the livestock on Sunday and pulling them out of wells when they fall in is servile labor that must be offered, as Jesus said, and despite what Henry said.
William Gladstone, British prime minister: “From a moral, social, and political point of view, the observance of Sunday is a duty of absolute consequence.” Absolute? Absolute? Is anything truly absolute, other than God?
Jesus believed the sabbath was important. The Pharisees believed it was all-important. Jesus was attempting to give those who opposed him a better perspective on what true religion is, but they were too viscerally opposed to him to listen. Nevertheless, in those last weeks before Jesus entered Jerusalem, he was still attempting to unveil the kingdom of God to defenders of God who staunchly resisted God’s kingdom. Religious people can sometimes be far more committed resisters of religion than are irreligious people.
Too many scribes and Pharisees were guilty of legalism. Legalism is the turning of law into a religion, a man-made institution which we transform into a virtual god. Too many of us make religious do’s and don’ts the essence of religion. The letter of the law can destroy us; the spirit of the law gives us life. Jesus represented the spirit, not the letter, of the religious law. After three years of trying to inculcate that idea into the minds of those who heard him, Jesus was not about to stop trying shortly before he knew he was going to die. In fact, because he became increasingly certain that he would be killed by one means or another, he was all the more intent on trying to break down the barriers of theological opposition while he still had the ability to do so. Jesus did not hate the Pharisees, but he hated their defective doctrines, and he fought against those bad ideas to the very end of his tragically-shortened life.
Please allow me now to make a sermonic aside. Sometimes I ask myself, “Why am I still preaching most Sundays after more than half a century? Should I not just hang it up?” And then other times I say to myself, “I’m glad I still am able physically and (perhaps) mentally to preach after more than half a century, because in my advanced years I see some things I never saw when I was younger.” I could have seen them; probably I should have seen them. But I didn’t.
Only when I decided to preach this series of sermons on the last days of Jesus as recorded in the Gospel of Luke did I start to see Jesus in a manner somewhat differently from what I had always thought before. When I was a little boy, I thought about Jesus as many if not most little boys think. “Jesus loves me/ This I know/ For the Bible/ Tells me so.” That is a very good thing for little boys or girls, or anybody, to believe. In my second year of seminary in Scotland, there was a song in the Church of Scotland Hymnary, in the one-hymn section called “For Little Children.” It went like this: “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild/ Look upon a little child/ Pity my simplicity/ Suffer me to come to Thee.” In those days, we had lots of “wee bairns” in the Glenburn Kirk, and I would sing that hymn with great gusto as I watched them come bounding up front for the children’s sermon which Dr. George Gordon Cameron, or on occasion I, would deliver.
However, as I got older, after high school and college and especially after seminary, I came to see Jesus not as a kindly, harmless religious personage, but gradually as a very tough theological proponent. That realization took several decades, however, because I had had a lot of “Jesus loves me” inculcated over here, and a year of “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” over there. The more I read the Gospels, and preached from them, the more it struck me that Jesus was not the peerless gentle soul I had originally imagined him to be. Instead he was a fearless spokesman for a God he believed was demanding that all of us should stop living our comfortable lives, and to begin living thoughtful, devoted, and taxing lives.
Luke 9:56 to Luke 19:28 is Luke’s attempt to portray that sort of Jesus as faithfully as Luke was able to do, never having known Jesus or having heard him utter a single word. Perhaps subconsciously, Luke was imagining, as we might do, how terribly hard it was for Jesus to take that slow journey to the cross. Jesus could not even know for sure that it would be a cross, but he was certain it would be something, and that it would be physically, psychologically, and spiritually agonizing.
But Jesus didn’t hesitate, not even for a fleeting instant. He kept going. He kept doing what he had been doing for three years, except that he was even more intentional about it than he had been before. Before he had healed people on shabbat, but it was not intentional. It was coincidental. Now it was purpose-driven; he deliberately healed a woman of a back problem and a man of edema, or what used to be called “dropsy” up until the twentieth century. Those miracles were consciously performed on shabbat. He did it to make a point with the Pharisees. The idea was not to pick a fight; it was to make a point. We must live much more by God-inspired love than by God-inspired law. Law is relative; only love, the love that truly is inspired by God, is absolute. So he healed because it was an act of love, and if it was shabbat, so be it.
So Jesus collected more enemies than he had acquired in the Galilee, and he expanded his concerns beyond those he had expressed in the north. He deliberately sought out the kind of people he knew would infuriate his theological adversaries, because Jesus sought everybody, and not certain kinds of somebodies. He was an equal-opportunity chooser.
Jesus is greater than we thought he is, and more than we thought he is, and less than we thought he is, and other than we thought he is. If that is so, I wonder if we have thought about him enough?