Call your Christian Leaders to account

Sabbath 

How does God teach us to live well?

What is the relationship of Christianity to Jewish law?

These two questions come up continually in Scripture as Christianity is a religion in strong relationship to Judaism and in dialogue with it.Following God’s commandments and being faithful to God is always tied in Jewish scripture to well being. If you follow the law: feed the hungry, care for the afflicted, stop speaking evil, then: ‘you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail’. Jesus’ frustration with members of the Jewish religious elite is that they focus on custom and ritual and ignore the reason for the law – the well being of God’s people.

Jesus says to the leader of the synagogue, 'but you will let your animals have water on the Sabbath and yet you will deny this woman healing on the Sabbath? You hypocrites!'

The Sabbath is meant to bring life, to enable the Jewish people to focus on God’s law so that a society of mutual well-being and justice can be created. Again and again Jesus finds that the Law is used for the opposite reason, to control and condemn people. It infuriates him and he is always fighting against the misuse of the Law, but not the Law itself.We need to listen to Jesus’ teaching today: In what ways do we prevent God’s love from giving people life and instead use God’s commandments as a way of condemning or excluding others? As Christians we are called, like the Jewish people, to create communities of justice, hope, healing, love and peace. In order to do that we have to put God’s teaching at the centre of our lives. Coming to church on a Sunday is one way of giving time for God and to listening to him. What is he saying to you this morning? How might he be re-calling you to right action and behaviour? 

 

I think that we need to keep looking around us for the people who really need God’s healing touch and we need to keep making sure that we don’t prevent them from coming to church. Think about the woman who was bent over double. Think for a minute what her life must have been like – always looking at her feet. Try it later today; try walking around with a bent back, try talking to people. Chronic suffering like hers was met by God’s mercy, yet resisted by the synagogue leader: what chronic suffering might we be blind to in our society today? In what ways might our rituals prevent the mercy of God being freely distributed? It is easy for us as Christians to assume that we are with Jesus (we don’t follow Jewish Law for example) but his opposition to the Jewish leaders may well be translated into opposition to Christian leaders if he were to appear today: hold your Christian leaders to account and remind them of God’s primary law of mercy and justice. Let me know if you think this church is preventing in anyway God’s mercy being shown. For the good news that Jesus keeps telling over and again is that God’s mercy and love is for all but that all of us must reform our ways to enter into God’s kingdom. 

Readings: 

Isaiah 58.9b-end

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
   you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you,
   the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
   and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
   and your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually,
   and satisfy your needs in parched places,
   and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
   like a spring of water,
   whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
   you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
   the restorer of streets to live in.

If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
   from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the sabbath a delight
   and the holy day of the Lord honourable;
if you honour it, not going your own ways,
   serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
   and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
   for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Gospel Reading                                  Luke 13.10 - 17

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.’ But the Lord answered him and said, ‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 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?’ When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.