Jesus Heals the Bent Over Woman, detail from the Two Brothers Sarcophagus, mid-4th century, Vatican Collections, Rome
Strategic Inaction (Proper 16C)
Homily Delivered 21 August 2016
8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, give us hearts to love and feel,
Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen
When I was a first year Chinese
student, mid-year I had an experience that taught me how profoundly the words
we use color our thoughts and feelings.
We had had a long weekend, and my instructor asked me in Chinese what I
had done. I replied in my ever improving
but still very tentative Chinese, “I rested (休息,
xiuxi).” He continued,
“And how did you rest?” I replied, “I
went to the gym, and then we went hiking and camping in the Shenandoahs.” He replied, “But you didn’t rest!” “What do you mean?” “You played (玩儿, wanr).
You had fun. That takes
energy. You may have enjoyed yourself,
but you did not rest!”
The difference between rest and
play: oh how I wish I had learned that distinction as a younger man! Later, as a student of Buddhism, I would
learn in taiqi the importance of lifting your weight off a leg and foot, and
using absence of weight and of effort as a tool in the struggle of balance that
occurs in any physical confrontation. In
meditation, I would learn that emptying one’s mind was the ultimate
presence. And as a U.S. diplomat, I
learned the importance of strategic inaction as a tool in advancing one’s
national interests. Though derided in
the West as lazy, laissez-faire, not-so-benign neglect, or mere ineptitude,
strategic inaction is a key element of theory behind Sunzi’s Art of War. The Chinese Taoist proverb says it all:
无为而治
Do
nothing, but accomplish everything.
Today’s Hebrew Scripture asks us to take
a rest, and give each others rest. Remove
the yoke from among you. Don’t
exploit each other. Remove the pointing of the finger, speaking ill of others. Don’t
reduce others to objects to be evaluated and judged, ridiculed, made fun of, or
maligned. Give food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted. Stand with the downtrodden. Help and don’t judge. Give them a break because they need it, not
because they deserve it.
It ties these social justice issues
to the Sabbath. We shouldn’t place a
heavy yoke upon us ourselves, even if we think this serves our purposes. We shouldn’t belittle ourselves, or think ill
of ourselves when we take needed rest.
We need to find time to rest each week, and make this a priority. We need to not consider this shameful, but
rather honorable:
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 honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own
ways,
serving your own interests, or
pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the
LORD….
To be sure, the commandment to
remember the Sabbath is not just a call for regular down time, periodic torpid
rest. The commandment is to remember the
seventh day by keeping it holy. This means, as the Prayer Book puts it, a
duty “to set aside regular times for worship, prayer, and the study of God’s
ways” (p. 847). That is a key part of
resting from what usually consumes us.
As Second Isaiah says, this should be a delight.
Yet rest is still at the heart of
the commandment. In the catechism of the
Roman Catholic Church, we read, “"[The Sabbath]
is a day of protest against the servitude of work and the worship of
money" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 2172).
In the Gospel reading today, Jesus
gives respite to a woman. She has been
bound down by a debilitating illness, here personified as a demonic spirit, that
tautly tied her muscles and held her doubled over and unable to stand up
straight and relaxed for years. He
simply lays his hands on her, unbinds her, relaxes her, and restores her
natural posture. She rejoices, thanking
God.
But a community religious leader
nearby is not pleased. He sees Jesus as
a competitor calling for people to be lax
in following the Law, not stringent in their religious duties. He doesn’t want that particular yoke removed, and he points his finger and speaks
ill: “Your business appears to be faith
healing and here you are, doing business
on the Sabbath!”
There has been quite a lot of
scholarly discussion on whether this is a fair representation of how Jesus’
critics historically may have reacted to such a situation. A scene in John has
Jesus healing being criticized for breaking the Sabbath. There, he mixes his saliva with dirt to make
a mud as a kind of healing ointment, rather than just laying his hands on the
afflicted. Since the mixing of mortar
for building or clay for potting was a specifically defined form of work
forbidden for Sabbath, some believe that it is this, and not the healing per se, that may have been
criticized.
Most rabbinic treatments of the
Sabbath indeed include the saving of a life as grounds for allowing things
otherwise forbidden for Sabbath. But is
being bent over a life-threatening condition?
Perhaps this woman could have waited a few hours until Sabbath was over
to be restored to health. “There are six
other days of the week on which you could have done this,” says Jesus’ opponent
in our story.
However you understand the
specifics, one thing is clear. Jesus
notes that his critic fails to see the joy of the woman. Pulling animals out of the mire was allowed
on Sabbath in rigorous interpretations, even if their lives were not
immediately threatened. This woman was
more important than an animal! Her taut
binding, bent over in pain for years, was worse
than the suffering of a beast caught in the mud! So couldn’t an a fortiori case be made to allow healing her?
Since many people thought that
illness was a punishment from God, the pointing finger of the community leader
implies something else—why should Jesus even try to heal the woman at all,
since she is only getting what she deserves?
And to break Sabbath in the process!
Jesus, you lazy keeper of the law!
Jesus will have none of this. Break the yoke! Remove the pointing
finger!
What we may be dealing with here is
a Galilean rural flexibility to Law
running into an urban or Judean doctrine of legal rigor: rigidity on the Law
versus flexibility. Generally a critic
of rigorists, Jesus himself could have his moments of tightness when it came to
the Law: it is almost certain that the
Historical Jesus forbade any taking of oaths or swearing on things, and the
casual repudiation of one’s dependent spouse that was the divorce of his
day.
But for him, how to decide when to
give more loosen up or tighten up a bit depended on how this effected the
people involved.
Second Isaiah had said, “if you
honor [the Sabbath], … then you shall take delight in the LORD” (Isa
59:12-13). The woman who has set free
from her bonds here is rejoicing in the Lord, and so, thinks Jesus, how can we
possibly have violated the Sabbath? A
good tree yields sweet fruit, a bad tree, bitter. What possible criticism is there when such
obvious good has been wrought?
Knowing when to give ourselves
ourselves and each other the grace of rest, and when to get busy to get good
things done, is a trick. No set of
external rules can tell us when to tighten up and when to let loose. This art cannot be mastered without an open
heart and open hands, without trust in God and benevolence or good will for
all. It is rooted the principle that
Jesus taught: forgive others that we may be forgiven; treat others as we
ourselves would want to be treated.
This complex of ideas is covered by what Buddhists call detachment,
compassion, and doing no harm.
We all pray for rest at times and we
all must be able to give it. We are all in this together, and proper humility
demands that we have solidarity with all our other creatures. It demands that we be gentle.
Remove the yoke, take away the pointing finger. The rule of thumb that Jesus uses here in this story is
good—look at the effect of our actions on ourselves and others. Regardless of the fingers pointing at us or
the yokes laid upon us, as we hold on to the line of our lives and our duties, tighten
up or loosen our grips as necessary to advance human dignity, love, and
freedom.
Jesus said his mission was to
announce the Year of the Lord’s Favor, to break the bonds, to set the captive
loose. He announced the coming of God’s
Reign in full power, and acted in ways that show he saw himself as the Year of
Jubilee when all debts were forgiven, as the Sabbath of Lord, when all could
rest and rejoice.
He says, “Come to me, you
heavy-laden and exhausted, and I will give you rest… My yoke is easy and my
burden, light.” He wants to give us
rest. We should let him do that. He
calls us to lighten up on ourselves and each other. This is how the pointing finger will be
removed, and yokes broken. Let go. Take a Sabbath. Give rest to yourself and to
others.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
