Strategic Inaction (Proper 16C)

 

“Jesus and the Bent Over Woman” – Barbara Schwarz, OP, 2014

 

Strategic Inaction (Proper 16C)

Homily Delivered 21 August 2022

8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Said Mass

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

 

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 rest to each other. 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 you think 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 Yahweh’s holy day 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 Yahweh….

 

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 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 loosen 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 Yahweh” (Isa 59:12-13).  The woman who has set free from her bonds here is rejoicing in God, 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 just when to give 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 ahimsa, 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 Yahweh’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 Noble One’s Sabbath, 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, so light as not to be noticed.”  He wants to give us rest. We should let him do that.  He calls us to lighten up on ourselves and on each other.  This is how the pointing finger will be removed, and yokes broken.  Let go.  Take a Sabbath, regularly. Give rest to yourself and to others.

 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.