Slack (Proper 16C)
Homily Delivered 25
August 2013
8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00
a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of
Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
The Rev. Dr. Anthony
Hutchinson
God, give us hearts to love and feel,
Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen
Elena
and I just got back from a week in the waters of Alaska and British Columbia,
during which time we saw some of the great fjords of the Inner Passage. One of these is called Ford’s Terror. It is named
after one Harry L. Ford, a crew member of the US. Coast and Geodetic Survey
Vessel Carlile P. Patterson. One day in 1889, Ford, doing a survey of the
area, , took a small rowboat into the steep and glacier-bound fjord alone. The water in the narrow inlet as he entered was
calm and relaxed, what sailors call “slack water.” After a short time looking at the icebergs,
harbor seals, and high cliffs, he rowed back to the inlet to go back to
Endicott Arm and his ship. But the tide
had turned. What had been calm,
peaceful, and still turquoise water was now a raging torrent of white with a
wall of curling surf taller than his boat was long. For the next twelve hours, cold and hungry,
he waited in terror, fearing that perhaps the calm water would not return
before he died. But at the next low
tide, during the short interval between the tide going out and coming in, the
water went slack again, and he was able to row out again, grateful and with a
story of terror that would immortalize his name in maps and Gazetteers.
“Slack”—the
term draws up images of calm and peaceful water, but, for wind sailors at
least, also risks water that is too relaxed,
without enough wind above it to drive a sail-boat. Slack
sails are useless. The word thus also
means the lack of tension and tautness necessary to accomplish things. My father always told me as a boy to “give it
some slack” when I was fishing so that the line would let the baited hook drift
naturally in the deep water. Later, as
a teenager, I came to feel he was perhaps a little too attentive to my life. “Give
it some slack,” became “Cut me some slack,
will you?” Even later, one of the
worse epithets my children hurled at each other when they might not be pulling
their own weight was “you slacker!”
Today’s
Hebrew Scripture asks us to cut each other some slack, give each other a break. 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.
The passage also asks us to cut ourselves some slack. 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
ourselves slackers 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, or slacking off, 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.
In the Gospel reading today, Jesus
gives a woman a break, and cuts her some slack.
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 slack,
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, slack 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! Jesus, you slacker!”
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 slacker!
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: slackness on the Law versus tautness. 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 slack 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 cut ourselves and
each other slack, and when to keep taut the line that ties us to the Good and
the Right, and gets 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.
When Harry Ford was caught in what
is now called Ford’s Terror, he almost certainly prayed for slack water. We all pray for slack 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, give the line slack or pull it taut 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 wants to cut us slack; we should
let him do that. He calls us to cut
ourselves and each other slack. This is
how the pointing finger will be removed, and yokes broken. Let go.
Cut someone some slack. Give them a break. And let's give ourselves a break as well.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment