"Sabbath Power"

Sermon on Luke 6: 1-16

Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS 

January 31, 2021

For a guy who’s supposed to be the Messiah, Jesus seems to be getting in trouble on the Sabbath a lot, don’t you think? “On one sabbath, Jesus was going through the cornfields….” and got in trouble for harvesting grain. “On ANOTHER sabbath, he entered the synagogue and taught…” and got in trouble for healing a man’s hand. 

Just sabbath after sabbath, getting in trouble. What’s the deal? Shouldn’t the Messiah be better behaved than this? 

Well.

Except. 

Jesus isn’t known for being particularly well-behaved. What’s that saying “well-behaved women rarely make history”? It turns out the same might be said for messiahs, too. 

Jesus is feisty on these two sabbaths. In the first, he might be hangry. He and the disciples are traveling on the sabbath and they need something to eat. So they harvest a little grain, rub it between their palms, and eat. When questioned on how this can be lawful, Jesus responds with a cheeky, “I’m Lord of the Sabbath.”

Oh. Okay. 

Feisty. 

On the second sabbath, he’s particularly adept at getting under the other religious leaders’ skins. He feels their eyes on him, wondering if he’s going to heal the man whose name we aren’t given. It almost seems like he chooses to heal the man’s hand BECAUSE he knows it’s going to cause a scene. He asks the other religious leaders a question EVERYONE already knew the answer to. “What is the sabbath for? Doing good or evil? Saving life or destroying it?” No one even answers the question because the answer is so glaringly obvious. OF COURSE the sabbath is for doing good and for saving life, not destroying. 

Hearing no answer he asks the man to stretch out his hand and then it’s healed. We’re not told HOW it’s healed, just that it happens. 

I kind of imagine Jesus looking at the other religious leaders with a twinkle in his eye after the healing. Because they were watching him to see if he’d heal but since we’re not sure HOW the healing happened, Jesus can’t really be blamed, can he? Wink, wink. 

The other religious leaders are filled with fury. The Greek there is actually they were “annoy-ah.” Yes. Annoyed. Peeved. Perturbed. Exasperated.

Who is this Messiah who seems to revel in causing drama? Especially on the sabbath?

Now, I don’t know if you like this trouble-making Jesus. Maybe you love it when he smirks or flips tables. Maybe you think he needs to settle down a smidge - would get his point across better if he BEHAVED a bit. 

Whether you this trouble-making Messiah makes you annoy-ah or inspires you, here he is. The Messiah who gets in trouble a lot. Who troubles us even all these centuries later. 

This is a hard text to preach on. And not just because Jesus’s behavior might make us annoy-ah. There are other difficulties, too. For one, this text has been used for FAR too long in ways that disparage our Jewish kindred. Perhaps you’ve heard an interpretation of this text that goes something like this, “The Jews were obsessed with the Law but Jesus came to show them a better way.”

When Christians interpret our holy scriptures like this, it’s wrong. On several counts. For starters, let’s not forget that Jesus was a faithful Jew for the entirety of his life. So it’s never appropriate to pit Jesus against “the Jews.” Sure, he wasn’t in agreement with all the other religious leaders of his time. They weren’t all in agreement with one another, either. That’s just kind of how it goes. But feeding hungry people or healing on the sabbath actually wouldn’t have been offensive to most Jews in Jesus’s time. We know from other contemporary texts that Jesus wasn’t teaching anything here that wasn’t already being taught by other Jewish leaders. It’s really just not accurate to say that Jesus was out-of-step with all of Judaism on this question. And it’s certainly not okay for Christians to use stories like these to make it seem like Christianity is a better, more evolved religion than Judaism. Full stop. 

Okay, but even beyond THAT sticky issue, there’s another difficulty with this passage. Did you catch it? The man with the withered hand. He seems to just be sitting there at the synagogue, just minding his own business. When suddenly, without being asked, he’s drawn into the drama of Jesus’s teaching as an object lesson. Eek. We have no idea what his name was. We don’t know what was going on with his hand. We have no idea if he WANTED his hand altered in some way. Perhaps he was just fine how he was, right? When viewed through a disability rights lens, this story can feel pretty icky. In our time and culture, we know that it’s not okay to assume people with disabilities need to be “fixed.” And we know that it’s certainly not okay to use other people as props. Jesus lived in a different time and culture than we do. Stories like this one keep us very aware of that important fact. 

Even with all these culture-needs-to-be-translated issues, though, I’m glad this story popped up in the lectionary for us. Because it’s actually the third-and-final part of the passage that I want to turn our attention to now: the calling of the apostles. 

Now, you might be conflating the disciples and apostles in your mind. But in this passage it’s pretty clear they are not a totally overlapping group. Jesus calls his disciples and chooses just 12 to ALSO be apostles. 

We don’t know how many disciples there were. But it sounds like it was certainly more than 12. Disciples were those who followed Jesus. His fan club, students. They were there to follow and learn. From that group of students, he selected 12 to be apostles. The Greek word means someone who is sent. An apostle, then, is one who follows SO THAT they can also then be sent out to do the same things Jesus does: teach, preach, heal, cause good trouble. [1]

The inclusion of this third story in today’s lection reframed the whole thing for me. Because when I read this third story I suddenly realized - this passage, these three stories together...they’re about POWER. Jesus is the Lord of the sabbath...Jesus is teaching in the synagogue...and Jesus is SHARING his power with some of his followers. 

Power - how it’s conferred, how it’s used - that’s been very much on our minds lately, yes? And here we have a story in our ancient scriptures about the one we profess to be our ruler showing us a thing or two about power. And how it’s supposed to be used. 

Jesus is making an unabashed show of his power in these three passages. Power, remember, is in and of itself - neutral. It can be used for good or ill. Jesus uses his power in these stories in practical ways. For good. To feed those who are hungry and need fuel for a journey. To heal. And, finally, to empower others. 

Rather than hoarding all that power, Jesus shows us that the real point of having power is to share it. Jesus’s ministry was not diminished by sharing his power with the apostles. Quite the opposite. By empowering others, his ministry became MORE effective. More feeding, more teaching, more healing, more hope for a hurting world. It’s like Toni Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free somebody else.” 

Jesus shows us that the whole point of having power is to use it for creating more health and wholeness, building a more just world, and SHARING it with others. The function of having power is to use it to empower someone else. So that goodness can grow in the world.

And so we are called, friends, not JUST to be disciples but apostles, too. 

Not just followers - not just learners at Jesus’s feet...though that’s where it all starts. We are ALSO called to go forth and share with others what we’ve learned and experienced from following Jesus. To tell the stories of all the good trouble he got into. To support and challenge one another as we do our level-best to live like Jesus (and to console and care for one another when we frequently fall short of that audacious goal). To share the good news that we are loved by one who uses power for good, who seeks restoration and new life, and who draws the circle wider and wider and wider still. 

May we step into the circle and join Christ in the dance of the Spirit’s powerful love. 

NOTES:

[1] With gratitude to John Lewis for the concept of “good trouble.”