Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
The striking scene in today's gospel is so interesting to me. It contains history, irony, and a challenge even for us today. With my rudimentary understanding, I hope I can tease out all three that struck me in my prayer.
Jesus words, "I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?" seems to allude to some common knowledge between the Jesus and his opponents. The history that Jesus seems to me to allude to is the Maccabean revolt. Not long before Jesus' birth (~160 years earlier), there had been a war in the Holy Land. One of the tactics used in that war by the Jews' enemies was to attack them on the Sabbath as many would not violate the Sabbath in self-defense. The Maccabbees, however, took a different stand. Matthias, on behalf of the others, declared, "If any man comes against us on the Sabbath day, we shall fight against him and not all die as our brothers did in their hiding places" (1 Mac 2:41). This does not sound terribly unlike Jesus' proposal. Here, I believe, Jesus is presenting a precedent that, according to Rabbi Shlomo Brody, "Was not accepted by many Jewish sects, but was certainly endorsed by rabbinic and Pharisaic texts...". Thus, Jesus takes a precedent that says "life can be defended by fighting back on the Sabbath (destroying life)" and elevates it. Jesus' elevated position proposes that if defending life by force on the Sabbath is permissible, than restoring life through goodness must be even greater.
The irony comes from the Pharisees' reaction to the good Jesus does on the Sabbath. They spend the rest of the day doing everything that Jesus devalued. They spend their time enraged (doing evil) and plotting what they "might do to Jesus" (destroying life). They sought to catch him violating the law of the Sabbath and instead they ended up neglecting the grace of the Sabbath. Instead of a time of rest, reconciliation, and peace they turned it into a time of testing, anger, and plotting. When we seek to evaluate and police others' spiritual lives, it is often our own spiritual lives that suffer the most.
Finally, there is a challenge in this Gospel. I believe one of the fundamental differences between Jesus and the Pharisees in this scene was not the interpretation of the law, but rather the interpretation of the person. The Pharisees saw the man with the crippled hand as a tool and a means to an end. He was the means by which they would test Jesus. Jesus saw him as a person. The Pharisees often go wrong in trying to test and trap Jesus. But it is not merely because he understands the heart of God more fully. It is also because they so often use people as their tools to try and entrap Jesus. How do we use people? How do turn them into a means to an end? When have we failed to do good for another for fear of those who are watching and judging us?
- Spencer Hargadon