Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Luke’s story of the healing of the man with the withered hand on the sabbath recalls another withered hand in Psalm 137: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither" (vs. 5).
Here a Judean musician is asked by his Babylonian captors to sing one his homeland’s songs. He mourns and vows that his right hand should wither and his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth if he forgets Jerusalem.
The miracle of the man with the withered hand is a way for Luke to make the point that for Jesus, legal observance is not enough. If we forget the original purpose of the law of God — to love -- we wither. Jesus enrages his legalistic critics by healing the man, saying, “Stretch out your hand.” This is what Jesus himself has been doing –- stretching the law, reaching beyond its literalness to touch lepers, to reclaim outcasts and those dwelling in the shadows.
Have we been guilty of such legalism? Do rules and regulations decide for us who’s “in” and who's “out?” Do we point to certain groups of people as “they?” Is the church reserved for the “sinless” and “righteous,” as we define them? If so, God help us. For in such thinking and in such actions we are as far removed from Jesus as any group of disciples can be. He will not recognise us as his own.
If we fail to love, our hearts will wither and, no matter how much or how well we worship, our tongues will cease to praise God. We will find ourselves weeping and alone in exile by the waters of a distant land far from God, exiles of our own making.
This day the Lord offers us a way out of exile.
-Timothy J. Cronin