Jesus.....the rule breaker!

Luke 13:10-17

+ In the name of God…..Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I’m old enough (just about), to remember when Sunday was still a day which felt very different from the rest of the week. As a child and young person my Sunday consisted of going to Sunday school at my local Methodist Church in the morning. The afternoon would be spent perhaps riding my bike around the streets of Redcar. There wasn’t much else to do! The only shops which were open were small corner shops or newsagents, and pubs were limited to opening within very specific hours, much to the annoyance of my step-father! You would wake up in the morning and it “felt” like it was Sunday!

Fast forward 25 or 30 years to today and things are very different from how they used to be! Most shops are open now on Sundays and pub licensing hours have certainly eased a lot as well. We live in time when (whether we like it or not) goods and services are available around the clock……24/7! Switch on the TV to see rolling news whenever we like…….no more waiting for Closedown somewhere around midnight with the National Anthem…….anyone else remember that? Head out to the shops whenever you want. Feel like a trip to the cinema or the theatre? How about whiling away this Sunday afternoon enjoying lunch and sipping Pimms in a sun-soaked beer garden somewhere (after coming here to church first of course)? Maybe your ideal Sunday afternoon is to just sit in front of the TV watching old musicals…….I’ve been known to do that!

Just don’t tell the Pharisees! They wouldn’t like it……..really they wouldn’t! The world the Pharisees thought they lived in was a nicely ordered one. A world where people knew the rules and kept to them. And if you did happen to break those rules then you would soon know about it, and probably so would everyone else!

 

So, here we see Jesus in our gospel reading teaching within the synagogue on the Sabbath. When approached by a woman who had been crippled for much of her life his instant response is to lay hands on her and heal her…….would we really have expected anything else? Well it seems that the leader of the synagogue did expect something else! He expected Jesus to obey the rules, in particular the one that prohibits working on the Sabbath!

I have the image in my mind of this indignant leader as a kind of Blakey from the seventies sitcom On the Buses. A man who lived by the rules and for the rules! I suppose he is something of a “jobsworth”! Those of you who remember On the Buses will know Blakey as the inspector who was so obsessed with keeping order in the bus depot and making sure the rules were kept that he missed out on much of the camaraderie and sense of belonging that his workmates so obviously enjoyed!

And so this leader goes straight over to where Jesus was and just starts to lecture the crowd that was gathered there. “You have six days of the week to come and be healed, come then and not on the Sabbath!” The rules that he lived his own life by and that he expected others to also keep were being so openly disregarded. It’s interesting that he doesn’t directly challenge Jesus himself, but rather he goes for the vulnerable who have come to Jesus in need of healing!

And Jesus’s response? As he does so many times in the gospels he turns the tables around and faces the man with his own hypocrisy. “Don’t you untie your donkey and lead it to drink on the Sabbath? And yet you have the nerve to complain about someone being healed?” He might as well have just said to the man, “Get your priorities right”!

The Sabbath had been given by God to the Jews as a day of rest…..of re-creation, a day free from the cares of the rest of the week. It was a day full of spiritual meaning, a day when the community could gather together in prayer and worship. And yet in many ways it had become fossilised within its own tradition and rules. A day that was supposed to bring freedom instead brought with it a sense of having to obey the rules. What the Sabbath as never meant to be was a day when people became so pre-occupied with not putting a foot wrong!

 I remember reading a few years ago of the very conservative Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland which opposed local council amenities such as swimming pools and leisure centres being open on a Sunday, and in some cases even tied up the swings in children’s playgrounds to make sure the Sabbath was properly observed. I’m sure it was done with good intentions, but their imposition of the rules on their community deprived the community of the choice to decide for themselves how best to spend the Sabbath and sucked much of the simple joy of life out of it!

I should imagine people sitting here today will have a number of different attitudes towards Sunday. You may be a traditionalist who longs for the good old days of when the shops were closed and the most you could do after church was a stroll along the sea-front. On the other hand, there will be those sitting here who (perhaps on a sunnier day than today) are quite happy to drive somewhere for the day, potter around the shops or go to the cinema. All strictly forbidden if we are to keep to the absolute letter of the law! And if we stop to think about it most of us in someway will probably do something today that according to the synagogue leader in our reading would count as “work”.

Jesus, as I’ve said before was never one for sticking to the rules or conventions. He probably wouldn’t have made a very good Anglican, with our PCC’s, Synod’s and committees! The one thing for Jesus which came far above and beyond all these rules and customs was the simple love and grace of God for all who came to him. Following Jesus isn’t about conforming to a set of rules laid down in the Bible, it’s not about becoming so bogged down by a long list of do’s and don’ts that we lose sight of the freedom that Christ offers us. And it’s certainly not about beating ourselves up when we don’t always manage to live by those rules.

 Following Jesus is about relationship! Relationship with a God, who through Jesus is able to break through the walls and offer us love beyond anything else we can ever imagine. A God who shows us new ways of relating to one another. A God whose priority is the restoration of all creation to himself. As Jesus reached out to the woman on that Sabbath morning and healed her the crowd rejoiced! Let us rejoice too for the one who in his love is able to go beyond the rule-book and into the very hearts of all who come to him.

AMEN