Throughout the Gospels, Jesus performed seven healing miracles on the Sabbath. You would think that a man with such a record of helping people regain their health and their lives would receive much appreciation and love for what he had done. It was not so as we reflect on the gospels. To the Pharisees and the Scribes, that was strong enough evidence to show that Jesus was a dangerous, irreligious, and law-breaking character they had to take down at the earliest opportunity they could find. To the Pharisees interpretation of the law of God, no work was permitted on the Sabbath, and healing on the Sabbath was work, therefore it was a form of breaking the Law of God.
Doing What Is Right
In our Gospel today, Jesus was invited on a Sabbath to dinner in the home of a well-known Pharisee. Likely it was a set-up to see what he would do that would violate the Sabbath regulations. A man with dropsy was also brought in, most likely “planted” in the house as part of the larger plot by the Pharisees and the Scribes. They wanted to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath. They “observed him carefully.”
The Lord posed to them two rhetorical questions “Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath or not?” and “If your ox or son fell in a well on a Sabbath, would you pull it out?” They had no answers to his questions because the right answers were obvious to everyone in the room. He went ahead and healed the man on the Sabbath, fanning more anger and hatred for him.
Reflection on this text has three key lessons we can use in our daily lives:
The first is that there is nothing more trying than to be under constant and critical scrutiny all the time. That is what happened to Jesus. He was under surveillance all the time under the Pharisees and the Scribes who wanted to catch him do a mistake. We observe that even under such undeserved hostile scrutiny, he maintained his serenity. He did not give his adversaries to his adversaries to get to his nerves. We as his followers are invited to model our lives after him. For some of us though when under intense pressure, our reactions are captured in a famous t-shirt sticker “I follow Jesus, but sometimes I want to slap people too.” That is not the way of Christ from the Gospel we heard today. Christ maintained serenity and peace under unnecessarily hostile circumstances. Do we need additional grace to stay calm under intense pressure?
Cultivating a Balanced View
Second, we notice that Jesus never turned down an invitation from anyone, including his adversaries. He had so much belief in the inherent goodness of people including those that appeared way broken or simply sinful. Christ believed that even the Pharisees and Scribes with their sinister motives, had goodness in them, and there was hope for their conversion and goodness. Ancient wisdom tells us that we will never turn our enemies into our friends unless we are open to meeting them and talking to them. It is there that we can understand where they come from and what their life experiences have been that make them behave the way they do. Burning bridges between us and our adversaries makes us lose an opportunity. Encounters help people change perspective and improve relationships. Today might be a good day to ask ourselves – who might I need to show more openness to even when I have a lot of disagreements with them?
Lastly, the Gospel challenges us about the need to cultivate a sense of balance or proportionality. Saving an ox cannot be more important than saving a human life. Sometimes we confer greater importance or priority to things in a manner that is distorted. We pray that God gives us a discerning spirit that can help us with the right ordering of things: the first to be first, and the last to be last, the higher up to be kept high on the list and the lowest on the list to be placed where it rightly belongs. Amen.
