Sermon for 8/24/25

Sermon 8-24-25 Luke 13: 10-17 11th Sunday after Pentecost

I often tell people I have CDO, that's OCD in alphabetical order. Individuals with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder experience intrusive, recurring thoughts. They often feel compelled to perform specific actions or rituals repeatedly. I just want to do things once and have it done right the first time. I'm funny that way.

But I can't hold a candle to some of the ancient Jewish church leaders. Just ask Luke the author of our Gospel reading for today.

“Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath”. The Jewish sabbath is Saturday, the last day of the week on both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The Julian calendar was devised by Julius Caesar and used for nearly 1600 years. Then Pope Gregory XIII made a revision to that calendar in 1582 to improve the accuracy of the date of Easter. We still use that one today and the Hebrew religion still considers Saturday their sabbath. God rested on the seventh day.

In ancient days, until the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, synagogues were usually found in small towns, not so many in Jerusalem, they had the Temple. Then synagogues started sprouting up all over. We can probably assume the synagogue in this reading was a small village or town.

It was the custom in synagogues for distinguished guests on the sabbath days to hold a place of distinction in their services. Those guests would be offered seats of honor in the front. They would be given the opportunity to read from the scrolls of the Old Testament during the service.

Jesus would have probably been the guest of honor on that day, and a woman appears. She would have probably come in from the back of the room. She's bent over, unable to stand up straight. She's been that way for some eighteen years and Jesus calls her over. We can assume she walked to the front of the room where Jesus would have been.

Luke says that she appeared with a spirit that had crippled her. The accepted view in those days was that maladies were brought on by invading “spirits”. He tells her, “Woman you are set free from your ailment” and laid His hands upon her. She immediately stood up straight and began praising God.

The leader of the synagogue did not handle it well. You might say he flipped out.

Synagogue leaders did not have to be ordained religious men. They were often just prominent laypeople of the community. Their job description, among other things, were to oversee the building, organize events, conduct meetings and supervise teaching. On days other than the sabbath the synagogues were often used as schools for the kids and meeting places for social events.

Whether this synagogue leader was a layperson or a full blown Rabbi we are not told, but we do know he was head and shoulders deep into the accepted dogma of the Jewish leadership of the time. He fully accepted and practiced the principles set forth by Hebrew authority figures.

This fellow was convinced that Jesus had broken the sabbath law against doing work on that sabbath by healing this woman. This was not Jesus' first time healing someone on the sabbath day, it wasn't His last either. Jesus is recorded healing at least seven times on the sabbath in the gospels.

The last time was when Peter cut off Malchus' ear with a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane. Ask Willie Shuler about the song “Colorado Kool-Aid”.

The Hebrew people of that time did not have the New Testament. There was no such thing. They had what we now call the Old Testament. Their religious life was centered around the Torah also called the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, the Prophets and the Writings.

It was the Bible that Jesus knew and lived by.

The Hebrew scholars, being OCD, worried day and night that they might accidentally break some of the laws that had been laid down by Moses. They began to lay down what they called “oral traditions”. Interpretations of the laws in what they called the Mishnah. They went on to write the Talmud, commentary on the Mishnah. Then again the Midrash, another exegesis or interpretation of the Talmud. It kept growing like the Blob that ate Cincinnati.

There seemed to be no end to their rules, regulations and interpretations.

The synagogue leader in this reading is obsessed with what he thinks is Jesus doing work, like healing, on the sabbath. In the Book of Exodus, chapter 31, verse fifteen and again in chapter 35, verse 2 it says, “whoever does any work on it shall be put to death”.

The leader addresses the crowd and avoids direct contact with Jesus. He says, “There are six days on which work should be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath”. It didn't occur to him he had just witnessed a miracle.

In a way he has a good argument. The lady has been afflicted for 18 years, one more day shouldn't make a big difference. On the other hand, in all that time she hasn't set face on Jesus, nor He on her. No one would have batted an eye if Jesus had said, “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning”. Jesus put human need above ritual requirements. He wanted to stop this woman's suffering as soon as possible.

Then He uses their own rules, regulations and interpretations to validate His actions. There are 39 categories of work that came about during the building of the Miskan, the portable sanctuary the Israelites carried around with them in the desert for forty years. Kind of sounds like a union job doesn't it?

Moses feet had not more than hit the flat ground before the Hebrews started adding rules, regulations and interpretations to the law he was carrying. It was legal to untie your domestic animals so they could drink. You just couldn't legally lift the pale they were to drink from up to their mouth.

Like I said, Jesus put human need above ritual requirements. Jesus never broke the sabbath requirements, He only broke the OCD tendencies of the Jewish leaders. This is the last time we read of Jesus being in a synagogue. He made a good showing.

Jesus shows the “loosing” of the woman's infirmity is just as important to the “loosing” of a man's ox or donkey, if not more so. The woman walked into the synagogue bent over with her eyes to the ground. She could not see Jesus. With just a word and a touch she stood up and looked God in the eye. Amen.