August 24, 2025
In the summer of 1992, right after I had graduated high school, my church’s youth group went on a mission trip to Boston. Most of our time was spent at a church in the city of Chelsea where we organized and ran a Vacation Bible School for local kids. We did get some time to get out of the church and neighborhood so we could get to know Boston and its environs. This included of course some sight-seeing. But far more eye-opening was a scavenger hunt in downtown Boston. We were divided into teams and we had to use the bus and subway system to get to Boston Common. Once there, we had a list of things we had to do, places we had to go and people with whom we had to talk. The people included shopkeepers, a random Bostonian, a tourist (you could usually tell the difference), a police officer, and a homeless person, among others. Most of these folks were relatively easy to spot and to speak to, though it does take a little boldness to walk up to a complete stranger and ask them a question. The exception was the homeless person: I think all of us were uncomfortable with the thought of interacting with someone who lived on the street and not everyone in my youth group actually did it.
My team and I came across three men sitting on a bench in the park; their shabby appearance and the bags by their feet which appeared to contain all their clothes and other possessions made it pretty obvious that they were homeless. Dutifully, I introduced my self and my friends and we, well mostly I, begin to ask them the questions which appeared on our list. It was a revelatory experience for me. As these men answered our questions and told their stories, I began to see them not as the poor, wretched, scary other, but as human beings like myself.
Knowing I was in Boston with a church group, the men made a point to talk about how they were treated by Christians. What I particularly recall is their experience with some of the church run soup kitchens and shelters. I was shocked to learn that there were churches which required the men to attend a worship service before they could eat and shelters which would not let a person sleep there if they did not sit through a sermon, often a fire and brimstone attempt to save these poor sinners—and surely they must be guilty of laziness, drunkenness, substance abuse or something else if they were reduced to living on the streets.
Despite my evangelical Baptist upbringing, or perhaps because of it, this struck me as wrong. I thought, and still think, that the folks running these particular ministries had it backwards. They were confused about what God wanted most. They should have fed and sheltered their homeless neighbors first, with no strings attached, and offered, but not required, worship, prayer and spiritual care to any who wanted it. After all, as Isaiah reminds us, what God wants from us more than worship is lives of compassion; what God desires from God’s people is not empty words of praise but concrete demonstrations of our love of God through acts of love for our needy, vulnerable and outcast neighbors.
It's not that worship is bad or prayer is unnecessary. It’s that worship and prayer are hollow gestures if they are not accompanied by loosing the bonds of injustice, sharing bread with the hungry, sheltering the homeless poor, and meeting the needs of the afflicted. [Is 58.6-7, 10] In the case of these shelters and soup kitchens, sharing the Gospel is a very good and important thing, but they could have done so though the act of feeding these men, they could have shown the God’s love in the concrete act of providing a bed. As Francis of Assisi told his fellow monks, “Witness whenever possible, use words when necessary.” Words will at some point be necessary, but actions demonstrate the truth of our words, the reality of our faith.
This morning’s Gospel reading also speaks of getting things out of order. Jesus is in the synagogue on the Sabbath, when he sees a woman was severely bent over and unable to standup straight. I can only imagine how debilitating, how limiting, and perhaps how painful her condition must have been. But Jesus sees her, sees her need, and responds by healing her. While she gives praise to God for her healing, the leader of the synagogue is not so thrilled.
This gentleman is most likely not a rabbi, but a layperson who has been elected by the congregation to lead and manage the work and activities of the synagogue. He takes his task very seriously; no doubt he is concerned with maintaining order and making sure that the community worships God with the proper respect and in accordance with the scriptures. This would have meant proper respect for the Sabbath, proper obedience to God’s commands about how to keep the Sabbath holy. Thus, the leader of the synagogue is upset with Jesus because he is quite sure that it is inappropriate to do work on the Sabbath. Some commentators suggest that he might also be perturbed because when Jesus called the woman over, he likely summoned her into the area of the synagogue reserved for men—another violation of proper sabbath etiquette.
In the Hebrew Bible, there are competing understandings of how to observe the Sabbath, how to keep it holy. The synagogue leader is focused on the idea of Sabbath rest—we are called to rest because after six days of creation, God rested on the seventh. He is simply trying to enforce the rules in order to protect the Sabbath from being degraded and becoming like any other day. If you make an exception for this person, who’s next? The synagogue leader is in good company; many rabbis felt that healing on the sabbath was a clear violation of the command to honor the sabbath by resting as God had. [Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina, p. 212, see note on verse 14 which points to multiple passages in the Babylonian Talmud] In his final book, the late N.T. scholar Richard Hays has an excellent discussion of the controversies surrounding Jesus’ acts of healing on the Sabbath. He observes, “the Pharisees and synagogue leaders…. were concerned for careful and rigorous observation of a divinely given ordinance that had deep theological justification in the scriptural stories of creation and redemption…. [Thus,] in fairness they should be understood as earnestly devout people concerned to maintain a high view of scriptural holiness and scriptural authority.” [Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays, The Widening of God’s Mercy, 2024, p. 124] In other words, the leader of the synagogue, like many of his co-religionists, just wants to do what is pleasing to God; he wants to faithfully and properly keep the Sabbath commandments. Yet, he is so focused on the idea of the Sabbath, that he loses sight of real people and their needs. He can’t really “see” the dignity and value of the suffering woman who has come once again to synagogue.
There is, however, another understanding of the Sabbath: that it is a time to remember God’s deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt. It is a time to remember that “the Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed,” [Psalm 103.6] and the best way to remember God’s mercy and love is to show it to others in their time of need. Indeed, Hays argues, Jesus is challenging the synagogue leader and those present who agree with him—notice Jesus addresses “hypocrites” in the plural and “each of you” who has an ox or donkey—to “reflect on the purpose of the Sabbath law—and to interpret it as an ordinance given for the sake of human wholeness and flourishing.” [Hays and Hays, p. 126]
This is the tradition that is articulated in Isaiah 58: Sabbath worship is empty and meaningless unless it is connected to care for the poor, justice for the oppressed and active compassion for those in need. Indeed, just as Isaiah speaks of “loosing the bond of injustice,” Luke uses the verb leui, meaning “to loose,” to describe both the “untying” of the animal to lead it to water and Jesus’ act of “freeing” the woman from her infirmity. As Elizabeth Larocca-Pitts observes, by healing this crippled woman on the Sabbath, Jesus stands “squarely in the tradition of Isaiah, advocating that all religious life should seek to produce justice.” important ideas—preserving the integrity of religious practice, keeping order, enforcing the law, keeping the rules—but Jesus reminds us that those ideas must not blind us to the value of the person or persons right in front of us.
Perhaps that’s the difference in Jesus and the synagogue leader: The synagogue leader sees only the rules, the Law. But Jesus sees the woman, sees her as a person, as valuable. She, like all of us, has multiple identities: a woman, a daughter, perhaps a wife, maybe a mother, a person with a disability, a Jew, a human being, a child of God. A focus on some of these identities—her gender and her disability—had likely left her excluded from full participation in her community. But Jesus, while denying none of her many identities, focuses on the most important: she is a human being made in God’s image and loved by God. He sees her value and dignity, he reaches out to her, and he declares her to be “a daughter of Abraham,” an equal of all Abraham’s other children in that room. By healing her, he affirms her dignity and value and restores her to full participation in the community. This woman who once could only look at the ground, now stands up straight and looks Jesus and everyone else in the synagogue directly in the eye. She is no longer an object of pity or disgust, but a subject, a person of infinite worth made in the image of the God whom she praises. As Jürgen Moltmann observed, “the act of mercy always…involves the recognition of the human dignity of those who are in need, and respect for their self-esteem,” thus opening up the possibility of a community of solidarity and mutual care. In other words, to see another person, to feel empathy for them and respond with compassion, to recognize their dignity and worth, is to take a step towards the Beloved Community that is the Kingdom of God, where all that is broken—bodies, minds, hearts, relationships, societies—will be made whole.
That is the point of both Isaiah and Jesus: religious and even scriptural rules are meant to promote human thriving and well-being. Thus, any act “done for healing or human wholeness should be welcomed…” even if it breaks the rules as we understand them. As Jesus observed in Mark, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.”
Allow me to relate two stories, one secular, one religious: No doubt, some of you recall the story of the night New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia invoked a state law and presided over a local court. It was a winter’s night during the Great Depression, the mayor showed up at the night court in a poor part of the city and gave the judge the night off. Soon, a ragged looking old woman was brought before him, accused of stealing a loaf of bread. She admitted the crime, but explained that her daughter’s husband had abandoned her with no resources and two children, and now her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving.
The owner of the store from which she had stolen the bread was unmoved. Arguing that it was a bad neighborhood, he implored the mayor punish the woman so she would serve as an object lesson to others.
“LaGuardia sighed. He turned to the woman and said, ‘I’ve got to punish you. The law makes no exceptions. Ten dollars or ten days in jail.’ But even as he pronounced sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket. He extracted a bill and tossed it into his famous hat, saying, ‘Here is the ten dollar fine which I now remit; and furthermore I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat. Mr. Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant.’”
The shocked woman was presented with $47.50. She gave fifty cents to the shopkeeper and so left with $47, the equivalent of well over $1000 today, to support her needy family, all because Laguardia saw not simply the law, but also a real person standing before him, one whom he treated with dignity.
A second and final story: A famous rabbi and several of his friends had spent the morning working far from their village. The labor was both difficult and dirty. At noon, the friends brought some water over to their teacher so he could wash his hands thoroughly. To their surprise, he used only a few drops [not nearly enough to thoroughly clean his hands]. How could it be, [they wondered,] that this devout Jew would skimp on the commandment to wash completely before eating?
Cautiously, one of his friends spoke up: “Rabbi, we noticed that you used very little water, not nearly enough to get your hands clean.” Wordlessly, the rabbi pointed to a young servant girl who was trudging up the path from the well. She was bent low under a heavy bar laid across her shoulders. From the two ends of the bar hung two massive pails [full of water]. “How could I do the washing at the expense of this poor girl?” the rabbi asked. “The water that I save may perhaps prevent one trip to the well for her.” [from “A Reciprocal Relationship,” a sermon on Luke 6.17-26 by Rev. Allen Groethe, February 11, 2001, Epiphany 6; with additions for clarity]
The rabbi knew that it is more important to actively love one’s neighbor than to observe all the commandments to the letter. He knew that showing mercy, caring for the poor and the stranger—that is pure religion that is pleasing to God .
May God give us the wisdom to see the dignity of all of our neighbors, to value them more than rules or traditions. May our hearts be moved to empathy just as Jesus was. May the Holy Spirit empower and inspire us to acts of compassion and works of love—for this is the worship that is acceptable to God, this is Sabbath, the Beloved Community toward which Jesus is leading us.