Lectionary Reflection for Proper 16C on Luke 13:10-17

REST IS COMPLICATED

I’ve never been good at sleeping during the day, even when I’m really tired. As a child, I struggled when I was instructed to sleep during the day. It didn’t happen often, but if we were going out in the evening as a family, my parents would sometimes try to help me endure the late night by getting me to nap during the day. I’m not sure that I ever really managed to sleep, but I know that I used to feel restless, bored, and desperate for the time to be over so I could finally burst out of my room and start to expend some of the energy that had miraculously appeared in my body the moment the command to rest had been issued.

For some of us, the daytime nap was a weekly occurrence on Sundays when everyone was supposed to rest for the sabbath. Apart from the obvious theological argument that Sunday is not the day of the biblical sabbath—technically it is the Lord’s Day on which we celebrate the resurrection—this approach to sabbath-keeping was, for many children across the world, very unhelpful. Those times of imposed rest were about as unrestful as they could be. True rest cannot be commanded.

My observations of the world around me and, through social media, the worlds of people across the world, indicate that many of us struggle to rest. We’re not really sure what rest means for us, and in our 24/7 world, taking time to rest can feel like falling behind. For some of us, the idea of rest is terrifying. It feels like a call to stop, to become passive and still, and to avoid doing things. While we may enthusiastically join the trend of quoting Kurt Vonnegut, “I am a human being, not a human doing”, we usually identify ourselves and our value by what we do, and specifically, by what we accomplish. Which means that rest, or non-doing, can feel like a kind of non-being. But perhaps we’re approaching both rest and activity wrongly.

I’m not sure that it’s helpful to create a dualism between being and doing. It creates the sense that if we’re active or working, we lose our essential beingness, and if we’re focused on being, it is a failure and a reason for guilt to do anything at all. But this is absurd. Whatever we may do, we do it as we are. And even “just being” is still doing something, even if it’s just staring out of the window. Who we are and what we do are intricately connected, and to try and separate these aspects of our selves can be unhelpful and even possibly harmful. Yes, burnout is an issue, but that’s not always because we’re doing too much. Often, it’s that we’re doing the wrong things in the wrong places with the wrong people; that our being and doing, instead of being authentically intertwined, are at odds, which creates a massive dissonance in our lives. And, while most of us could use more rest than we get, too much mindless non-doing isn’t healthy either. Perhaps these are some of the reasons that keeping the sabbath is difficult, and why it can become a legalistic, even puritanical, practice.

In the 1981 movie, Chariots of Fire, the star athlete, Eric Liddell, who had been selected to represent Great Britain in the 1924 Olympic Games, refuses to run in the heats for the 100-metre sprint because they are scheduled for a Sunday—which, in the movie, he calls the sabbath. I saw the movie as a teenager who had recently made a commitment to Christ, and I applauded Liddell’s courage in standing by his convictions. But even then, I found it strangely contradictory that he was so convinced that his running honoured God—“God made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure,” he tells his sister—but that God would expect him not to run on a Sunday, which was meant to be a day to honour God.¹ It felt to me like he was being overly legalistic, and I sensed that perhaps he was missing the point of the sabbath. In a similar way, the synagogue leader in the Lectionary reading from Luke 13:10-17 seemed to have become so obsessed with keeping the letter of the sabbath law that the spirit had been lost.

SABBATH TYRANNY

As Jesus was preaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath, he saw a woman whose body had been bent over for eighteen years. Many commentators have speculated on what could have caused her distress, and some have suggested a condition like spondylitis ankylopoeietica, a fusion of the bones in the spine that created ongoing stiffness, inflammation, fatigue, and acute pain.² The Gospel writer, however, attributes her suffering to a spirit (v.11) and to bondage by Satan (v.16). Significantly, this woman was simply present in the synagogue. She didn’t draw attention to herself or address Jesus in any way. While her presence in the synagogue could indicate that her community cared for her,³ her disability would certainly have made her ‘invisible’ to some extent. As Ira Brent Driggers notes, being bent over meant that she was unable to look people in the eyes, and the community’s primary view of her would have been the top of her head.⁴ But Jesus saw her, fully and lovingly, and called her over. Jared E. Alcántara even suggests that women were not permitted inside the sanctuary of the synagogue, and so Jesus would have had to seek her out, breaking with social norms, to perform this healing.⁵