The Spirit of Control Versus the Spirit of Freedom: A Reflection on Luke 13.10-17

After a few weeks ‘off’ talking about Jesus’ parables, today we return to regularly scheduled Sunday programming reflecting on the lectionary readings. But today’s Gospel reading acts as a nice bridge, since it connects to the conflicts and themes that instigated Jesus’ parables of grace in Luke 14 and following. It’s a story about the law and what it means to be faithful. But it’s also a story about the conflict between control and freedom, one that seems particularly relevant in our present world.

The story, found in Luke 13.10-18, begins with Jesus teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath. A woman shows up, whom the text tells us had been living with a debilitating condition that had left her hunched over for eighteen years. Jesus has compassion on her and heals her on the spot. People start to rejoice but the synagogue leader is having none of it, furious that Jesus had performed this miracle on the sabbath: “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” (Note that, as usual, it’s the marginalized woman who bears the brunt of his attack, not the one he’s actually mad at!) But Jesus interjects with his classic response about the sabbath:

You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?

In other words, simple mercy always takes priority over rule-following. In this case, Luke tells us that this argument wins the day, but Jesus isn’t always so lucky. In just the next chapter, when travelling with a group of Pharisees, he will again heal someone on the sabbath, an act which sets the Pharisees up as opponents rather than allies for the rest of the Gospel.

In the synagogue-leader’s defense, running a community is challenging and thankless work. There must be rules and norms and shared behavioural expectations in order for the community to have an identity and meaningful boundaries. In that sense, it’s a lot easier to be a prophet and just come in and shake things up and be one one’s merry way. So I have sympathy for him here. But that doesn’t mean he’s not in the wrong. For he’s let his desire for control — the “peace, order, and good governance” that are the stated values of our democracy here in Canada — overtake his willingness to let go and let the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of freedom who, like the wind, “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3.8). Here he has witnessed a legitimate miracle, and one that would dramatically transform the life of a marginalized woman in his community, and yet he can only think about it in relationship to the rule book.

This tension between control and freedom is one that recurs in the New Testament. And there’s a consistent pattern: Where a passage is talking about theological truth and the power of God, it’s on the side of freedom; where it’s talking about community guidelines, it’s far more likely to clip freedom’s sails a bit. (When some Christians today claim they don’t like Paul much, this is probably why; his epistles are written to try to right the ship in struggling communities and so lean to the side of control, order, and discipline.) It’s a tension we’d do well not to ignore or minimize. It’s not a question of whether there are rules and guidelines within a community, but of which rules and guidelines we prioritize and use to define our community.

In the story today, the synagogue leader and Jesus offer up two different visions for what their community is: “We are a community that follows the rules” versus “We are a community that prioritizes mercy.” Again, it’s not that rules are bad — they are necessary. But in order to be the kind of community Jesus wants us to be, we need a flexibility about them. In this the word ‘rule’ itself is helpful. Today we tend to think of rules as mini-laws, but originally, the word, regula in Latin and kanonos in Greek, referred to devices that either helped a form keep its shape or provided rough measurements. The lack of specificity is built-in to the classic standard Greek-English lexicon for the term: “a flexible rule that cannot be depended on for straight measurement.” They are not laws, but literal guidelines, which should apply when all else is equal but which can be fudged when all else is not equal. The classic example of this for me is Lenten fasting in Eastern Orthodoxy: While there is a standard, canonical fast that avoids meat, dairy, alcohol, and heavy oils, this rule is readily adapted for any number of reasons of age, health, or lifestyle.

I say all this because the point of this Gospel reading is not that Jesus hated the sabbath; far from it! He just insisted that it serve humanity’s need for rest as it was intended and not itself become a burden or stumbling block for loving one’s neighbour. And if that’s how Jesus related to even his community’s most sacred religious rules, how much more should we take this attitude into our own communities and their rulebooks? It’s all about love and nothing — especially our piety — should get in its way.