Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Then he said to them, ‘If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a sabbath day?’ And they could not reply to this.”
NL Daily Devotion for Friday, February 9, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
This healing story isn’t about a “who”, but a “when.” A man at a meal on the Sabbath has dropsy and Jesus knows the Pharisees are watching to see what he would do. Would he heal the man on the Sabbath, which was against the law of Moses, as it was considered “work”?
Jesus calls them out preemptively. “If your kid falls down a well on the Sabbath, are you just going to leave them there until the next day?” In other words, it’s ridiculous to put that kind of saving, healing “work” into the same category as the kinds of “work” Moses forbade in the laws about the Sabbath. God loves God’s people, and their health, safety, and welfare come first. God’s laws are meant to be life-giving, not arbitrarily restrictive.
What’s at stake here is the way a community’s interpretation of a law which is meant to help people turns that law into one that harms people. We face this exact dilemma regularly in our modern context, for example, as the re-interpretation of the Constitution of the United States can suddenly allow one group of people to disregard the rights of another.
Jesus makes the claim that the welfare of the people comes first, and challenges us to let go of our rigid ideas in order to heed the call to love and serve our neighbors.
When has my interpretation of the “rules” caused me to fail to act in support of my neighbor?
