Black and white
This week is on Luke 6:1-11:
There are two things this Jesus story addresses: The Tyranny of the Flowchart and the All or Nothing Fallacy. The Pharisees were ultra-religious, to the point where they missed subtlety, and that caused them to stray in their faith. Their handling of the Sabbath was a great teaching point for Jesus to address the problems with how they lived.
A little background on the Sabbath: God designed things to work in cycles. There are cycles of activity and cycles of rest. None are absolute. Warm climates have rainy and dry seasons. Cold climates have cold and temperate seasons. Days have day and night. People have circadian rhythms. The gene pool has life and death. And part of the ordained lifestyle for the Jews was that civilization would have the week, and the week would reset itself through a day of rest. There was also stuff about leaving crops fallow every so many years, forgiving debts and freeing slaves after a number of years and so on. These are general principles that keep people and things from burning out or becoming stagnant. They punctuate monotony.
The Pharisees turned God's description of how we should live into a set of black and white rules. Nothing in nature is that absolute. We get 80 degree days in February occasionally. Sometimes we're up in the middle of the night or take an afternoon nap. People can die young or live 113 years. Sometimes the moon lights up the night, or eclipses the sun. But to the Pharisees, the Sabbath was absolute. And the more absolute you could make your Sabbath, the better Pharisee you were, even if you were in opposition to God's more important plans for your life.
Pharisaism reminds me a lot of the TSA's rules for air travel in the US. It's wrong to bring more than three ounces of liquid onto a plane, because it could blow up, but it's OK to bring a pint of liquid if the word "saline" is written on the bottle. Police have been known to write tickets for cars parked an inch past the maximum distance from the curb. It's an unwillingness to look at the big picture and consider if a rules violation is an actual problem or not. To someone who understands the reasoning behind the rule, this sort of tyranny of the checklist or flowchart is obvious foolishness. "Why can't the terrorist pour the bomb mixing materials into a bottle that says 'Saline?' Is a jar of jam really the same as a jar of nitroglycerin, and if so, why are you throwing it into a barrel right next to where hundreds of people are gathered?" "Why does a car suddenly become a road hazard when it is 13 inches from the curb, but is perfectly safe when only 12 inches from the curb? Is that really the same as a car parked three feet away?" It's complicated hoop-jumping for the purpose of showing off, like in a circus.
People were willing to let Jesus starve and a man remain crippled in order to keep the purity of their law. Was foraging grain for personal use the same thing as working all seven days a week to store it up? Was healing a man's hand the same as spending the day building a fence? If it's not black, it's white. If you're not first, you're last! People insisted that Jesus wasn't allowed to take care of short-term personal needs or do work that would glorify God, but they were willing to violate their law themselves by spending the day to surveil Jesus, looking for a way to snare him, and then holding a business meeting to plot Jesus' murder. Who is violating the Sabbath, the man who stops to quiet his rumbly tummy and then changes a man's life for the better, or the man who stalks and plots to kill another?
The flip side of this is how people react to black and white thinking. Some, in order not to be polar thinkers, give up thinking altogether. That's not what we're supposed to do either. If Jesus was giving a speech now, I wonder if there might also be a case where he confronts the Christian businessman working through the weekend on an important project because "Jesus said the Sabbath is for man, not man for the Sabbath." The things Jesus is confronted on in this story are both short term things which take care of immediate needs: You're hungry and the food is right there. A man is in trouble, you can help him in less than five minutes, and you might not get the chance tomorrow. Jesus isn't saying to throw out the Sabbath. He's just saying not to make it god in his place. It isn't all, like the Pharisees said, but it isn't nothing either.
God's order is more complicated than the simple models we make in our heads. It isn't something that can be turned into a checklist. Take a walk in nature if you don't believe me. Are the trees in neat little rows? Does land end abruptly and become water? Is nature in disorder because it doesn't look like a park? Try to see the big picture and all the colors and shades of God's creation. Live in the real world.
One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat the kernels. Some of the Pharisees asked, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”
Jesus answered them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” Then Jesus said to them, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Get up and stand in front of everyone.” So he got up and stood there.
Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?”
He looked around at them all, and then said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so, and his hand was completely restored. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus.
There are two things this Jesus story addresses: The Tyranny of the Flowchart and the All or Nothing Fallacy. The Pharisees were ultra-religious, to the point where they missed subtlety, and that caused them to stray in their faith. Their handling of the Sabbath was a great teaching point for Jesus to address the problems with how they lived.
A little background on the Sabbath: God designed things to work in cycles. There are cycles of activity and cycles of rest. None are absolute. Warm climates have rainy and dry seasons. Cold climates have cold and temperate seasons. Days have day and night. People have circadian rhythms. The gene pool has life and death. And part of the ordained lifestyle for the Jews was that civilization would have the week, and the week would reset itself through a day of rest. There was also stuff about leaving crops fallow every so many years, forgiving debts and freeing slaves after a number of years and so on. These are general principles that keep people and things from burning out or becoming stagnant. They punctuate monotony.
The Pharisees turned God's description of how we should live into a set of black and white rules. Nothing in nature is that absolute. We get 80 degree days in February occasionally. Sometimes we're up in the middle of the night or take an afternoon nap. People can die young or live 113 years. Sometimes the moon lights up the night, or eclipses the sun. But to the Pharisees, the Sabbath was absolute. And the more absolute you could make your Sabbath, the better Pharisee you were, even if you were in opposition to God's more important plans for your life.
Pharisaism reminds me a lot of the TSA's rules for air travel in the US. It's wrong to bring more than three ounces of liquid onto a plane, because it could blow up, but it's OK to bring a pint of liquid if the word "saline" is written on the bottle. Police have been known to write tickets for cars parked an inch past the maximum distance from the curb. It's an unwillingness to look at the big picture and consider if a rules violation is an actual problem or not. To someone who understands the reasoning behind the rule, this sort of tyranny of the checklist or flowchart is obvious foolishness. "Why can't the terrorist pour the bomb mixing materials into a bottle that says 'Saline?' Is a jar of jam really the same as a jar of nitroglycerin, and if so, why are you throwing it into a barrel right next to where hundreds of people are gathered?" "Why does a car suddenly become a road hazard when it is 13 inches from the curb, but is perfectly safe when only 12 inches from the curb? Is that really the same as a car parked three feet away?" It's complicated hoop-jumping for the purpose of showing off, like in a circus.
People were willing to let Jesus starve and a man remain crippled in order to keep the purity of their law. Was foraging grain for personal use the same thing as working all seven days a week to store it up? Was healing a man's hand the same as spending the day building a fence? If it's not black, it's white. If you're not first, you're last! People insisted that Jesus wasn't allowed to take care of short-term personal needs or do work that would glorify God, but they were willing to violate their law themselves by spending the day to surveil Jesus, looking for a way to snare him, and then holding a business meeting to plot Jesus' murder. Who is violating the Sabbath, the man who stops to quiet his rumbly tummy and then changes a man's life for the better, or the man who stalks and plots to kill another?
The flip side of this is how people react to black and white thinking. Some, in order not to be polar thinkers, give up thinking altogether. That's not what we're supposed to do either. If Jesus was giving a speech now, I wonder if there might also be a case where he confronts the Christian businessman working through the weekend on an important project because "Jesus said the Sabbath is for man, not man for the Sabbath." The things Jesus is confronted on in this story are both short term things which take care of immediate needs: You're hungry and the food is right there. A man is in trouble, you can help him in less than five minutes, and you might not get the chance tomorrow. Jesus isn't saying to throw out the Sabbath. He's just saying not to make it god in his place. It isn't all, like the Pharisees said, but it isn't nothing either.
God's order is more complicated than the simple models we make in our heads. It isn't something that can be turned into a checklist. Take a walk in nature if you don't believe me. Are the trees in neat little rows? Does land end abruptly and become water? Is nature in disorder because it doesn't look like a park? Try to see the big picture and all the colors and shades of God's creation. Live in the real world.
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