Fashion vs compassion

 This week's verses are Matthew 12:10-12:

A man was there who had a withered hand. And they asked Jesus, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” so that they could accuse him. He said to them, “Would not any one of you, if he had one sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” 

  These verses are a conversation that takes place between Jesus and a group of Pharisees in their Synagogue. A little background: I always have to remind people that the Pharisees were the religious elite of their day. People always think of them in the way that Christians are often characterized in the media, like these fussy scheming prudes that nobody likes because they're always complaining about other people. In fact, the Pharisees were more like the media themselves. They set the moral fashions that other people followed, and were looked at as lighthouses of righteousness and good examples to follow.

So here they're trying to expose Jesus by putting him in a situation where they can make him look bad. Have you ever seen those YouTube videos that activists do, where they go overboard trying to lure some unsuspecting politician or celebrity into saying something they can make into a sound bite so they can spin it to get attention for themselves? Well, this is what they did before YouTube. They're no match for the Son of God though. Jesus explains clearly why it is necessary to heal someone on the Sabbath.

Some more background: Having a withered hand was a very big deal back when this conversation took place. Nowadays, we have prosthetics, surgery options, a wide range of potential careers, advocacy for the disabled, and even a deep social services safety net. People with even severe disabilities in modern times can still live a relatively normal life, at least when compared to how it would have been in Roman times.

But imagine you lived in a world when any disability was considered to be a curse from God. No employer would take you, because they could get plenty of unskilled labor with two good hands without having to take a chance on you. Your relatives would distance themselves from you, so that whatever curse was on you wouldn't be attached to them too. Marriage prospects would be close to zero. But even worse than no sex and no dollar bills, was Leviticus 21:17-21:

“Tell Aaron, ‘No man from your descendants throughout their generations who has a physical flaw is to approach to present the food of his God. Certainly no man who has a physical flaw is to approach: a blind man, or one who is lame, or one with a slit nose, or who has a limb too long, or a man who has had a broken leg or arm, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or one with a spot in his eye, or a festering eruption, or a feverish rash, or a crushed testicle. No man from the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a physical flaw may step forward to present the Lord’s gifts; he has a physical flaw, so he must not step forward to present the food of his God. 

The verses are about Levites specifically, not Jews in general, but imagine being brought up to believe that a disability could be a barrier between you and God. It's hard enough being disabled, even worse in those days, but imagine living in a society that believed it was something that made you disgusting or unacceptable to even God himself.

So this was the trap that the Pharisees laid for Jesus with this poor man. "Confirm our narrow-minded doctrine, or be cancelled." Checkmate, right? Not for Jesus. He invented the Sabbath for us, and he wasn't going to wait to let the crippled man finally enjoy it. The Pharisees, who were not disabled, wanted to make the man suffer another day for the sake of their dogma.

And that was the difference between the "morality as fashion" crowd and the "morality as compassion" crowd. God gave us the law to help us to know him and to live healthy lives and reduce suffering. But the Pharisee perverts it into a way of outwardly determining who is in the "in" crowd versus who can be looked down on. Withered-hand man was obviously "out," and they were hoping Jesus could be made to be seen as "out" too.

Our inner Pharisee causes us to ask ourselves "Is it really that big of a deal? Can't it wait? The guy's hand didn't just wither yesterday. Surely he can wait until tomorrow. Why rock the boat?" But Jesus compares the man to an animal in distress.

A sheep in a pit could wait until the next day too. It's not going to die while stuck, unless some wild animal comes to finish it off. But no sheep owner would do that because they have compassion on the animal. It's no big deal to drag it out, but it is a big deal to go the rest of the day listening to the traumatized animal freaking out in the pit. In the same way, Jesus saw that the poor, stigmatized man was suffering, and he saw no reason to wait until the next day to help him, certainly not just to show everyone how rigid his Sabbath-keeping was.

When Jesus answered them and healed the man, he was showing the Pharisees to be hypocrites, since they would "break" the Sabbath themselves to help an animal but would let a man suffer. By the very law they claimed to follow, a man was more valuable than an animal. Do we miss details like this sometimes ourselves?

He also removed the man's suffering and showed that love is more important than following the law ritualistically to the letter. He didn't make the man wait till tomorrow for something that could be done today. Do we make others wait? Or do we doubt that God will help us today rather than some point in the future?

And most importantly, in removing the man's physical flaw, he removed the barrier between him and God. Is there anything standing between us and God that he can't remove?

Think about these verses this week and how they relate to your Christian life. Does our Christianity function as a kind of fashion that changes the way we see others for the worse, turning us into Pharisees? Or does it increase our compassion for people in need, helping us to be more like Jesus.