Homily – The Hypocrisy of Defending Bad Habits and Rules
St. Luke 13: 10-17
This Gospel lesson is profound, teaching us many things about the nature of healing, hypocrisy, and thanksgiving. Today I would like to focus on three of the things that it teaches us.
One: We Really Should Come to Church
The first has to do with the context of the event: it occurs on the Sabbath. This is what drives the encounter and makes it such a powerful lesson. I want you to think about this for a moment: what was Christ doing in the synagogue on the Sabbath? He was perfect and the fount of all knowledge – he certainly did not go there to learn. As the second person in the Trinity, he was in constant, direct union with God the Father and the Holy Spirit – he certainly did not need to go to the synagogue to pray. Moreover, he had plenty of other things on his plate… so why did he come to the synagogue on the Sabbath?
Christ came to church on the Sabbath because that is what the godly do. That is what the people of God do. It is what the Church does, and, as He is the head of that Church, there is nothing more meet and right than for him to be there.
While we now honor the Sabbath on Sunday [to participate in the Resurrection and the beginning of the New Creation] rather than on Saturday it is the same for us. We are to honor the Sabbath with our preparation, our attendance, and our love. I know how people often react to this; “why do I need to come to church every week – it’s always the same?!” Yes, it is always the same; just like eating is always the same, sleeping is always the same, and breathing is always the same. Are we going to skip any of those? And those things only support our bodies (which perish), while church (and preparing for church) supports our whole person; to include our soul (which never dies).
Moreover, if it is not convincing enough that Christ himself did it; if it is not convincing enough that he, through the Church of which he is the head and to which we profess membership, tells us that we should do it; if these things are not enough, then we should come to church every Sunday because we need to be healed. And if we do not need to be healed, then we should come to church to that thank God that we are well.
Two: Come and be Healed
In today’s lesson, Christ healed the woman in the Synagogue on the Sabbath. This is what Christ does. This is what the Church does. This is what the Sabbath about: about healing and rejoicing. Christ reaches out and touches the woman and the spirit of infirmity fled from her. The Church continues this, his ministry. There is a special power – a special grace – in the touch of the Church. It is the hand offered in love; the one that not only feels you pain and anguish, but provides warm comfort and the sure path to wellness.
The leaders of the synagogue missed that vital point: they thought that that “church” was about something else. Over time, their worship had become separated from its intent; the Sabbath had become an idol to their own misconceptions – and to their own pride – rather than an icon of the Living, Loving, God. They worshipped it instead of worshipping God THROUGH it.
The Church is the Hospital, and Christ is the Great Physician. We are either here to be healed, or celebrate healing (Christ came to heal those who knew themselves to be sick, not those who consider themselves well). The Pharisees did neither – they just got in the way. We do this when we forget what church is for (when we forget the Good News) and turn it into a museum, or an arena, or a place for entertainment, or a place to share our political opinions, or even more positive things like a school for moral education or a place to hang out with people we like.
One of the ways we judge a community’s wellness is by looking at the ratio of hospital beds and the like to the population. How healthy is the Lehigh Valley? Why do we have empty pews? Perhaps we have begun to forgot who we are and what Church is for.
Three: Exegesis 101 – We are the Jews; We are the Leader of the Synagogue
When we hear of the encounter described in today’s lesson, we should be outraged at the attitude of the ruler of the synagogue. He was upset that someone had been healed in a house dedicated to God on the day dedicated to his worship. This man’s hypocrisy should be obvious and appalling. I want us to taste his wickedness; I want us to hate his blasphemy. He had taken things meant to spread God’s love and used it to defend his own malice. Are we outraged? We should be. It is sickening when people do evil in the name of God. Now, I want us to take that outrage, that righteous indignation at the disjuncture and incompatibility between the requirements of love and what religious people actually do in the name of their religion… and I want us to apply it to ourselves and to our church.
We are amazed that this man would correct the Christ in the place designed to prepare people for his coming; but at least he has the excuse of ignorance. We have no such excuse. We confess the Orthodox Church to be the body of Christ, with Him as its head – and yet we do exactly what the leader of the synagogue did: we put ourselves above Christ. We put ourselves above His Church. We dare to contradict when he teaches or shows us what we really should be doing. We turn our religion against God. The man was rebuked because he had turned his synagogue into a place where something other than God was worshipped and something other than love was practiced (idol vs. icon). We are the Jews: we have done this ourselves.
This kind of introspective discernment should – along with fasting, patience, joy, and charity – be part of our Advent preparation. And we can’t take the easy way out: it is all too easy to find the hypocrisy in others (and especially in your priest!). I want us to find the things in our own lives and in our routine parish practices that challenge the Orthodoxy which we claim to profess. I want us to find the things in our own lives and in our routine parish practices which would lead Christ to respond by saying; “You hypocrites!” I want us to find all the ways we are using religion against love.
But we can’t stop there. Having found them, we need to do what the woman did: come here to have that burden removed. The hand of God will come upon you, and His voice will proclaim “my beloved, you are freed from your infirmity”. And then, having been healed, we should join her and all the saints in praising God for all the glorious things that He has done for us.
