August 22, 2010 Jeremiah 1:4-10 Luke 13:10-17

“Living by the Rules”

Dr. Ted H. Sandberg

Professional golfers played the last of their 4 major tournaments for this year, the PGA championship,
last week. It was won by Martin Kaymer in a 3-hole play-off with Bubba Watson after they’d tied
following the regular 72 holes. It was to have been a 3 way play-off, because Dustin Johnson
apparently also shot the tying score, but Johnson, on the final hole, hit an errant tie shot which landed
in the crowd. The crowd, it turned out, was standing in what’s called a bunker, an area filled with
sand. One of the rules of golf is that a player, while taking practice shots, can’t strike the ground in
the bunker. Because Johnson didn’t realize he was in a bunker, because he hadn’t read carefully
enough the warning issued by the Professional Golfers Association about this particular golf course
having bunkers all over the place and the very real possibility that the crowd would be in these
bunkers, Johnson hit the ground when he took a practice swing, and so he was penalized 2 strokes –
which meant he didn’t tie for the lead and didn’t have the opportunity to be in the play-off.
Talk on the Monday about the PGA tournament was how harsh the PGA was for enforcing the rule
about not hitting the ground in the bunker – especially because it was very difficult to see that
Johnson’s ball had landed in a bunker. There was a golf official with Johnson who could’ve told
Johnson that he was in a bunker, but the rules also state that the official isn’t to volunteer information,
he must be asked – and Johnson didn’t ask him. Most of the people I heard felt very sorry for Dustin
Johnson, but golfers and other sports people seemed to agree that the rules are the rules. It was too
bad that Johnson didn’t realize he was in a bunker, but it was his own fault for not reading the rule
page handed out at the beginning of the tournament because he just assumed it was like all the other
information that’s handed out at each tournament. The general consensus was, “Rules are Rules.”
It’s important that we have rules in society, laws if you will. Think of the chaos we’d have if there
were no laws. It’s bad enough with laws! We go to the gas station to get gas and assume that when
we pay our money we’re going to get the amount of gas we pay for. There are laws that make it
illegal for gas stations to pump .90 of a gallon when we pay for a full gallon. The same is true at the
grocery store. The scales are legally required to be accurate so that when I pay for a pound of grapes,
I receive a pound of grapes. The rules insure that we’re treated justly and that we, in turn, treat others
justly.
Some rules may seem like a nuisance to us. I get irritated when I have to sit at a red light when no
cars are coming from either direction. Why can’t I stop and then go if no one is coming? And there
are plenty of times when I feel the speed limit is too slow. Laws can be a pain at times.
But who would want to drive through Chico if there were no stop lights, or if we didn’t know that the
vehicle to the right has the right-of-way when cars get to an intersection at the same time? Or think of
the chaos if no one was willing to take their turn at the checkout line, if the strongest simply pushed
their way to the front of the line. We need rules and laws to live by.
Which makes Jesus’ healing of the woman on the Sabbath a problem for those who want to keep the
rules at all cost. Luke tells us that Jesus was teaching in the synagogue and a woman who’d been
crippled for eighteen years, a woman who was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight was
in the synagogue. The woman didn’t come over and ask Jesus’ help. Rather, when Jesus saw her, he
called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on
her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.
1
But this made the leader of the synagogue indignant because Jesus had done work by curing her on the
sabbath. This man kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done;
come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” (Not that that had happened in 18
years, of course.) In other words, “Obey the law, Jesus.”
It’s important to understand what was happening here. The leader of the synagogue, probably a
Pharisee, believed that for the community to be pure, individuals must also be pure . The Pharisees
saw it as their role in society to keep the Jewish society free from religious contamination. “This is
why the Pharisees were so concerned about eating, for meals are one of the most important and
regularly occurring times when what is outside the body (food) is taken into the body. The threat of
defilement is great, so measures taken to ensure the maintenance of purity must be commensurate with
the threat.”1 Therefore, the Pharisees placed great emphasis on obeying all the purity laws of the OT
law.
What are those laws? They’re the laws in the OT we often skip over when we read the Bible because
the laws appear outdated. For example, Leviticus 11 gives a long list of things that can and cannot be
eaten. Leviticus 12 describes what a woman is to do after giving birth. Leviticus 13 describes what a
man must do if he has leprosy. The Law goes on and on, in great detail, describing how the Jews were
to keep clean, and how they should become clean if they’re contaminated. These are the purity laws
that were so important to the Pharisees. High on the list of purity laws was the law to obey the
Sabbath. Remember, anything that contaminated an individual contaminated the whole society.
Anything or anyone who challenged this understanding of society, anything or anyone who challenged
the purity laws of the Torah, the Law, had to be confronted and defeated.
Jesus confronted the Pharisee’s core value of the supremacy of the purity laws. Rather than purity at
the center of his faith, Jesus placed forgiveness, because he viewed God as a God of love and mercy.
“Be merciful, as your heavenly Father is merciful,” Jesus taught in Luke 6. What this means is that
while the Pharisees exclude those they decide are impure, Jesus includes people – especially the poor
and those most often rejected by society. In the parable of the kingdom feast, Jesus has the king say
“Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” The
Pharisees want to keep the unclean out. Jesus wants to invite all people in.
What’s happened in our passage in Luke is another example of this debate over which is primary to
God: purity or forgiveness, God’s holiness or God’s compassion and love. The leader of the
synagogue must defend every purity law of which keeping the Sabbath holy was one of the primary
laws. There can be no exceptions because exceptions allow contaminants into the society. The
woman who’s been bent over and crippled for 18 years can not be healed on the Sabbath, because
there can be no exceptions.
Now, you and I more than likely will take Jesus’ side in this. Who’d argue that there shouldn’t be an
exception to the rule about working on the sabbath in this instance. Jesus himself points out the
exceptions the law makes. He says, “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?”
Luke tells us that when Jesus had said this, his opponents were put to shame. They were shamed, but
1 1. Herzog, William R., Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God: A Ministry of
Liberation, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2000, p. 173.
2
the argument didn’t end there, the argument between when to keep the rules and when to make
exceptions. We’re still in the midst of this argument today, aren’t we? And we argue both sides. All
of us say, “This is what the Bible says. This is what the Constitution says,” when it suits us. And we
argue for exceptions when it doesn’t. We do this whether we’re liberal or conservative, Democrat or
Republican.
For example. Most every one who’s discussed building the Islamic mosque 2 blocks from Ground
Zero in New York says that the Muslims have every legal right to build the mosque where they want
to. The argument is that even though they have the legal right, it’s offensive to many to have the
mosque that close to Ground Zero and so they should move the mosque somewhere else – sort of
make an exception to the law. “It’s legal, but we don’t want them to do what’s legal.” In this
instance, many on the more conservative side argue that an exception should be made in the law.
Those on the more liberal side, those who more often argue for exceptions to be made, argue that the
law is the law and the mosque should be built as planned.
By way of aside, and at the risk of making probably half of you angry with me, I wonder if there
would be the same uproar over building a new Baptist church close to the Oklahoma City Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building site, given Timothy McVeigh’s probable ties to the ultra-conservative
Christian Identity movement? Even more, as a Baptist, I don’t want to be identified with Fred Phelps
and his Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS. (Phelps is the Baptist minister who, with a small
number of his family/congregation, pickets at the funerals of our service men and women because of
the government’s position on abortion.) Should Baptists not be allowed to build new churches
because of Phelp’s actions the way all Muslims are grouped together with the murders who destroyed
the World Trade Towers? Muslims are just as violent and non-violent as everyone else. Food for
thought, I hope.
Coming back to the passage from Luke, there’s a fundamental issue inherent in this story, and all the
stories like it, and that’s the issue of how we read the Scripture. The Pharisees read the Scripture as a
holiness code. Their concern was to keep their community pure. They emphasized all those texts in
the Law that sought to keep the people of Israel clean and pure religiously.
Many Christians today place their emphasis on purity laws too. Oh, they may not use the eating codes
in Leviticus, but they use lots of biblical passages just as the Pharisees used the Purity codes. They
use Bible texts to exclude people for what we could call Purity reasons. They exclude in order to keep
the church pure and holy. They exclude those who don’t live-up to their modern code of behavior.
Jesus, on the other hand, while obeying the laws, at the same time broadened the meaning of those
laws to be inclusive. Jesus says that God’s law of forgiveness, God’s law of mercy, God’s law of
loving our neighbor is primary. When we seek to uphold the Sabbath law, we’re to understand the
Sabbath law in terms of God’s mercy and love and not see God’s mercy wrapped up in our
understanding of the Sabbath. I’m afraid that many Christians today are modern Pharisees, more
concerned to keep the church pure than they are to share God’s forgiveness and grace, more concerned
to draw the lines to exclude when Jesus erased the lines to bring people in.
The question for us as individuals is, which code are we going to follow – the purity code or the code
that Jesus teaches? Don’t jump too quickly to say that we’re going to follow Jesus’ code because to
obey Jesus’ code means we’re going to accept people we may not like, may not agree with, may not
want to be around. To obey Jesus’ code means we’re going to be called upon to love the poor, the
hungry, the homeless, the liberal fanatic and the conservative bigot. To obey Jesus’ code can, and

3
will, get us in trouble with a society that doesn’t want “them” anywhere around.
But, of course, if we follow the purity code, we may not be pure enough to get in on our own. Maybe,
we better do our best to obey Jesus. When all’s said and done, I’d rather trust in God’s mercy than in
my own attempts to be pure.