URC Daily Devotion Friday 13th December 2024

St Luke 6: 6 – 11

On another sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue and taught, and there was a man there whose right hand was withered.The scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would cure on the sabbath, so that they might find an accusation against him. Even though he knew what they were thinking, he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come and stand here.’ He got up and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, ‘I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?’ After looking around at all of them, he said to him, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He did so, and his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.

Reflection

Dismiss any caricature of Pharisees and Scribes as pantomime villains, wilfully opposing anything and everything done by Jesus and his followers. They were learned scholars intent on maintaining the teaching and traditions of their religion. For them this was a hard but vital task; they lived in an occupied land subject to people with very different religious beliefs and observances; it was the very specific observances of Judaism that held the Jewish people together, and the maintenance of the Sabbath and public observance of the 39 activities enumerated by generations of rabbis was something they perceived as vital for keeping the Jewish people distinct from their heathen overlords and neighbours.

Their focus was indeed narrow, so narrow that any deviation from the law was perceived as an existential threat – for so it was from their standpoint. To quote W R Bowie, “They peered so narrowly into old books that they never lifted their eyes to look out of the window upon the new and exciting facts which were going by. They knew all about what God had said once, and in their preoccupation with that it did not even occur to them that they had better be listening for what God was saying then.”

So, what about us? I regret that the editors of Rejoice and Sing did not carry over from earlier hymn books George Rawson’s paraphrase of Pastor John Robinson’s address to the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, “We limit not the truth of God to our poor reach of mind, by notions of our day and sect crude, partial and confined … The Lord hath yet more life and truth to break forth from his word.” But at R&S 483 we do have Brian Wren’s, “Glad of tradition, help us to see in all life’s changing where you are leading, where our best efforts should be.”
 
Prayer

Looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,* we pray that our minds, our eyes and our hearts may be open to understand what you, Almighty God, are saying to your Church now; give us the vision and strength we need to be and to do what you would have us be and do; in the power of our Lord Jesus Christ we pray: Amen
 
*Hebrews 12: 2.