The priority of the donkey – 23 August 2013

^...But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, 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.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! 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 13:14-16] 

The two ends of religion, any religion, confront each other in this incident.  Jesus heals a woman whose condition, whatever it was – I was raised never to ask a lady what was the matter with her – had her bent double for 18 years.  But Jesus does this on the Sabbath Day.  The leader of the synagogue sees only an offence against the law of the Sabbath.  And he is quite reasonable – there are six days, after all, to line up for healing, so why do it on the Sabbath?  Jesus seems not to mind starting a fight.  He seems actually quite angry.  This is hypocrisy, he says -- these good people never hesitate to lead their ox or donkey out to water on the Sabbath Day.  Evidently some people assume the needs of the ox or the donkey trump the needs of the woman, who of course is supposed to be mainly invisible anyway.    

This debate is without resolution.  Centuries before the time of Jesus, as we read in the Hebrew scriptures, the prophets are confronting the legalists.  Each thinks the other is dangerous for healthy religion.   What God requires, in the words of the Prophet Micah, is that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly – not that we fulfil some quota of religious observances or moral protocols.  God does not want our burnt offerings if they are not from changed, merciful, loving hearts.  Isaiah 58, for instance, sets it out in pungent prophetic prose.

Let’s always honour the legalists for what they are trying to protect -- order, dignity and decency, their perception of truth.  Jesus’s argument against them was not that they had rules, but that eventually they started giving room to hypocrisy and injustice.  People are prior to the rules.  If the donkey’s needs, rightly, can be attended to on the Sabbath, why can’t the woman’s?  Yes, Jesus is indignant, not only because they would have denied the woman healing because it was the Sabbath, but also because she was a woman and not a man or an animal.  It reminds me of the priority for hot bath water in 18^th century English homes – first the men, then the dogs, then the women, then the servants.  A jolly Saturday bath night when everything was as it should be.  But Jesus dares a special space for women in his society and culture.  It is part of healthy spiritual understanding and practice for those of us who follow his way.   It is not the rules that set life the right way up, but what the Dalai Lama calls the Good Heart.  Our religions meet at their deepest truths.