A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Epiphany 5C and 6C
The text: Luke 5:12-6:16
Healings, mostly. That’s the bulk of what we miss when the lectionary skips forward a whole chapter. But that isn’t all of it. There are four essential elements in the narrative that we read in chapters five and six.
1. Jesus’s first encounter with “Pharisees and teachers of the law”.
Jesus doesn’t simply heal people in chapter five. He heals people that “shouldn’t” be healed. The healing Jesus does throughout the gospels, and particularly here, is transgressive and his purpose for healing all pricks the consciences of those who want paralysis, for example, to be a punishment.
Let us not be too eager to declare that all Hebrews believed that disease or demon-possession was a result of sin, but we also shouldn’t consider it a fringe belief, either. What Jesus is doing is a direct challenge to this vision of God and he does this soberly.
It is also fair to say that these teachers of the law aren’t exactly cheesed at Jesus for the healing so much as his glib response to them. This resembles the modern parsing of differences between those who protect the powerful for a perceived right to discriminate or when they say something like “it’s about culture, not hate.” What is common here is a policing of behavior and wanting to parse that out from the point.
They accuse Jesus of blaspemy, not because he’s talking about God, but because he’s talking about them — their belief in the paralyzed as sinful people who can’t be forgiven.
2. Jesus calls a tax collector to be a disciple.
If we’re thinking Jesus would shrink from the heat of controversy, then we really don’t know Jesus. And chances are, we have a weak understanding of controversy.
What makes a controversy? We usually think of it from the heat in the midst of it, as a conflict between people or ideas. We then like to label the ideas themselves as “controversial.”
Sometimes we backtrack and try to pin this controversy (which US culture likes to drape with deeply negative connotations) on the person who unsettles the supposed peace, as if it takes two to tango but the one of them joined so reluctantly that their role hardly counts so, it really is just a solo dance.
What makes this moment controversial is not that Jesus has a different view of disease, but that the religious establishment freak out about it. Which is to say that they create the controversy and declare it controversial.
So what then does Jesus do? He ups the ante by hanging with traitors.
Tax collectors were ostracized, not because of deep theological convictions or purity laws. It’s because they are traitors and exploiters of the people. These aren’t others in the same way the poor and marginalized are others. It is a people who choose to make a living off of others, like loan sharks.
In calling one as a disciple and joining him and his friends for dinner, Jesus isn’t condoning their exploitation, but crossing a boundary to speak to them, commune with them.
3. Jesus fixes on tradition.
This is the perfect segue to the big move for Jesus. He has already transgressed tradition about healing and contact with tax collectors. Now he has moved onto much bigger traditions: fasting and the Sabbath.
Jesus is questioned about his practices and he pushes back on them. It is not simply academic, nor is it particular. It seems that they, much like we are, too afflicted with a narrow vision. It is how we can obsess about a moment or a detail or specific argument or outcome. But Jesus is looking at it all. All of it and each of it both — at all times.
The thing about narrowing our focus is that we sometimes need to do this to make things easier. But this has a way of sheering off necessary stuff from the whole that we now can pretend just doesn’t exist. It seems that the approach many of us take to simplifying our problems is mostly ignoring a lot of the problem and memoryholing it so that it never actually existed in the first place. Much like we’ve known about climate change for decades and yet every new discovery we pretend like we’re starting from scratch. If only we’d known about this in the 1970s. Oops!
Jesus’s approach to fasting and Sabbath is to not pretend as if the established traditions contain the whole of meaning. That they, too, are the best conclusions people could make at the time rather than the holy truth itself.
You and I know the experience of the person who cares more about the rule around something than the something itself. And we know, too, the way the adherence to the rule is of far greater emotional weight than, say, acknowledging the pain of the misfortunate or suffering of the sick. Better not do that healing today, Jesus! It isn’t the day for it!
And while we don’t get all that exercised about this example, I think that is because we ourselves are behaving in the ways the teachers of the law feared: we don’t give a rat’s ass about the Sabbath. It isn’t just that we aren’t obeying the law, we are actively opposing the spirit of it, too. We are doing what they feared and not what Jesus taught.
Jesus’s transgression was against established Sabbatical laws in an effort to expand the value of Sabbath teaching. Our own need as modern followers of Jesus is not to establish new laws to follow, but to more fully embody the tradition in ways that more fully embody what the Law tried to contain.
4. Jesus chose twelve and made them apostles.
One of the under-expressed parts of the gospel narrative is how Jesus orders his network of followers and students. We focus on The Twelve and these are the ones to whom Christians usually refer when they refer to The Disciples. But in each of the synoptic gospels, and especially here in Luke, the the disciples number more than the twelve named disciples. And more than that, he doesn’t merely name them disciples, he names these twelve also apostles.
So what is the difference?
- Disciples are students of the master.
- Apostles are those who do the work of the master. Usually after the master is gone.
This is a central character of the gospels themselves. Jesus is the rabbi, teaching a cadre of students. But his students aren’t just students. He makes them practitioners from early on. He wants them to do the work of what they are learning.
In modern education terms, we call this active learning. And we know from psychology and learning development that this is the best way to obtain a skill or learn something: to practice doing it. Language study is a perfect example. Reading grammar books will teach you something about Spanish. Spending time in Mexico will really teach you Spanish — especially when you are doing both at the same time.
One of the secrets to active learning is in what we do after the event. If we take time to reflect, either in writing or with another person. This time of recapping is where the tremendous leaps forward become permanent and we can express what we have actually learned.
That Jesus is ordering his followers this way, intentionally, to set them up for their own work, is about naming this as more than learning the rules and the way things are, the traditions. It is to experience it all — including the transgressions.
May we, too, learn actively and fully.