Homilies & Thoughts

Our translator here writes, “They were observing him carefully.” But the word used here really means that they were observing him with suspicion. They watched closely to see whether he would make a mistake or do something wrong.

It is important that we hear it that way because, fundamentally, this Gospel contrasts two different gazes. There is the gaze of the crowd, which is one of suspicion. And then there is the gaze of Christ, which seems to be the gaze of a father looking at his son. That is, in a sense, how he speaks of this man with dropsy: who of you would not rescue your child if he fell into a pit, even on the Sabbath? Christ looks at him like a son. And these ways of gazing affect the outcome.

We are to love God and love our neighbor. Yet we use this word love in so many different ways. If we are to understand what the Lord commands, then we have to understand what real love looks like. And our truest teacher is God himself. So let us look at how God loves.

He created us in paradise and gave us a single command. We broke it. Yet even when he cast us out of that earthly paradise, he did not abandon our first parents. He gave them a promise: he would restore us and raise us up.

The Lord criticizes the crowds because they know how to read the signs in the weather, but they do not understand the moment in which they are standing. God himself, the Messiah they claim to have longed for, is now in their midst, and they do not recognize him. Their minds are consumed by natural things that matter to them. Whether it will rain or be hot determines how their day will go, how their crops will fare, and how their animals will be. These are the things that occupy their attention.

The Lord says he has come to set the earth on fire. He has come to bring about change in the world through the fire of the Holy Spirit, who should be remaking the world. As Christians, we should have some influence on the world, bringing about the changes Christ asks of us.

And yet, in day-to-day life, it often seems that the world has more influence on us. Think about your own speech throughout the day. Are you more likely to quote a politician, a commentator on the news, someone from the secular world, or Christ himself?

Sometimes we hear this phrase in secular law: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” If you break a law, you can still be punished for it, even if you didn’t know it was illegal. That’s a common principle because otherwise anyone could claim ignorance. And proving what somebody knows is truly challenging for us. So we have to have that rule.

But you’ll notice that God deals with us differently. In today’s Gospel, ignorance is, to a degree, an excuse. The servant who knows his master’s will and does not do it is beaten severely. The one who does not know his master’s will, but still does something deserving of a severe beating, is beaten only lightly. Now, both are punished. Neither gets away without consequences. But the punishment is not the same, because God takes account of what the servant knew.

Notice that these servants are both active and passive. They passively sit and wait. They’re not out in the streets looking for their master to come back. They sit at home and wait. But they’re also active because they are ready. They’re dressed, and their lamps are lit. That detail is important because it tells us what the spiritual life should look like. It has both an active and a passive component.

The Pharisees went to entrap Jesus. They disagreed with him, but they did not come to listen. They were not trying to understand what he had to say. They were not even looking for an honest conversation about their disagreement. They had already decided he was wrong. Now they wanted a reason to silence him, a reason to kill him.

And that decision closed them off to the very thing they needed to hear. The Lord gave them an answer worth thinking about, an answer that could have changed their relationship to the systems of power in their world. But they could not receive it. Their minds and hearts were closed because they had come only to trap him.

“There’s nothing concealed that will not be revealed.”

I remember a lesson they taught us in seminary as they prepared us for life as priests: while you have a right to a private life, you do not have a right to a secret life. As people with a public role, we have to remember that distinction. Not everything about our lives needs to be known by everyone, but we cannot build a secret, alternative life.

“Woe to you, scholars of the law! You have taken away the key of knowledge.” That is a surprising thing to hear, because the scholars of the law are the experts in the law. If you asked them what their goal was, they would have said it was to hand on knowledge: the correct knowledge and understanding of how to live out the law. And yet the Lord charges them with taking away the key.

I like it when this reading comes up, because it’s an unusual moment for the Lord. This scholar comes up to him and says, “Lord, don’t you realize that you’re insulting me too?” And Jesus says, “Yes, I do realize that. And in fact, I have more insults for you.”

But what Jesus says to him is intriguing: “You scholars of the law impose burdens that are hard to carry, but you don’t lift a finger to help.”

In English, we have this term WASP: a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And whatever else it means, one of its connotations is this kind of merger of religion and culture.

When you hear the term, you picture someone who dresses a certain way, has a particular set of manners, and whose life looks like a particular American ideal. It’s the kind of person for whom using the wrong fork for your salad is probably an equal sin to breaking the commandments. Everything gets merged together.

This Gospel always gets to me at a deep level because I am a messy person. I do not typically have a room that is well swept and put in order. But everyone, even messy people, likes a clean room.

When everything is cleaned up and nicely ordered, and you step into it for the first time, it feels wonderful. It feels freeing. But then you have to keep it that way. And that is where I always fail.