Matthew 23:1-12 (NRSV)
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.
But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father -- the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
The story is told about a woman and her husband in their golden years sitting together on the back porch of their home watching the sun set. The woman turns to the man and says, “You never nibble on my ear any more.”
The man is kind of taken aback and he blinks and turns to her and says, “Excuse me?”
“You never nibble on my ear any more. You used to do that all the time. It was such a lovely spontaneous thing for you to do. You’d come up behind me and put an arm around me and whisper in my ear that you loved me and then you’d nibble my earlobe real gently. You don’t do
that any more.”
When she finished speaking the man stood up and started heading back into the house. The woman was stunned and she said, “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get my teeth so I can be spontaneous.”
Age has a wonderful way of teaching us about our limits. I often think now about how differently I would have lived as a younger man if I had known what I know now about my body. When I was younger I could shrug off pain and never think twice about it. Sometimes I never even knew I was in pain. It was very easy to bounce back.
In the old days I could eat a double-pepperoni, onion, and anchovy pizza and never think twice about it. Today I can look at such a thing and know what it would cost me to do that and what my night would look like after such a dinner. In the old days I could begin an exercise program and never worry about stretching. Today I have to stretch a lot or pay for it later. I have to hit up Patsy for physical therapy advice.
As I grow a little older I don’t take anything for granted. Hair that used to grow on top of my head now grows in places where hair never used to grow before. My glasses are no longer optional accessories. A visit to the dentist can mean some very bad news.
But I am not complaining. I’m really not. What I know now is that knowing my limits is a gift and I feel sorry for young people who don’t know theirs. Knowing this body I’ve been knocking around in for 41 years makes me appreciate every day how miraculous it is and how vulnerable we are and how easy it is to take for granted this life we’ve been given. When you’re young and seemingly capable of almost anything you set your mind to, it’s easy to forget how tenuous life is and how much we depend on something greater than ourselves for life. It’s easy to forget how much we depend on God.
Which is the reason Jesus has such harsh words for religious leaders. Here in this gospel passage that we have for today, Jesus continues to blast the leaders as he teaches in the Temple in the last week of his earthly life. At the end of Matthew, Jesus is not pulling any punches. He knows the end is coming. He knows he needs to leave some guidelines for his disciples and the rest of his followers as they start to build a new community. He knows they need to know who they are and they need to know their limits.
Moses had given the people the Law. Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Law and for centuries since that time the people of Israel had been trying to follow the Law, listening for what God wanted and what God forbade. The religious teachers had developed an elaborate code for understanding just what it was that God wanted the people to do.
Jesus recognized that what they were attempting was noble. It was good for the people to know their limits. “Do whatever the scribes and the Pharisees teach you,” Jesus says because they sit on the seat of Moses. “But whatever you do, don’t do as they do.” In other words Jesus was saying, “Do as they say but not as they do.” Because the leaders had become intoxicated with their own power. Worst of all they had converted the law into a burden for other people to bear so that they could be freed from serving the community. They enjoyed the social respectability, the way they were treated in the market, the honorary titles they were called. They really didn’t care for the heart of the teaching.
But Jesus knew that something more was needed. The Law was not intended to be a burden that oppressed people with ridiculous regulations. The Law was meant to free people to be whom God intended them to be. The Law was meant to remind us of our limits, to remind us of our dependence on God and to tell us that God’s intentions for us are not dominance and prestige but membership in a community that makes us whole.
So when Jesus told his disciples how they were to live, the emphasis was on respecting their limits, humbling themselves and serving one another. This was the way a healing community was to be built.
Martin Luther knew something about this. Luther, you may remember, was the 16th century church reformer who tacked up a list of 95 points for reform on the church door in Wittenburg, Germany on October 31, 1519. We remember that day tomorrow as Reformation Day.
Luther was a tormented and haunted man. As a young monk he could not escape the feeling that he was doomed for all eternity because of the effects of his sin. He was so aware of how little merit he had to offer God and so convinced of how sinful he was that he could only talk about salvation as something in the abstract for other people and not for him. He knew his limits and they tormented him.
Of course, Luther came to a time of great conversion. He became convinced of the possibility of God’s grace offered through faith. In Christ he saw that God had come to offer him a righteousness and a wholeness he could not find on his own. Luther came to know salvation in Christ and to know it for him personally.
But Luther never stopped thinking of himself as a sinner. He never wanted to get over being a sinner, because for him it was a reminder of who he was before God. In knowing his limits he could never be deceived into thinking that he was anything less than a debtor to God’s grace. Salvation did not come to the healthy, it came to the wounded.
He used the story of the Good Samaritan to describe the condition of the Christian: “It is like the case of a man who is ill, who trusts the doctor who promises him a certain recovery and in the meantime obeys the doctor’s instructions, abstaining from what has been forbidden to him, in the hope of the promised recovery, so that he does not do anything to hinder this promised recovery...Now this man who is ill, is he healthy? The fact is that he is a man who is both ill and healthy at the same time. As a matter of fact, he is ill; but he is healthy on account of the certain promise of the doctor, who he trusts and who reckons him as healthy already, because he is sure that he will cure him. Indeed he has already begun to cure him, and no longer regards him as having a terminal illness. In the same way, our Samaritan, Christ, has brought this ill man to the inn to be cared for, and has begun to cure him, having promised him the most certain cure leading to eternal life...Now is this man perfectly righteous? No. But he is at one and the same time a sinner and a righteous person. He is a sinner in fact, but a righteous person by the sure reckoning and promise of God that he will continue to deliver him from sin until he has completely cured him. And so he is totally healthy in hope, but a sinner in fact. He has the beginning of righteousness, and so always continues more and more to seek it, while realising that he is always unrighteous.”
Healing the soul, like healing the body, takes a recognition that we are at the end of our rope, we are at the end of our capabilities and capacities, and trusting that even so we are in the care of the Great Physician. We are in God’s hands. It is the purpose of the scriptures to tell us that’s where we are. It is the purpose of this community to remind one another that that’s who we are. We are all followers of Jesus, made whole by his wounds, “by his stripes you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24). And when we find ourselves wounded and separated from God and from ourselves, we have a place to take those pains. When we find ourselves oppressed by limits we haven’t had to deal with before, we have a place to take those pains. When we find ourselves put down and put out, ground down and used up, overworked and overworried -- in every situation, in every weakness, in every trial and each tribulation, we have a place to take those pains and that is to Jesus. To Jesus, who knows our pain because he walked this valley…who knows our limits because he took our flesh…who knows our potential because he was there at our creation…who knows our salvation because he is our God.
Healing, you see…coming to the end of our rope and finding God…is not just a sidelight to the Christian mission…it’s not just something that Jesus and the apostles did that we now look back on with embarrassment…its not just an archaic relic of the early days of the Christian Church…healing is not just a small, forgotten piece of what Christianity is all about…it is the point of Christianity. It’s why Luther and John Wesley and so many Christians through the centuries have seen a direct relation between the healing of our bodies and the healing of our souls and have described our salvation in just that way - as healing.
When I was serving two churches on the Charlottesville District, the district clergy took a retreat together at Richmond Hill, an ecumenical center on Church Hill in Richmond. The first day of the two-day retreat was supposed to be a silent retreat. Well, that was disastrous. Have you ever tried to get a group of clergy to be silent for any length of time? It’s not easy and it proved impossible, something that was rather annoying to me.
After dinner that night, as the official period of silence came to an end, I was on the clean-up crew with some of the regular residents of the Richmond Hill Community. One of them was a homeless woman who was only staying with them temporarily while she found more permanent housing. We were talking as we wiped down the tables together in the dining hall and she startled me by saying, “You need healing.”
It was not anything that I would have said. On the surface I felt that things were going well. Physically I felt well. I was a new father at the time and I was thrilled with my children and with my work. But I was also running past my idealism about ministry. I was running into some roadblocks in the church and in my own abilities and wasn’t sure how to address them. I wouldn’t have said it the way this woman said it, but, yes, I needed healing.
The next morning at breakfast she came up to me and gave me this bottle of olive oil that she had purchased with food stamps. “You need this,” she said, “and you need to share it with your congregation. Many people need healing.”
I never saw her again but I kept the bottle and in a few weeks time I invited my congregations to share in a service of healing, something that became a 5th Sunday tradition in our churches. Saying prayers with our brothers and sisters who need healing, lifting up names in prayer of those we know need healing and restoration, anointing one another with oil and the sign of Christ’s cross -- when we do these things we are only doing what the scriptures commanded us to do. James says, “Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.” [James 5:14-15].
Knowing your limits is a very good thing. It’s not a sign of growing old - it’s a sign of growing wise, recognizing that the mystery of God’s love and power is something we cannot comprehend and can only ignore at a terrible cost. At the end of our rope there is a healing place where we can meet the God who has conquered evil and the grave and whose desire is to bring us wholeness and to bring us home.
There’s nothing magic about this oil. There’s nothing magic about healing. But there’s something powerful about God and you are invited to meet God here. Thanks be to God.
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