THEY WATCHED HIM

A SERMON FOR THE 16th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

In today’s Gospel, we read how Our Blessed Lord heals a man suffering from dropsy—on the Sabbath! It reinforces a lesson we have often heard, that it is far far more important to observe the spirit of the law than the letter of the law.

Our Lord has been invited to someone’s house for dinner. Not just anyone’s house, certainly not a friend’s house where he could relax and just sit down and enjoy a good meal in good company. He has been invited to the home of one of the chief Pharisees. Now why do you suppose one of these chief Pharisees had invited Jesus to dinner? They hated him. And he wasn’t too fond of them either, calling them hypocrites and vipers, whited sepulchers and other names. No doubt they did a lot of whining about calumny and detraction, and their reputations as priests and great men. And yet they invited him to dinner. Was this simply to try and make up with Our Lord, to try and convince him that they weren’t as bad as he made them out to be? Or was it for some far more devious reason? A hidden agenda by which they could expose Our Lord either as a fraud and a charlatan, or failing that, as one who had contempt for the sacred Jewish law…

Note carefully the phrase at the beginning of the Gospel: “And it came to pass, as Jesus went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the Sabbath day, THAT THEY WATCHED HIM.”

They were watching him. Watching very carefully to see what he would do. And lo and behold, there “just happened” to be a man there who “just happened” to have the dropsy.  He "just happened to need healing. Healing? Ah yes, but it was the Sabbath day...

As Catholics, many of us are not aware to what lengths practicing Jews will go, even today, to avoid any kind of manual work on the Sabbath. You may be familiar with the neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York, known as Williamsburg. This area is still ethnically almost entirely Jewish—Orthodox Jewish. From sunset on Friday night (the eve of the Sabbath) until sunset the following day, the streets of Williamsburg are quiet. The Jews are not allowed to drive a car, or turn on a light switch, or cook a meal. Many of these Jews hire Irish girls to come to their home on the Shabbat, to cook for them. These girls are paid even to flush their toilets for them, because to do so themselves would be to break the Sabbath.

And so now Our Lord is faced with this dilemma. If he does not heal the man with the dropsy, they will label him a fraud and say he can’t heal the sick, or worse yet, that he doesn't have compassion for the sick. If he does heal the man, they will label him not a fraud but a criminal, one who has broken the Sabbath, broken the sacred Jewish law. And you can be assured that the Pharisees were watching Our Lord very carefully to see what he would do. Nothing would give them greater pleasure than to quote the words of God from the Book of Esdras where he reprimanded his people, saying: “What is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the Sabbath Day?” 

Whether the man with the dropsy was a plant or not, we do not know, the Gospel doesn’t say, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is how Our Lord resolves the dilemma. There is no ambiguity about what he does next. He heals the man. Sabbath or no Sabbath, he heals him.

So… did Our Lord profane the Sabbath Day? Let us remind ourselves once more that there is a big difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” And this is what Our Lord points out to the Pharisees, who of course, are too hard-hearted and thick-headed to even listen. They just chalk it up as another reason why they need to get rid of this man.  Our attitude towards this healing on the Sabbath should not reflect this hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who claimed that Our Lord was contemptuous of the law. Yes, there is a law. And yes, we must obey it. But we must obey the spirit and not the letter of the law, never failing to place the law of charity above the merely disciplinary law of attending Mass.  We cannot leave a sick relative to fend for himself so that we can go to church and forget about him.  But unless we have such a good reason as this, our very first obligation should be to attend Mass. If we are sick ourselves, or if there’s no traditional Mass within a reasonable distance, or if our job obliges us to work on Sunday morning (law enforcement officers, medical professionals, and so on) then there is no sin if you can't attend Mass.  But if we have no such reasonable pretext to prevent us from attending, “remember”, says the Third Commandment, “rememberto keep holy the Lord’s day by going to Mass.  Otherwise you jeopardize your very salvation by committing the MORTAL sin of omitting to obey this commandment of God.  It is so important, that God adds the word “Remember” at the beginning: Remember, that thou keep holy the Sabbath of the Lord.” Remember, don’t forget, it’s important to do this.

Remember to do what? Not drive a car? Not switch on a light or flush a toilet? No, for these things belong to the Jewish law, the Torah, and that law is the law of the OLD covenant. Our Lord became Man to die on the Cross, to redeem us, to open the gates of heaven, to fulfill this OLD law and give us instead a NEW law, a law of grace, where we must above all “love God with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, and our whole strength.” And if we love God, we will keep his commandments—including the Third.

In the Old Testament, the Sabbath of the Lord was observed on the last day of the week. This, of course, was because God rested after the six days of creation. What is less well known is that it was on the seventh day of the week that Israel was led out of the land of Egypt, out of bondage. It was their day of redemption, and every Saturday was a solemn commemoration also of that event. But then Our Lord came to fulfill the old law and give us a new covenant. He came to fulfill the prophecies and symbols of the old testament. The deliverance of Israel from the land of Egypt was merely a foreshadowing of the deliverance of God’s children from sin. And to commemorate this new, this true deliverance, the Apostles, instructed by Our Lord and guided by the Holy Ghost, substituted the first day of the week for the last, they replaced Saturday as the Sabbath with Sunday. After all, it was on a Sunday that Christ freed us from the bondage of Satan, when by his glorious Resurrection he triumphed over Satan and hell, and it was again on Sunday that he sent the Holy Ghost upon the Church, thus completing the great work of his new creation.

We can look at it another way too. The Jews were the SERVANTS OF GOD. The servant is entitled to rest on the last day of the week after he has worked every other day in the sweat of his brow. We Christians, however, are the CHILDREN OF GOD. We place God our Father before ourselves, and we seek first the kingdom of God, giving him the first day of the week.

So howshould we keep holy the Lord’s day? It is important to remember that it is NOT enough simply not to commit the sin of not attending Mass on this day, nor to profane the Sabbath with evil deeds or words or thoughts. Nor is it enough simply to abstain from servile work. These things are important, it is true, but we must not simply OMIT doing evil, we are expected moreover, to something good. We must “keep holy” the Lord’s Day. Sanctify the day. That doesn’t mean it’s a sin to play games, to water your plants, to read the newspaper or do a crossword puzzle. But it does mean that we should make a conscious effort to make the day different from all other days of the week—not only by avoiding unnecessary manual labour, shopping, gardening, and so on, but by positively keeping in mind that “this is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad therein.” Use your imagination to come up with ways of honoring God by showing your love for him and for your neighbor. Maybe by visiting a sick friend or an elderly neighbor, by doing an extra good deed for your mother, by a small act of penance, or a few extra prayers.

If in doubt as to how to keep Sunday holy, for once do what the Pharisees did—they watched our Lord.  We should watch him too, observing how he placed the spirit of the law before the letter, and how the love he had for his Father and his neighbor was the paramount motivation for his actions.  May our own love for God and neighbor determine how we keep every day of the week, but in particular this holy day of Sunday.  If we watch our loving Savior, we cannot fail to know exactly how to make our every Sunday a day of praise for God and sanctification for our souls.