Image: Christ healing the man with a withered hand, Byzantine mosaic.
‘Stretch out your hand’
Andrew Collis
Ordinary Sunday 9, Year B
Psalm 81; 2 Corinthians 4:5-12; Mark 2:23 – 3:6
Our icon for today is a Byzantine mosaic which depicts Jesus healing a person with a withered hand. “Stretch out your hand,” says Jesus.
Our gospel reading is about “religious” people who want to trick Jesus into failing a test of faithfulness to the law. They use the law to trap and to harm, and it makes Jesus sad and angry.
We can grasp the story’s meaning on the basis of Jesus’ words alone:
“The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. That is why the Chosen One is ruler even of the Sabbath.”
“Stand and come up front!”
“Is it permitted to do a good deed on the Sabbath – or an evil one? To preserve life or to destroy it?”
“Stretch out your hand.”
A person with a “withered hand” is healed. A person is restored – to hope and life …
There have always been provisions in Torah for saving life on the Sabbath. Jesus is claiming, against a group of fundamentalists, that restoration of health is an urgent and religious matter.
“Present Sabbath observance should not be a legal straitjacket, but a joyful foretaste of kingdom rest,” writes one commentator (Brendan Byrne SJ). “In the person of Jesus the pledge of human wholeness associated with the kingdom is already becoming effective. To have postponed the cure to another day would be to deny its onset.”
“Imagination is the creative power in us to complete the seventh day of Creation, which God left empty so that we would be free to co-create the kingdom with God” (Richard Kearney).
“Never see an evil and do nothing about it,” Mary MacKillop (St Mary of the Cross) reportedly advised her sisters.
An interpretation of the passage may well stop there. It is a fitting place to rest.
Is there a resonant word for you? A word about reconciliation? Stretch out your hand … Stretch out … Learning, exercise … Offer your hand in friendship … Risk an exchange of peace … Respect … Respectful touch … Manual labour … Writing, drawing, painting … Chance your arm …
We might venture a little further, inquiring as to the Sabbath itself. What can it mean for us, this joyful foretaste of kin(g)dom rest? Why is it commanded of us (and not given in the mode of invitation or suggestion)?
It is helpful to distinguish between Sabbath as vacation, as a day off or day of forced quiet or devotion, and Sabbath as a day of delight for both body and spirit.
A Sabbath festival celebrates God’s re-creative, redemptive love by way of sensual glory and beauty, ritual, communal feasting, and playfulness (Dan B. Allender).
Sabbatical time fosters delight in creation (Country/Ngura), an experience of God’s delight in us.
What makes Sabbath observance crucial to good life together in the world? What do you think?
I came across this word from Corita Kent during the week. Sr Corita is talking about work … and something else. I think it’s apt in the context of terrifying wars, genocidal hatred … wounded desires for meaning and wholeness:
“Peace will not be made for us by others – it will not be given to us by others. We must make it ourselves, and it is very hard work and very dirty work. If we make it well, we are artists. If we don’t, it means the end. What else matters then – except to be artists?” (1982).
The Apostle Paul writes: “We carry about in our bodies the death of Jesus [by which I think he means the pain, the experience of rejection and violence, as well as sadness, anger, exhaustion], so that in our bodies the life of Jesus [a delight in love] may also be revealed” (2 Cor. 4:10-11). Amen.
