Corrupt Religion

In Luke 13:10-16 we have an account of Jesus healing a woman on the sabbath in a synagogue. Predictably, the leader of the synagogue was displeased, but he chastised the crowd rather than Jesus.

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” Luke 13:14

The synagogue leader emphasized to the woman and anyone else who might have an illness that this is not the time to be healed. The sabbath is a day for worshiping God, saying prayers, reading scripture, but not a day for the “work” of being cured. Notice Jesus’ twofold response.

But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” Luke 13:15-16

First, Jesus points out that such thinking acknowledges more readily the needs of animals than people. In showing more care for animals than for people, this perverse perspective denies the place of humans, because they bear the image of God, in the created order. The synagogue laws had made sabbath-keeping a repudiation of God’s creative work. The so-called sacred day of rest desecrates the order established in the six days of creation. How can people honor God on the seventh day, when repudiating the work from which he was said to rest? Jesus’ argument is devastating and pointed, but he is not finished.

Next, Jesus claims that he himself is engaged in spiritual warfare, the conflict between light and darkness, between God and Satan. He declares that Satan has bound this woman. Shockingly, if we hear the implication of what Jesus is saying, the synagogue rules forbid anyone from undoing Satan’s work because it is the sabbath! So corrupt had the observance of the sabbath become, and the popular understanding of piety, that those seeking to be righteous were essentially aiding and abetting the work of Satan! God’s holy sabbath was not a time to oppose evil or rescue those oppressed by Satan, but a day for them to stay under the power of darkness. If the sabbath was not a day to oppose Satan and free those oppressed by evil, what does that say about the God who is worshiped on this day? Jesus has no doubt about the God he worships, the God whose day this is, and the necessity to oppose evil on this sacred day.

Do I really need to draw the parallels for the church? Are we, as churches, by and large that different from the synagogues of Jesus’ day? Do our norms of religious propriety make us more reflective of the God we claim to worship than the synagogue laws? Too often, I fear we are not.

Far too often the church has failed to uphold the truth that all people are created in the image of God. I am not talking about the “created equal” language of our nation’s founding document. Equality is a poor substitute for the biblical language of bearing God’s image. Even if we practiced a belief that all men are created equal, we would not be living according to the faith spoken of in scripture. Having inalienable rights is not the same as being image-bearers of God. If we do not honor God’s image in one another can we claim to honor God?

To our collective shame, the powers of darkness have too readily taken hold in the church so that religious people have often failed to see and oppose the works of Satan. Christians have not always answered in the affirmative the question posed by Jesus, “Ought not this person bound by Satan be set free?”