That Parable at Lenny’s

This is the second Sunday in a row that the Gospel lesson features a healing, and not just any healing, but a healing done by Jesus on—what else?—the Sabbath day.



Last Sunday we heard of the woman who had, Luke tells us, “a spirit of infirmity” for 18 years; she could not stand straight. Jesus healed her immediately. There were those who objected to this healing on the grounds that it was work, and work ought not to be done on the Sabbath. After all, the law says, “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates.” Healing, they argued, is work; ergo, no healing on the Sabbath.

Jesus did not challenge God’s law, but their interpretation of it. He asked them, on the Sabbath do you untie your beasts and lead them to water? Yes of course, and even your beasts of burden enjoy their Sabbath rest, as the law requires. Why then should not this daughter of Abraham be released from Satan’s yoke of affliction on this, the day on which God himself rested?

In another place, Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, God established the law of the Sabbath so that we human beings could set aside our toil one day out of seven, in order to enter the rest of the One in whose image we were created.

I know it’s dangerous to “get political” in a sermon, but I do feel I have to say something about this. As our society has abandoned Holy Scripture and the Ten Commandments as a “norming norm,” the sabbath rest has become a luxury for the well-to-do. It’s Labor Day weekend, when government workers at least still get the day off to remember the humane victories of the labor movement, such as, for instance, the 40-hour week, the weekend (a secular Sabbath), and the family wage. Yet those hard-won protections have largely evaporated in today’s world of 24x7 work. Even now, on a Sunday morning, retail and restaurant workers have begun their shifts, and delivery vehicles ply our neighborhood streets. Wouldn’t it be better, more humane, to give them all the day off, or at very least, the morning? That Amazon package could wait a few hours—it really could!

I’ve always been personally troubled by that venerable American tradition practiced even in the most religious parts of our nation, the tradition of going out to eat after church. It seems to me to be founded on the presumption that Sunday churchgoing is an activity of the leisured classes, while service workers are expected to be at their posts. Yet why shouldn’t we go out to eat on other days of the week and on Sundays entertain one another in our homes? Or perhaps, even more radically, on Sundays we could seek opportunities to minister to those who ordinarily wait on us. But more on hospitality anon.

As the fine old lady said when the minister turned his attention to the sin of gossip, “He’s quit preaching, now he’s meddling!” I won’t apologize for my political opinions, but neither will I offer any excuse for my own hypocrisy in the many times I’ve shopped or dined out on a Sunday. I’m reaching for more of a cultural observation and a challenge, which I think is the real challenge of applying this commandment of Sabbath-keeping in an authentically Christian way: How ought we to use the freedom we have as Christians, not merely to enjoy ourselves, but to help others also enjoy the freedom and rest of Christ’s Kingdom? We often forget that the message Moses brought to Pharaoh was not simply a message of deliverance from slavery, “let my people go”; it was a message about God’s sabbath rest, a rest that is necessary for God’s people to realize their identity. “Let my people go, that they may serve me.”

The sabbath is not simply a day for acts of individual piety (for those so inclined). It is, in Jesus’s teaching, a day for social justice, for liberation, for inviting our fellow man and all of creation to share the freedom and the rest promised to God’s people, and by extension, to all of creation.

Now the hospital does not close on Sunday, nor do even our volunteer firefighters fail to answer calls on the Lord’s Day. This again is a right application of the principle. The Sabbath is not a day to shirk our obligations to others or to avoid helping those in need. Rather, because we are free in Christ, we may use our Christian freedom, especially on this day, to do good.

With that somewhat lengthy preamble, we have the context necessary to understand what is happening in today’s Gospel lesson. Again, it takes place on the Sabbath. This time the location is a dinner to which Jesus and presumably many others, anybody who was anybody in this town or village, was invited.

Here Jesus makes himself—how else can we put this?—the “skunk at the garden party,” the disruptive and ultimately unwelcome visitor, embarrassing the other guests and even his host.

It reminds me of nothing so much as that tour-de-force essay of Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” (New York magazine, June 8, 1970) reflecting on the infamous occasion when Leonard Bernstein and his wife hosted Black Panther activists at a soiree:

“Lenny is a short, trim man, and yet he always seems tall. It is his head. He has a noble head, with a face that is at once sensitive and rugged, and a full stand of iron-gray hair, with sideburns, all set off nicely by the Chinese yellow of the room. His success radiates from his eyes and his smile with a charm that illustrates Lord Jersey’s adage that ‘contrary to what the Methodists tell us, money and success are good for the soul.’ Lenny may be 51, but he is still the Wunderkind of American music. Everyone says so. . . . How natural that he should stand here in his own home radiating the charm and grace that make him an easy host for leaders of the oppressed. How ironic that the next hour should prove so shattering for this egregio maestro!”

I wonder how the Pharisee who invited Jesus to dinner thought the evening would go. Surely he did not expect this frontal assault on his social position and generous hospitality. Like the Panthers, Jesus shamelessly and even tastelessly takes advantage, turning the entire occasion into a living parable, skewering the pretenses of the host and his guests and reducing them to dumbfounded foils and object lessons at their own expense—if, we may hope, also for their own good.

The first set piece is of course this healing of the man with dropsy, which we usually today call “edema,” a chronic swelling caused by fluid retention, itself often a symptom of other serious health conditions. It’s a problem that even with modern medicine can be difficult to cure. (I’m not an expert, I just looked it up.) Now, how did this invalid get there? Did he just show up? Was he invited? Was the whole thing an attempt to set Jesus up, to see what he would do? Did the people doubt whether he could heal this man, or were they hoping Jesus would seem to violate the Sabbath by performing the miracle? Nobody says anything. But they’re watching. Before he ever says or does anything, Jesus is under suspicion, under surveillance.

Jesus has to clear his throat and identify the elephant in the room himself. The host and others gathered are Pharisees, experts in the law. So Jesus invites them to offer a legal opinion. “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” Nobody is willing to commit himself one way or another. No one will answer him yes or no, or even propose a distinction or clarification. Apparently the memo has gone out: do not engage with this man. So Jesus, when he sees that nobody will answer him, according to the scriptures, “he took [the man] and healed him and let him go.” The miracle of healing itself is so ordinary to Luke the Evangelist that it hardly rates a mention.

But Jesus isn’t done. After the healed man has left, Jesus poses a second, rhetorical question to the cowardly legal experts, or perhaps to the assembly in general. “Which of you, having a son, or an ox, who has fallen into a well, will not immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day?” Again, no response. How could they respond, except to agree with Jesus that healing on the Sabbath does not necessarily violate the Law and that it is meet and right that God’s anointed, the Messiah, should do such things!

The second episode follows immediately on the first. Jesus observes the behavior of the guests, jockeying for the best seats, the seats closest to the head table and thus reflective of status and proximity to wealth and power. He then offer some advice that sounds very much like what we heard in that very short reading in Proverbs. “It is better to be told ‘Come up here,’ than to be put lower in the presence of the prince.” Good standard advice for the ambitious but wise young person. Don’t put yourself forward, let others recognize you, etc. The kind of advice your mom would give you.

Or is it? Remember that all of Jesus’s parables have to do with the kingdom of God. Notice the scenario Jesus offers: “a marriage feast.” For those who have ears to hear, he is not speaking of an earthly social occasion, but of the Supper of the Lamb at the end of days, the feast that has even now begun in the heavenly realm, the feast to which, in a few minutes, we will spiritually ascend and participate in as we celebrate of the Holy Eucharist.

Well then, if this is a parable of the Kingdom, we should take the host to be Jesus himself, who said that in his kingdom “many who are first will be last, and the last first.” The social order and hierarchies and ranks of the kingdom of God are not like ours. It seems that money and success are not good for the soul after all. Those who are wealthy and powerful on earth had best in fact start practicing humility and self-abasement, because they’re going to need it if they hope to be happy in God’s kingdom.

Finally, Jesus tells another parable that seems to be aimed at his host. “When you give a dinner or a banquet”—again, this sounds like it’s going to be more standard, proverbial type of advice. But Jesus quickly veers into the unexpected: “. . . do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid.” Oh no! Wouldn’t want to be repaid now, would we? Really, what is he talking about? Of course we want to be in good with our rich friends, of course we want to be repaid, isn’t that what building social capital is all about? But again, this is a parable of the upside-down Kingdom of God. What Jesus is showing us is that we have the opportunity even in this life to begin living as if we are already in his kingdom. The Kingdom of God is not some far-off place and time. The Kingdom is here, the kingdom is now! And what we do here and now does indeed have an impact upon our future standing in the world to come, as Jesus says: “You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

Here, I think we may return to the theme with which I began this sermon. Jesus says, “When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” I spoke of how God’s sabbath rest cannot be kept to ourselves but must be shared with others. Jesus himself is the exemplar of this way of life. In his earthly ministry, he did not seek the attention of the rich and well-regarded, or the powerful and influential. He addressed himself to those who had none of these advantages, who brought him only their need. And he did for them more than they ever thought he could.

This is how we too must approach our Savior. We do not come bearing gifts, hoping to be accepted for our good works, or our excellent character, or our standing in the world. We come to him simply because he offers in abundance all that we need and lack in ourselves: pardon for sinners, healing for the sick, strength for the faint of heart, peace for the dying. We acknowledge ourselves poor, maimed, lame, and blind, yet he is our life and our good portion, now and in the age to come.