Cultivating Christ-like Character, part 3:

WALKING IN INTEGRITY AND LOVING THE TRUTH

Mark 3:1-6

March 22, 2009 ~ Rev. Janet Robertson Duggins

Jesus must have known that he was walking into a touchy situation at that synagogue. He must have known that everyone was watching him, to see what he would do.

This is almost at the very beginning of his ministry but Jesus has already become known as a rather unconventional character, for a preacher and teacher. By the end of the second chapter of Mark, he’s been criticized for having the audacity to forgive sins, for sitting down to a meal with “sinners,” for eating and drinking instead of fasting a lot like other “religious” folk, and for letting his disciples pick some grain to eat on the Sabbath. But the word has also gotten around that people are flocking to hear him teach and tell stories. And of course the news that he has healed people has spread like wildfire.

None of that went down too well with the leaders of the religious community, who didn’t approve of independent, outspoken preachers who might stir up controversy. Some people that day were probably watching to see what Jesus would do simply out of curiosity. But there’s not much doubt that some were waiting for him to slip up, and give them a reason to bring him down.

In fact, some who have studied this story think he was set up, that the man with the crippled hand was deliberately planted in Jesus’ path to force a confrontation over the proper way to honor the Sabbath.

It’s probably hard for us to grasp the extent to which this puts Jesus in a tough position: we simply don’t have a concept of Sabbath like the Jews of Jesus’ time had. It seems like so much legalism to us, but for them Sabbath was at the very core of their faith. It was about honoring God. All work of any kind was to be set aside for a day – to remember that everything really comes to us not through human efforts but from God’s creation. The practice of Sabbath was something that really set them apart from other people and other faith traditions. It had to do with their identity as a community (very important in a country occupied by a foreign power.) The many rules that developed around it were expressions of their desire to keep the Sabbath tradition as faithfully as possible. So anybody who seemed to flout that tradition was regarded as suspect. Think about how we today react to someone who seems unpatriotic, or scornful toward family life, or dismissive of people of faith. That’s kind of the position Jesus was in.

But already in his ministry, he’s established a pattern of caring and healing. If he doesn’t heal this man, who’s right in front of him and obviously in need of healing, he will be compromising that mission of healing and caring. But if he DOES heal him - healing would be considered work - he will be seen as showing disrespect for the Sabbath and for the cherished faith traditions of his people.

Didn’t you wonder when you heard this story whether Jesus couldn’t just have quietly waited to heal the man the next day, or even later when there weren’t so many people around? I did. I mean, surely a few hours or a half-a-day couldn’t have made much difference to the man. Why not just quietly go in and enjoy a nice worship service, not offend or anger anyone, keep controversy outside the place of worship… and just focus on the reaching out and healing at another time? Surely Jesus could have managed to satisfy everybody here. Why create the controversy, anyway?

Incredible as it may seem to us, Jesus just doesn’t seem that interested in avoiding controversy.

I’m not sure that it’s true either, as some people suggest, that Jesus was a rabble-rouser, whose goal all along was to shake things up and challenge the status quo in every possible way.

The point is that something more important than the threat of controversy is at stake here. The story centers on the clash between two ways of understanding what it means to be a faithful believer: one seeing faithfulness defined by rules and practices and behavior – external, measureable things – and the other, Jesus, who wants to talk about the state of the heart.

Jesus is not rejecting the idea of the Sabbath – the rhythm of regular rest from work and renewal through time with God is not ever opposed by Jesus. In fact, the gospels do portray him as keeping the Sabbath and attending worship, as well as spending time alone in prayer. But Jesus is after the heart of the Sabbath, its true purposes – which are life-giving, healing, renewing, and beneficial.

When he asks the gathered congregation about this, and gets only silence, Mark says that he “was grieved by their hardness of heart.” You might remember that Old Testament prophets used that phrase a lot, usually to describe the Israelites and their frequent stubborn unwillingness to follow God’s law. Interesting that here it refers to people who are ostensibly all about following the law, to the letter. But Jesus is convinced their hearts aren’t in it.

Jesus doesn’t sidestep the controversy, because it’s just simply not part of who he is or what he came for to accept this kind of inconsistency of heart and actions as normal. Any superficial practice of goodness that doesn’t involve opening the heart to understand God’s loving intentions of wholeness for people grieves him deeply. His ministry of healing and compassion is completely in unison with his embrace of Sabbath practice… and he wouldn’t separate them just to avoid controversy.

This is the same man, remember, who said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” It’s not to be expected that he will shy away from a controversial issue because people might be angry.

In other people we might call this “integrity.” In Jesus, it’s just being himself.

Jesus’ heart, actions and words are perfectly consistent with his identity and purpose. And his identity and purpose are deeply rooted in God’s vision for humanity.

There are lots of ways we might describe integrity, but that’s really the core of it:

Discovering our identity and purpose in God’s vision for humanity;

and being true to that identity and purpose in heart, word, and action.

Of course it has to do with what you do. But – and this is what the people watching and criticizing Jesus didn’t understand – it’s more than that. It’s more about who you are. Albert Camus once said “Integrity has no need of rules.”

I think he understood it rightly.

But there might be one other thing to say about it, something that occurred to me as I thought about this story. I wonder if the lack of integrity we see in the story of people so concerned about the rules for keeping Sabbath and so unconcerned about the heart and spirit of it, in fact might have something to do with their failure to really “get” the Sabbath.

What makes integrity – in that sense of oneness of purpose and action with God’s desires for us – what makes that hard in our world is that we sometimes don’t have a lot of opportunity to explore who we are, and what God’s purposes are for us. Our lives are very full. We have so much on our minds. We like to think this is just how it is for us today, but maybe people always felt this way. Certainly it’s always been easier to practice a superficial form of goodness than it is to really get one’s heart right with God.

But Sabbath time can give us time to discover who we are in God, and how to align our purposes with God’s. Sabbath time is time in which work and busyness and routine and so forth are set aside so that our bodies and minds can rest, and our spirits can be renewed. It helps us refocus on what’s really important.

Sabbath time reaffirms that we are meant to be in relationship – with God and others – as much as we are meant to be “productive.” It reminds us that God and the world are bigger than us, and that there are always going to be mysteries we won’t be able to unravel. It reminds us that we aren’t, and can stop trying to be, in charge. Sabbath time frees us to feel our feelings, and acknowledge our needs. And it restores us so that we can find renewed energy and concern for the needs of others. It’s awfully easy to lose our hope for a better world; Sabbath time is supposed to give us a little taste of that peace and blessing we are reaching toward for everyone.

We can try to define what it means to be a good person, or to be a faithful believer, with rules. But I’m not sure that rules alone can shape integrity in us. To really live and shine with integrity, we need to be growing into a sense of wholeness. We have to believe that wholeness, and not a fragmented, dishonest, conflicted life, is what God wants for us. It isn’t easy to believe that, or to claim that, when there is so much chaos and confusion in our lives, so many pressures to conform to one thing or another. It isn’t easy to pause the busyness, or the anxiety, long enough to get in touch with yourself, and with God. But I think it might be exactly what we need, and maybe the only way, to embrace the wholeness that can let us live in Christ-like integrity.

Jesus said to the man, “Come forward…. stretch out your hand.” And he reached out his hand to Jesus… and began to know what it was like to be whole again.

Amen.

Resources:

To Walk in Integrity by Steve Doughty

Mark for Everyone by Tom Wright

“What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8