Religious Failure: Another Sabbath Healing (Luke 14:1-6)
Early in the last chapter, Luke related the story of Jesus performing a healing on the Sabbath and the religious leaders rejecting Him. He now bookends this section with another rejection of a miracle on the Sabbath. The whole section has been about the failure of the Jews, particularly the leaders, to accept the evidence of Jesus’s divine mission.
This time, Jesus is even more confrontational and direct. He asks the leaders if it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath. They cannot answer. It is a bit of a paradoxical question. Who would heal except God? One could argue that the devil in disguise could mislead the people by posing as a do-gooder. However, one could just as easily argue that no one would lead the nation in God’s name, lead them to do good and be good, except for people of God. Yet here we have men leading the people to do good for all the wrong reasons. Not for God. For their own interests and power. And the “good” they are demanding is not so much good as control.
So, Jesus heals a man right then and there, and the leaders are left with no response. They see they are losing their control, but cannot argue a position in which they should maintain it. Instead, they will work behind the scenes to eliminate the threat.
How do we, if we are leaders today, respond when we see God moving in a different direction than where we want to lead? How do we react when we discover leaders in our midst are devils in disguise? Do we expose, correct, and follow God? Or do we protect the leaders out of a “desire to protect God?”
This time, Jesus is even more confrontational and direct. He asks the leaders if it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath. They cannot answer. It is a bit of a paradoxical question. Who would heal except God? One could argue that the devil in disguise could mislead the people by posing as a do-gooder. However, one could just as easily argue that no one would lead the nation in God’s name, lead them to do good and be good, except for people of God. Yet here we have men leading the people to do good for all the wrong reasons. Not for God. For their own interests and power. And the “good” they are demanding is not so much good as control.
So, Jesus heals a man right then and there, and the leaders are left with no response. They see they are losing their control, but cannot argue a position in which they should maintain it. Instead, they will work behind the scenes to eliminate the threat.
How do we, if we are leaders today, respond when we see God moving in a different direction than where we want to lead? How do we react when we discover leaders in our midst are devils in disguise? Do we expose, correct, and follow God? Or do we protect the leaders out of a “desire to protect God?”
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