Isaiah 58.9b-14, Luke 13.10-17
The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, Sunday 21 August 2016
West Camel, Sutton Montis w Corton Denham
The eighteen-year-old girl makes her way through the Sunday shopping crowds, laden with designer carrier bags, looking somewhat bent and bowed-down beyond her years. The bags are weighing her down, for sure, full of new clothes, new shoes, new cosmetics. But what weighs heavier on her is her spirit. For she is caught in that familiar feeling of dissatisfaction, having spent a great deal of her time and most of her credit on goods which she knows won’t satisfy her for long.
Since she bought her new dress she has seen someone her age wearing something far nicer; she knows that once she gets home and puts on her new make-up she will look in the mirror and still feel inferior to the magazine models on her bedside table.
Self-conscious in the Sunday shopping crowds she feels that everyone else is looking at her, discussing her shortcomings, judging her inferior. She yearns to be perfect, like they are. It breaks her spirit and cripples her. She is eighteen, and it has always felt like this.
In a bedsit just around the corner from the main shopping street, another eighteen-year-old girl sits alone, starving. Deliberately starving, for she has decided that the way to deal with her sense of being judged on her body image, the way to make sure that she fits into a society obsessed with thinness, is to avoid food altogether.
She is hungrier than anyone passing by outside, but is frightened of taking even a single bite, in case she should not be able to stop eating. Her bones are weak through not eating, her body is slowly bending out of shape. Possessed by the spirit of addiction to weight reduction which she has acquired from society at large, a spirit in thrall to unnatural thinness, the girl in the bedsit has triumphed over her normal instincts in her pursuit of slenderness - and she is very ill.
Showing off a slim physique is not enough for this girl - her real aim is to be skinnier than the girls she sees passing by, and the Hollywood stars and Olympic goddesses on her screen. She is in a race to lose the most weight, a race where the winners are bound to become thinner and thinner. She is eighteen, and this Sunday, as every day, she starves herself to achieve success. [1]
These two Sunday Girls are not unusual, although the spirit which oppresses them might make them feel isolated and alone. In a society where individualism is everything, where body image is crucial, we all feel ourselves judged by others; we sense fingers pointing our way, our ears are open to criticisms which come to us directly or which we soak up through the signals we get all the time from the culture around us.
It is this spirit which drives our food obsessions, our fashion obsessions, our health obsessions. We might either become ascetic or over-consume; we might buy ostentatious designer clothes or by contrast, choose to conspicuously ‘dress-down’ in what are called ‘pre-stressed’ items; we might be up early jogging or at the gym or we might be reactionary couch potatoes - but it is the same spirit at work, the spirit which causes us to always be looking at others and desiring what they have, always acting out in rivalry with others. As René Girard puts it,
In the modern world, we compete as individuals, against all other individuals. The community is nothing and the individual is everything. We have identified the enemy and he is us. [2]
Possibly the young may be more deeply affected by this competitive spirit, but it touches us all at some level - otherwise there’d be no market for hair dye or anti-ageing cream.
Now you may have observed that in my portraits of the two eighteen-year-old girls I used some words and phrases which link symbolically to our readings today, from the prophet Isaiah and from Jesus in Luke’s gospel.
My two eighteen-year-old women are, like the one Jesus spotted in the crowd, crippled by a spirit which bends them out of shape. And I chose to concentrate their activity on a Sunday because this gospel story is one of the many where Jesus faces-off the religious leaders on the question of working on the Sabbath - and always it is he who is doing, they who are prohibiting. Let’s stay with that for a few moments.
There are, in creation, many gifts freely and graciously given by God to liberate us and to complete us, but which over time have been hijacked by organised religion and turned into rules and regulations which oppress. The Sabbath is a prime example. In Genesis, ‘God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation’. [3]
Over the years rabbis developed their own interpretations of the Sabbath, interpretations which were called that rabbi's ‘yoke’. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi's yoke. One rabbi even said his yoke was easy. [4] And his clashes recorded in the gospels, showed how difficult Sabbath observation had been made by the yoke of some other religious leaders.
The difference between Jesus and his critics over the Sabbath was the difference between emphasising the law and celebrating the creation.
Jesus’ critics viewed the Sabbath through the eyes of the law, and their finger-pointing accusations based on the long lists of rules and regulations which they had developed around Moses’ commands to labour for six days and keep the seventh day as a Sabbath’ on which even the most modest form of work was regarded as unlawful. [5] You can imagine the effect of their heavy yoke on the people: causing a kind of nervous numbness, turning the Sabbath into a day for doing nothing, achieving nothing.
Jesus, on the other hand, seemed to leapfrog Moses and go right back to Genesis in his interpretation of the Sabbath. He viewed the Sabbath through the lens of creation. For him it was a day - like every day - for continuing God’s creative work in the world, for completing the incomplete. So he healed the sick, cast out the spirits which oppressed the bowed-down, shared food with his hungry followers. The effect of Jesus’ easy yoke on the people was to heal, enable, and empower them.
Now, Sabbath observance remains an issue in our day and time. Society has largely lost the sense of its purpose as a day to ‘keep holy to God’, but our society has made something of an idol of recreation - hence the rise of Sunday sport (on playing-fields and on TV) and of Sunday shopping as a leisure pursuit of choice. Interesting to note that this recreational activity indulges our food obsessions, our fashion obsessions, our health obsessions.
When grappling with this thorny issue Christians have often relied on a legal understanding of the Sabbath, harking back to the commands of Moses, not unlike the yoke of Jesus’ critics.
So it might shock us to read in John’s gospel Jesus justifying a Sabbath healing by telling his critics, ‘My Father is working up until the present, and I also work.’ [6] As James Alison writes,
[Jesus is making] a formal denial that God is resting on the Sabbath, as well as an affirmation that Creation has yet to be completed, and that for this reason Jesus carries on with his work of bringing Creation to fulfilment on the Sabbath. [7]
When, on another Sabbath, Jesus makes a blind man see, in John chapter 9, he does it by spitting on the earth and from the clay, making a paste to anoint the man’s eyes.
The Hebrew word for ‘clay’ is adamah, from which God originally made "Adam," humankind. So, here, what Jesus is doing is the act of finishing creation. The man born blind had palpably not been brought to the fullness of creation, and Jesus finishes off the process by adding the missing clay. [8]
When the blind man speaks, he testifies, ‘Not since the dawn of time has it been heard that anybody has opened the eyes of the blind’. He is suggesting that the one who healed him - who completed him - is the one who was there at the dawn of time - the Creator himself. [9]
So, by acting on the Sabbath is Jesus teaching us that we ‘keep the Sabbath holy to God’ not by doing nothing, but by continuing the work of Creation? This sounds like good news for farmers, gardeners, birds, bees, and the trees and fields which clap their hands in praise of their Creator, all the time.
And, by healing people on the Sabbath is Jesus teaching us that the work of Creation is completed when people are made whole? Now the blind man can see, now the bowed-down woman has had her spirit lifted, they have become the complete human. Created by God initially, completed by God through Jesus.
The Christian is one who recognises that it is through Jesus that she is brought to the completion of her creation, who is being progressively inducted, which means included, into the life of God, which is life without end. [10]
Our society’s Sabbath is a day of recreation, but Jesus’ Sabbath is a day of re-creation, a day for the transformation of Creation and humankind into wholeness.
So - back to our two Sunday Girls, taking their recreation but bowed down with a spirit which oppresses them, a yoke based in food obsessions, fashion obsessions, health obsessions. As René Girard observes, this yoke does not originate from our religion, but from the neopaganism of our time, in the cult of the body. [11]
Our two Sunday Girls may not be burdened by any obligations to religious authorities or other institutions like the family - in a society where anything goes, they shop alone, eat alone. But there is still a yoke which burdens them. It is a yoke carried by society at large, which the prophet Isaiah described as ‘the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil’ [12]
The spirit which bows down the woman in Jesus’ crowd is the same spirit which oppresses our two Sunday Girls. Feeling themselves judged by others; sensing fingers pointing their way, vulnerable to criticisms coming at them all the time from the culture around them. So when the prophet speaks, he speaks to their condition:
‘When you call, the Lord will answer;
when you cry for help, he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, …
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.’ [13]
At eighteen you are deep into the process of creating yourself, defining your personality, shaping your future direction. You may not be aware of it but it is a time where the Creator is close to you, close to the heart of that wonderful creative work you are engaged in.
At eighteen you are vulnerable to the spirits which oppresses you, bow you down, stop you becoming the person you were formed to be. You may not be aware of him in the crowds, or while clicking social media in your room, but Jesus sees you, longs to call you over and say, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment’, to stand you up straight, to complete your creation, to include you in the life of God, life without end.
For the Sunday Girl it can be about so much more than recreation - it can be a day of re-creation.
Notes
Credit to Paul Neuchterlein for the fruitful directions he sent me in, in preparation of this sermon, from his Girardian Lectionary Reflections on Proper 16c.
[1] René Girard, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), p.8-9, and sleeve notes.
[2] René Girard, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), p.25.
[3] Genesis 2.3.
[4] Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, p.34. The last line references Matthew 11.30.
[5] Exodus 20.8-10. See also Wikipedia: Activities prohibited on Shabbat for the contemporary ‘yoke’.
[6] John 5.17. Quoted in James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.9. [This is from Chapter One, ‘the man blind from birth and the Creator's subversion of sin’, which Paul Neuchterlein describes as ‘one of the groundbreaking essays in all of contemporary theology’. He has made the text available online in its entirety, here.]
[7] James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.9.
[8] James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.6, referencing Genesis 2.7.
[9] James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.8.
[10] James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.8-9.
[11] René Girard, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), p.19.
[12] Isaiah 58.9.
[12] Isaiah 58.9-10.
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