Wednesday, January 19, 2022                                   (today’s lectionary)
Cutting off the devil’s head
David spoke to Saul, “Let your majesty not lose courage. I am at your service to go and fight this Philistine.”
Jesus said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out and his hand was restored.
 In The Screwtape Letters (#15), C. S. Lewis said about time:
Humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. (Since the devil is writing these letters to Wormwood, a demon-in-training, the Enemy equals God.) He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present.
Jesus was a master of living in the Present. Saul was not. Our man with the withered hand was not. He remembered the day when an accident ruined his nerves and circulation, and his hand became useless. He will never forget that day. His ability to do the work of the present day was ruined back then, or so he might think. Each sabbath that passes only reminds him of the length of his miserable life. Will it never end? Like every one of us (except our children), he mostly lives in the past and the future.
Not like Jesus. Lewis continues:
The Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
Jesus made that clear when he facilitated the man’s healing. Jesus gave him a new choice. From this moment on, he says, you can inhabit the present moment and ride it all the way to heaven. Let the sun rise and let the sun set, and all the while be still. Know that I am God.
Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?
That was an easy question to answer. But the Pharisees remained silent. Perhaps Lewis’ Screwtape speaks for them:
In the Present, and the Present alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell. This state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.
But wait. If I were that man with the withered hand, could I remain in the present, singing an everlasting duet with Jesus, lost in joy? Wouldn’t I remember and remember and remember the moment of healing, those words of Jesus I heard, but which now have receded into the past? Jesus invites me to move on, as he himself does, and know the joy of God’s presence here and now.
This transparent immediacy is not something I can do alone. But I don’t have to.
The words of Jesus, “Stretch out your hand,” echo in my ears. And so I do stretch out my hand, again and again, and the healing comes, again and again.  Gradually I realize how valuable my hand is, how valuable my hands are, and I touch others as well as myself, and Jesus smiles on me.
“Stretch out your hand,” I say, and others are healed by my infectious joy. We reach up together into the sky, touching eternity.
Just a few words from Winn Collier, writing about epiphany:
That marvelous, terrifying word … God comes precisely where and when we don’t expect it. Light comes, but it breaks in on a timetable we cannot manipulate, and often into the midnight dark long after we’ve abandoned hope. Epiphany means that we must lose control, that we never really had control, that we truly are … at the mercy.
Don’t forget that the big story today is about that guy Goliath, and David’s five smooth stones, of which he needed only one to send the giant to the ground. David’s confidence? Sure, but mostly God’s power in that one smooth stone.
(1 Samuel 17, Psalm 144, Matthew 4, Mark 3)
Painting by Domenico Fetti, David with the Head of Goliath, 1620 (King’s Withdrawing Room, Hampton Court Palace, Richmond-upon-Thames)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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