Wednesday, January 18, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The case of the withered hand
Jesus said to the man with the withered hand, “Come up here before us …” Then Jesus said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out. And his hand was healed.
There is more to this story. It took place on the day of Sabbath. The Pharisees were convinced that this healing on the Sabbath was work which blasphemed God and broke the law of Moses, which was of course, the law of God.
Jesus asked the Pharisees, “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than destroy it?” But they remained silent, and he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart.
I’ve begun reading The Spell of New Mexico. Editor Tony Hillerman thinks the spell is sometimes cast by the people, and sometimes by the places. Hillerman himself is drawn to the dry, starkly magical (for him) places in the Navajo country. One such place is near the Three Rivers Petroglyph site north of Tularosa.
Stone Age hunters used this same ridge before the white man arrived. The cliff drawings suggest that sitting here among these basalt boulders, with no sound but the blowing wind, and the arid immensity of the Tularosa Basin around you, stimulated imaginations which predate my own.
I wouldn’t be reading this book if I too wasn’t captivated by the spell of New Mexico. Blue sky, empty spaces, mesas impossible to reach and wind – wind that blows through the grass, through my hair, blowing all around me peaceful.
Nothing much here, but only beautiful. Still, not everyone agrees. New Mexico is empty, barren, endless and … well, withered. Where does the healing come from, except from our imagination? Jesus’ imagination saw the man’s hand healed, and he could do nothing but act out what he saw. As the writer says in Hebrews, Jesus is our great high priest. He can do no other.
“Stretch out your hand,” Jesus told the man. And he stretched out his hand.
Of course he did. He looked into Jesus’ eyes. He felt safer and more content than ever before in his life. Of course he stretched out his hand.
And his hand was healed.
Like Ezekiel and Isaiah and Jeremiah before him, Jesus could not keep silent. Megan McKenna says about the prophets, and about Jesus:
The prophets’ vocation is to cry out—to God, to the air, to any open heart; they cry out on behalf of God and on behalf of the poor because no one is listening except God. They cry out for those no one heeds, except maybe in passing in lip service … we need the prophets, the far-seeing ones, the dreamers in broad daylight, the long-distance high beams that show us glimpses of where we are going.
Almost every morning Jesus found the highest place around him and prayed from there. His dreams survived the broadest daylight. And Jesus the prophet and priest invites us to join him in the high country.
But.
The Pharisees went out and immediately took counsel with the Herodians against Jesus, to put him to death.
Oh, Lord, forgive our self-righteous determination to be wrong! Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses. Lead us not into evil. For thine, O Lord, is the Kingdom. Lead us to the high country!
(Hebrews 7, Psalm 110, Matthew 4, Mark 3)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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