Monday, 9/9/13
Let’s look at the story of the man with a withered hand.
Supposedly, the man had been crippled at birth, and had grown used to it after
a fashion.
When I was twelve back in 1940 there was a boy like that
from the next street. Calvin would wander over to talk to me about Country
Music. He figured he could manage a guitar somehow if he ever could afford one.
In the meantime he serenaded me, not knowing that back then us city people
looked down on Country singers. I think Calvin carried a lot of sorrow.
That rule against curing on the Sabbath was a later addition
to the Law. From about 530 to 330 B.C. Jerusalem was part of the Persian
Empire, and a hundred years into that period the Persian emperor had granted
the Jews the right to add amendments to the Law of Moses. They went overboard
doing that. Like, one was permitted to walk something like only two hundred
yards from his property on the Sabbath. (The rich got around that by buying a
square foot of land every two hundred yards through the city, so they were
never too far from their property.)
The story of the man with the withered hand brings up the
matter of conflicts between church law and the laws of kindness. We often have
need to resolve conflicts over that.
Like, I have a nephew who got five of his kids through
Jesuit colleges, and he was determined to see them married Catholic. Recently,
he forced a son and his bride-to-be to take marriage instructions from a
priest; but then, the bride’s mother insisted on a garden wedding. While I
didn’t like breaking the rule that demands a wedding be connected with a parish
church, I bent the rules for that garden wedding. A priest friend, hearing
about it the morning of the wedding day, was angry with me, telling me I just
shouldn’t do it. I did it anyway. With our losing a large percentage of our
young people, giving them a helping hand seemed to be similar to Jesus telling
that man to stretch out his hand.
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