13 Luke - Debugging Faith

By Richard

Jesus heals on a Sabbath and the ruler of the Synagogue is literally seething. “Come on one other six days designated for work,” he said, “But not on the Sabbath.” We read that Jesus, “Shot back. ‘You frauds! Each Sabbath every one of you regularly unties your cow or donkey from its stall, leads it out for water, and thinks nothing of it. So why isn’t it all right for me to untie this daughter of Abraham and lead her from the stall where Satan has had her tied for these 18 years?’” (Luke 13: 15, 16, the Message)

I wan’t to focus in on the line “You frauds”. If we’re honest every one of us has, at some level, fraudulent behaviour. One of the challenges of the Gospels is that Jesus tends to expose our double standards. Indeed this tendency of Christ to “expose” us is actually one of the reasons that I believe so many people claim that the Christian faith is untrue. You see, we’re not talking about some feel-good-yoga of the safety of rule-based-religion, but we're talking about a call to take an honest look inside ourselves and become people of integrity. We’re called to debug faith of fraudulent behaviour and friends that’s a challenge that we must either embrace of hate.