Stretch forth your hand

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Today’s gospel (Luke 6: 6-11) recounts an apparently brief miracle – the healing of a man with a withered hand – but on reflection this story has the potential to cut deeply, like all the events in the life of Jesus.

One Sabbath, Jesus entered a synagogue and began to teach. Among His listeners were Pharisees watching to see if He would heal on the Sabbath – for not even God’s miracles are holy enough to pass the test set by the Pharisees’ most sacred observances. Also among Jesus’ listeners was a man with a withered hand, a genetic condition or possibly one caused by infant paralysis in which the muscles of the hand are shrunken. Jesus called the man to the middle of the room and then began questioning his Pharisee observers about whether it was lawful to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath. He answered their speechless response by bidding the man to stretch out his hand which, in the moment, was cured. The Pharisees, rather than looking to the light, turned to their own black hearts for counsel on how to deal with Jesus.

We have reflected much on the Pharisees over the summer, but what of this man with a withered hand? All the physical cures of the gospel betoken a spiritual reality, as was obvious from the healing of the deaf man yesterday. The blind see, the dumb speak, the lame walk: in all these physical transformations there is a spiritual significance. The same can also be said of this cure of the man with a withered hand.

Jesus’ first commands to the man are Stand up!  and Come out into the middle. For the man was hidden in the congregation, and his arm was possibly covered up with sleeves a little longer than usual. We are now so used to people wanting to be out and proud about all manner of things that we are less aware of the sense of shame or reticence that those with disabilities carry, even today. Why does Jesus call the man out in this way? Is He unfeeling towards the man’s shame? Perhaps Jesus seeks less to expose the man, than to invite him towards simplicity.

For hiding away can often be a sign of complexity; not of wanting to be unnoticed like the saints, but of not wanting to be seen, of proceeding through life masked. We all put on disguises, not perhaps to cover withered hands, but to cover our withered sentiments, our hostilities, our immaturities, and our vulnerabilities. We often do so because of fear for we can all fall victim to what is called the looking-glass self: I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.

And, so Jesus bids us rise alongside the man with the withered hand: Stand up! And then, Come out into the middle, not for us to be ostentatious, as at some evangelist rally, but rather to shed the burden, not to say the distortion, of what we imagine others think of us. Our imaginings of the imaginings of others are as near certainly useless as a freshly bought Lotto ticket. But regardless of their accuracy, our true reality is not who we are in the eyes of others; it is who we are in the eyes of God. Our true failure is not how we appear to our disadvantage in their eyes; it is how far short we fall of God’s dream for us. Many years ago, a confessor advised me to confess my sins as God sees them; for it is only this light of God’s eternity that judges things justly. Shame can be useful but only if it brings us back to a sense of ourselves; not if it invites us towards the kind of hypocrisy practised by those holier-than-God pious frauds, the Pharisees.

Then comes Jesus’ final command to the man with the withered hand: Stretch out your hand. In commanding him so, Jesus might otherwise have said to him: Be who you are. He says the same to us. Stretch out your hand, for if we do this in union with Him – united to Him by every yes we try to say to the Father - then it is not we who stretch out a hand, but Jesus who does so. Stretch out your hand means Be my servant in all simplicity. For it is only by Jesus’ power that the man stretches it forth. Who knows how many times he had sat in his house, hidden from the eyes of others, bemoaning his inability, powerlessly imagining the limb as fresh and strong as a healthy hand. Now it becomes so, not by his own power but by the power of Jesus. So may we all be transformed.

For Jesus not only heals the man’s withered hand; He transforms his withered life, as He transforms us in His power. But first, we must shed our complexity, stand boldly in what we wrongly imagine is a cloud of human shame, and step forth into the middle where we can not only see what we currently are, but glean an inkling of what we might be – God’s dream for us – if only we can put our hand in His.