This week’s lectionary gospel (Luke 13:10-17) shows, along with other healing stories, how Jesus taught mercy over concerns like being correct, or keeping laws, or being “righteous.” To Jesus, the freedom and relief of the woman he illegally healed on the Sabbath—a woman trapped in suffering for eighteen years—ranked so far above any law that Jesus blasted the leader who reminded him his action was illegal. He says, You show mercy to your donkey on the Sabbath. Why wouldn’t I show mercy to this woman, a child of God? Who cares if it is the Sabbath?
In the value system Jesus not only taught but incarnated, wholeness in people and relationships trumps law. Upon reading the passage, I am reminded of the tear-drenched voice of an eleven-year-old whose father, a poultry plant worker in Mississippi, was taken in a massive deportation raid. Her voice, literally painful to listen to. Or that of a Honduran mother who was told a gang would kill her son if she didn’t pay their demanded price—so she came to the US border desperately seeking asylum because she has family here, because she viewed it as her one safe option. Yet at the border, she found no legal recourse. This mother wanted only to protect her child, as any of us would, so she crossed illegally.
In these cases, people broke the law. But whatever the complex issues, we’re compelled to ask: What about mercy? And just as important, as Jesus challenged the one castigating him: What about hypocrisy—the hypocrisy of those who benefit from illegal crossings of our country’s borders every time we more affordably stay at a hotel, or eat at a restaurant, or buy food from producers that need and utilize undocumented labor? Americans participate in infractions of our immigration system every day. All of us benefit from that system. But it is only the immigrants, the marginalized, expected to pay for illegality.
Isn’t this the opposite of mercy? Sure, we can argue the values Jesus taught are impractical, or not intended literally—as some have done for millennia, with so-called Christian empires often at the vanguard of policies like slavery, genocide of Indigenous people, subjugation of women, exploitation of laborers, or violence against LGBTQ people or others who are othered. In these circumstances, those enforcing laws that prioritized “order” over mercy thought their arguments were compelling.
The story of Jesus breaking the law to heal on the Sabbath is no doubt a challenging story today. We are asked to see ourselves in the story and be taken apart by it—which is what powerful narratives do. What character are you in this story? What do you think of Jesus and what he does? Last week was the feast of St. Mary. We can also remember that Mary and Joseph were, in Matthew, immigrants fleeing their homeland, whereas Herod, representative of the legal system in the narrative, is cast as villain.
As election season heats up, we encounter an uptick in anti-immigrant rhetoric. Already, candidates use immigration to stoke fear and grievance in voters. Let us instead center mercy.
Wren, winner of a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal
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