But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way. – Luke 14:4

Today's Scripture Reading (December 4, 2020): Luke 14

It is better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission. Or, at least, so the idiom goes. The phrase has raised its head several times during my life. The concept behind the saying is that it is better to act only to have to apologize for a misstep than to be paralyzed by inaction due to caution or politeness. And the reality is that there have been times in all of our lives when we have followed the idiom, blazing a trail forward, knowing that we might have to apologize later. But at that moment, we know that it is the right thing to do.

But the reverse is also true. There are times when we remain silent because we have no answer to the question under consideration. Sometimes it is a genuine lack of information, and there is nothing wrong with that. I have long argued that the words "I don't know" should be spoken more often than we hear them in our culture. We aren't supposed to know everything; in fact, knowing everything is impossible. We need the courage to stand up for our beliefs and the humility to admit when we need others' help with things that we just don't know.

But silence is sometimes born out of an internal disagreement. We don't answer because there is a war inside of us between what we want to say and what we know we should say. It is a moral dilemma. And in the Christian Church, this is the situation that we find ourselves in more often than we probably want to admit. We are blinded by a desire to uphold the law of God, but we do it in a way that violates the law of Christ.

And that was precisely the reason for the Pharisees' silence. Jesus had just asked a question. "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?" We could carry that same question in to any of our hospitals on any weekend. If someone is sick and in desperate need of help, is it okay to save them? And there is a universal understanding that says that if we are the ones who are sick and in need of help, we don't want the day of the week to stay the hand of the physician. Healing someone is doing good. And something deep inside of us cries out that it should never be illegal to do good.

But the Pharisees considered healing, work. And work was illegal on the Sabbath, even if it was in the pursuit of doing good. Jesus's question resulted in a war that was currently taking place inside of the Pharisees in attendance. The battle was a struggle between a moral imperative that said that doing good could never be illegal and the interpretation of God's Law that argued that work on the Sabbath was always forbidden.

Jesus's question to the Pharisees was similar to the problem that the Pharisees had asked Jesus on several occasions. It pitted a moral truth against the interpretation of a law. In this case, the Pharisees wanted to say that healing on the Sabbath was work and therefore illegal, regardless of the purpose of the work. But couched in such a way and in the company of someone in need of Jesus's healing touch, the Pharisees did not dare to speak what it was that they believed. And so, they stayed silent.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Luke 15