The Jesus of Luke’s gospel is always eating: snacking on grain picked on the Sabbath, stopping for picnics, inviting himself to people’s houses for supper. And today he is at it again. But this time in a grander setting, he has been invited to a Sabbath meal by one of the leaders of his community to feast with the influential and the important. Now I don’t think that I have ever been to a truly grand party but my parents were once invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. They were very excited and dressed, of course, in their very best; they were served the finest food and drink; and then - my mother disgraced herself - she drank too much Champagne and sang the Spice Girls number “I’ll tell you what I want what I really, really want”. Dad was mortified at her behaviour! I remembered this embarrassing family story when I read this morning’s gospel because although Jesus seems to be behaving badly - instead of being gracious and grateful, he is hectoring the host and lecturing the guest son how to behave – he is actually trying to teach them, and us, about what it is that we really want. It all starts when he bumps into a sick man on the way – & he asks if it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath. But it is not the sick man that Jesus is really here to heal … The man suffers from what was called dropsy, which means waterlogged – it was the old fashioned term for oedema – when the body swells because it is unable to get rid of excess fluid. Paradoxically, although their bodies are full of water, a person with dropsy suffers from unquenchable thirst. And so dropsy had become a symbol for insatiable hunger, for craving that could not be satisfied, always desiring more. The point being made is that it is not just the man with dropsy who is suffering from insatiable cravings, from unsatisfied desires, from endless want; so were the guests around the table and so are we. In our first reading, the prophet Jeremiah, diagnoses the very same sickness in his people: they are hungry, thirsty, yearning: It is as if, he says, they are spending all of their time and energy digging out cracked cisterns that will hold no water when what they really need is a fountain of living water. What we want, what we really want – is God: What both Jesus, and Jeremiah, are trying to remind us that what we really want – we can have. But God is a gift. A gift poured out for us in the waters of baptism. And whatever we are striving for or hungering after – in the end, this is what we really want, this is where we are at home, this is where we belong. RBT 1-9-2013 |