Man with Shriveled Hand AND Centurion’s Servant

In the account of the Man with the Shriveled Hand (Matthew 12:9-14; Mark 3:1-6; Luke 6:6-11), I wonder if the Pharisees had not been the protagonists of this story if the gospels writers would have remembered this particular healing.  The Pharisees make the story compelling because clearly Jesus is choosing to value people over livestock and The Sabbath, and that does not sit well with the Pharisees, they were “furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus.”

In my ministry I’ve observed that some 80% of the problems I see are not really problems, (or what I like to call self-correcting problems).  Meaning that they will go away on their own if I don’t intervene.  What I have learned through the years is that if I treat any of the 80% like it is an actual problem, then it becomes a problem, and I will be forced to intervene.  I think the art of ministry is knowing exactly where the line is between real problems and the 80%.  The Pharisees, I think, didn’t have that line well calibrated with Jesus, and by their reactions turned, what would have been a rather unremarkable Sabbath healing story, into the story we are reading today. 

I wonder where the line is with people who ask to be healed.  Is there an 80% that will naturally just get better, like a doctor friend said about having a cold:  “You should be better in about a week, but sometimes it can take as long as seven days.”   Contained in that 80% is, I think, a smaller subset that are afflicted with a real problems, but unwilling to participate in being healed.    Now clearly the man with the shriveled hand was not in that 80%, Jesus intervened, and by asking him to stretch out his hand, he too participated in being healed. 

In the healing of the Centurion’s Servant (Matthew 8:5-13; Luke 7-1-10), something very different is happening among those who observe Jesus saying “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would.”  In Luke’s account, he adds “I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel.”   To those hearing Jesus say this, they would have understood Jesus to say that the faith of this Gentile was greater than all of Israel, and for a people whose self-identity claimed that God’s blessing was for them only, the thought of Jesus first listening to this non-Jew, and then performing the healing he asked for, would have disturbed them.

Several things about this  Centurion’s Servant story speak to us today:

1. That the healee need not be present, or even aware that healing is being asked for them.
2. That the circle of who Jesus listens to is much larger than the ones hearing him at the time expected.  I think the same could be said for the American Church today.