hands and time

There are those people in life, aren't there, who are just waiting for you to make a mistake. They seem to come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and definitely in all sorts of places, but they simply love to have something to moan about, especially when it is at someone elses expense.

Unfortunately it is impossible to work in a church and not come across folks who seem to delight in being miserable, whose sole purpose seems to find fault and not with the purpose of making things better but just to moan and groan and revel in discontent.

Jesus had a cohort of these folks too and when, in Mark 3, he comes to heal a man with a withered hand you can almost hear the whispering and downright criticism starting up. The chatterers were certainly chattering when he challenged their underlying assumption that they had the right to uphold Sabbath law over and above God's works of mercy and healing - and you can imagine their anger at this as they listen to a calm and rational argument which undermines their sad weaponry.

God's purpose can be difficult to discern and God's mercy hard to see through the way we do things, through the way we expect them to be. We like a certain level of comfort, we have expectations and in a Church which promotes a level of ordinariness and stability in liturgy it is, perhaps, not unreasonable to have some expectations. However, when those expectations become so solid that we look to them, that we look to the way we like things, before we look to God - then we are running into trouble.

We all have grumpy days, those days when we feel picky, when we are eager to find fault and we know that that leaves a bad taste in the mouth and damages our relationships with those around us. If we find we go beyond that point of occasional sore headedness though, we need to take stock. If there are people to whom we always feel critical and generally unsettled or even angry we need to work to restore relationship (and, no, people do not always respond in like manner but that is no excuse).

Whilst we all fall into the trap of grumpiness, that sort of persistent nastiness engendered by personal expectation has no place in a Christian community. If Jesus says anything to those who uphold law over justice and mercy, he says that their expectations are way too low, that their picture of God is too small, that they are holding on so tightly to themselves that they are squeezing God out of their lives.

The man walks away healed and restored because he dared to walk with Jesus beyond the expected, beyond where he had been before - and that invitation comes to us too. We just have to listen.