When people met Jesus, what he said and did made them think in completely new ways.
Luke (13:10-17) tells of Jesus' meeting with a crippled woman, and how he heals her so she can stand up straight again. But it's on the Sabbath, when no-one's supposed to do any work – so the synagogue ruler says he should have waited till the next day: "There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath."
People of a Pharisaical tendency didn't win arguments with Jesus, and they don't this time – if you water your animals on the Sabbath, I'm going to heal this daughter of Abraham, he says.
In his reply, Jesus compares what he did to caring for an animal: it's an act of routine kindness. Caring for other people isn't a special act of virtue; it's part of the normal Christian life.
But behind this story there's some deep thinking about how you live in a way that pleases God.
It reminds us that the religious law is just a guideline, something to give us a bit of help in making sense of faith. Our faith is generally law-shaped, but it's not defined by law. When law gets in the way of kindness or generosity – the instinct to help and share and make the world better – it's not doing its job any more.
We're often much better at keeping the letter of the law than we are at keeping the spirit of the law, because often, it's much easier to think than it is to feel. Arguing about doctrine or the kind of music you want sung in church is much easier than feeding the hungry, say, or even just telling people about Jesus.
This doesn't mean that we can sit lightly to the moral law of God. We can't justify things like lying, stealing and sexual promiscuity by arguing that in some way we're being kind or loving. But we should be very wary of making things that are just custom and practice – the way we do things – into unbreakable rules that mean we actually neglect God's command to love other people.
The woman Jesus healed had been crippled for 18 years – so long that she'd become invisible, until Jesus saw her. While everyone else just accepted the situation and thought it was normal, he decided to change it – and he wouldn't let petty concerns about religion get in his way.
Are we willing to be radical disciples of the radical Christ?
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
