The Fellowship of the Shriveled Hand
Luke 6:6-10
The season leading up to Easter, which is March 31, for a lot of people may feel like a bit of a “downer” after two years of COVID and fear and separation in church services. Some people are what we call C-E-O Christians! Yes. Christmas and Easter Only. For most of human history, taking time to reflect on mortality and the reality of death was actually valued as an act of wisdom—and humility. Not just by adults, children were encouraged to engage it. When I was a kid growing up, we used to say a little prayer that started like this.
Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep. If I die before I awake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Sobering for a little kid, and there's actually a second verse to that for a lot of people who don't know this. It's in the New England primer. Now imagine praying these words with your little seven-year old child.
Our days begin with trouble here, our life is but a span, and cruel death is always near so frail a thing is man.
“Goodnight, honey.” Mama kisses you on the head. “Pleasant dreams.” People did that with little children. Why? Well, they assumed that there was wisdom in reflecting on the fact that our lives were not for sure. So, we're going to think about what happens in the beyond.
Let me start by saying that I know we like messages that tell us our abilities are remarkable. Our lives are amazing. Our circumstances are going to get better, and our determination will most certainly prevail. And I just need to tell you up front, this is not that kind of message. So, if your life is going great, if your marriage is effort free, if they just keep promoting you at work, if the Air Force is considering you for a White House assignment, this message is not for you. But for the rest of us who live in a world where our families get shattered, marriages crumble, and diagnoses seem beyond all human hope, whether it's betrayal, at work, or in a friendship, in a relationship that sucks the breath out of you that you cannot understand, or you can hardly stand to see one more story of the evil in Ukraine or the middle east—I invite you to join me today in The Fellowship Of The Shriveled Hand.
The story that was just read and we’re going to look at today is actually told three times in the New Testament. So, Luke 6:6-10 apparently was regarded as very important about a man in the synagogue who had a shriveled hand. The circumstances suggest that the man was painfully aware of his own weakness, inadequacy and shame. We're not told in the story whether the man was born this way or had an accident. But, in Luke’s account, we're told that it was his right hand. In the ancient world most people were right handed. So, the right hand was regarded as the hand of agency, the hand that makes work possible. So, possibly he was a beggar. Possibly no woman would marry him. He was attending synagogue, so he was likely a person of faith. And likely knew the story in 1 Kings 13:4 of a man with a shriveled useless hand, and it was healed. And he most likely prayed like we do for healing, but nothing ever happened.
Most people healed in the New Testament received healing by asking Jesus to be healed. The centurion asked Jesus to heal his servant, the friends who lowered their friend through the roof on a mat asked Jesus to heal, a man with an epileptic son asked Jesus to heal him, and a blind guy named Bartimaeus yelled from the road side for a healing. However, The man with the shriveled hand in Luke 6 never asked to be healed, and we don't know why. Maybe he was shy. Maybe he was polite. Maybe he had doubts. Maybe he just didn't know why. Deformity in the ancient world often came with a stigma even more than it does in our world. Maybe he thought God was punishing him. So, I imagined him sitting there in that teaching time, hiding his shriveled hand in his sleeve, because he felt ashamed. It's the last thing he wanted anyone to notice. No polite person would call attention to this man’s shriveled hand. But Jesus did! Now it's especially startling in Luke 6:8, Jesus publicly points out this man and says get up and stand in front of everyone. That's Jesus. And not just get up. Not even just get up and stand. But, get up and stand in front of everyone! In other words, expose yourself—and your shame. Reveal the ugliness you’re hiding. Jesus deliberately calls on this man to do this. And the man sits for a moment with his lifeless hand inside his sleeve. And then the text says, So he got up and stood there. And we don't know how long everybody is staring at this man’s hand. And worse yet, these are the people he most wanted not to be there. Healthy handed religious people who had strong right hands that they use to greet each other, and to do important work and shake their healthy right index fingers at the sinners in the shade of the synagogue. A church service was the last place he would want to expose his gnarled, shriveled hand. And of course, Jesus knew all this. Jesus understood how all the things of religion can sometimes wither people's hearts and set them apart.
And even in this gathering, there were religious leaders, Pharisees, people who thought they knew God really well, who were opposed to Jesus helping this man on this day, because it was the Sabbath. They valued rule keeping. They thought that rule keeping was more important than people helping. And one of the verses tells us this made Jesus really, really mad. And then He spoke a second time. But now for the man, the second statement made things worse.
Jesus said, Stretch out your hand. Stretch out your hand. That was the one thing the man with the shriveled hand would most want not to do. You don't go to synagogue to expose what you're most ashamed of, not just that it was the one thing the man could not do. So, Jesus drew attention to the man’s shame and weakness, because it was the man's weakness that would become the hinge of his story and the turning point of his life. Think about this. Jesus did not ask him to do what he could do. Jesus asked him to do what he could not do. And he must have thought to himself, My whole life has been centered around managing my shriveled hand. I cover it up. I try to hide it. Now, all that is undone. This is the worst moment of my life—until it wasn't.
Jesus asked the man to do the very thing the man could not do—stretch out your hand. And, so it is with us. What God asks us to do, what we know we should do is precisely what we cannot do. Jesus is asking you to do what you cannot do. Stretch out your hand.
Thirty years ago, I attended a men’s prayer meeting consisting of missionaries and English-speaking pastors in the Tokyo area. We read Scripture, prayed, and then began sharing our stories—from our hearts. Guys talked about their pain and inadequacies. They openly shared their fears—in tears. And other brothers would sit next to them on the floor as these men wept in pain and another brother read portions of Scripture as if the voice of God was speaking life and assurance into each heart. I well up inside remembering that time. There was serious healing and hope and courage happening that day. And this went well into the evening. No one left. The meeting was over—but they weren’t. None of us left, because we all knew what came into that room—the power of God. We all knew it. But it did not come through giftedness or training or inspiration or planning, as good as those things are. It came in weakness. It came when people felt a need so great that they had nothing to lose anymore and nothing to hide anymore. It came in the honest, gut-wrenching confession of need and shame and ugliness and fear. It came to the fellowship of the weak and shriveled hands.
I've learned a lot more about the fellowship of the shriveled hand in the last few of years in my own life. While living and serving in the USA for the past 20 years, I would come to discover my own weaknesses as a result of growing up as the child of an alcoholic father. I couldn’t talk about it mainly, because I didn’t understand how it impacted me. Then, I went to an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting where they had a separate group for adult children of alcoholics (ACOA). In AA, people introduce themselves by saying, “My name is—Dave—and I’m an alcoholic. In ACOA, we’d say, “My name’s Dave, and I’m an adult kid of an alcoholic.” Then, everyone would say, “Hi Dave!” in a sincere tone of voice. It was to help people like ACOA’s to feel welcomed. “You’re welcome here!” As people shared in a few short moments their own journey into their brokenness, I discovered words to describe my own pain as others shared their story of weakness and inadequacy. I learned that I could talk about my broken heart, and stretch out my shriveled hand.
Why did Jesus so intentionally make that man stand up in front of everybody? Why didn't He just call him aside and talk privately—offline if you will? Why put this man's weakness on public display? I think maybe part of it is that Jesus was wanting to begin a new kind of community where people who are needy and imperfect and in trouble and weak and deformed and ugly and shamed are particularly celebrated. I think maybe it's because shame can be either hidden or healed. But it can't be both. So, here at Kanto Plains Baptist, we invite you to stretch out your hand!
David Ronan, Ph.D.