Stretch Out Your Hand

Today’s readings look like they contradict each other. Paul orders the Corinthians to throw a man out of the Church. Jesus overrides the Sabbath rules to pull a man back in. One reading closes a door and the other opens one, and both claim to be acting for the sake of holiness.

They are, and the same principle runs under both. Holiness exists to save life. The Corinthians had forgotten that, so they tolerated a scandal and called their tolerance maturity. The Pharisees had forgotten it too, so they sat in the synagogue watching a man with a dead hand and hoped Jesus would heal him, because then they could file charges. Each side got the direction of holiness backwards. One protected the sinner at the expense of the body. The other protected the rule at the expense of the man.

Most of us lean one way or the other. We either keep quiet while the leaven spreads through the family, or we keep every rule while a brother withers in front of us. Today the Church also remembers Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, a Paris law student who got asked a question in a debate club that stung him for the rest of his life: what do you do besides talk? His answer was to stretch out his hand. Jesus asks the same thing of the man in the synagogue, and of you.

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 5:1-8

It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.

For though absent in body I am present in spirit, and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing. When you are assembled, and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Gospel: Luke 6:6-11

On another sabbath, when he entered the synagogue and taught, a man was there whose right hand was withered. And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him, to see whether he would heal on the sabbath, so that they might find an accusation against him. But he knew their thoughts, and he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come and stand here.” And he rose and stood there. And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” And he looked around on them all, and said to him, “Stretch out your hand.” And he did so, and his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.

Scriptural Analysis

A Scandal No One Would Name

Paul has just spent four chapters on the factions tearing Corinth apart. Now he turns to something worse. A man in the community is living with his father’s wife, which in Paul’s usage means a stepmother, the exact phrase Leviticus uses when it forbids the union (Leviticus 18:8). The Greek verb is in the present tense: this is an ongoing arrangement, and everyone knows about it. Even the pagans would not stand for it. Roman law forbade marriage to a stepmother, and Jewish law attached the penalty of being cut off from the people (Leviticus 18:29).^[1]

What actually upsets Paul, though, is the reaction of the Church. “You are arrogant,” he says, and the Greek word means puffed up, inflated. Some of the Corinthians apparently thought themselves so spiritually advanced that what a member did with his body did not matter. Others may have simply been unwilling to embarrass a wealthy patron. Either way, Paul tells them what they should have done instead: mourned. The word he uses is the one the Old Testament uses for grief over sin, the kind of sorrow that changes behavior, and the Greek grammar makes the point sharp. Their mourning should have been of such a kind that they removed the man from their midst. Sorrow over sin, in Paul’s mind, leads to action.^[2]

Then Paul does something unprecedented in Christian literature. He excommunicates. The language is a courtroom’s: you assemble, I am present in spirit, judgment is rendered in the name of the Lord Jesus, and the man is handed over. Paul’s word for “hand over” is the term Greek courts used for delivering someone to trial or punishment.^[3] But notice who executes the sentence. Satan. Within the Church a person enjoys a kind of sanctuary from the devil, because the Church is the temple of God and the Spirit dwells there (1 Corinthians 3:16). To be put outside is to lose that protection. Paul intends the man to feel it.

And here the reading turns. The purpose of the sentence is “that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.” Excommunication in Paul’s hands is a therapy of privation. The Church removes a man from the sacraments so that the loss will wake him up before the last judgment does. The Catechism still describes excommunication this way: the Church’s most severe penalty, which bars a person from the sacraments precisely so that he will be moved to repent.^[4] Paul is doing to the man what a surgeon does to a limb. He cuts in order to heal.

The Leaven And The Lamb

Then Paul reaches for an image every Jew in Corinth would feel in his bones. “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” Before Passover, Jewish households scoured every shelf for leaven, because to eat leavened bread during the feast meant being cut off from Israel (Exodus 12:15). Leaven makes bread rise, and it also corrupts. One tolerated scandal, Paul says, works through a community the same way, silently, and it spoils the whole batch.

But watch what he does with the metaphor. “Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened.” The Corinthians do not need to be founded again. Their baptism has already made them a holy people. Paul places the indicative before the imperative: you are unleavened, so become what you are. Then he gives the reason, and it is the earliest claim in the New Testament that Christ fulfills the Passover. “For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed.” The lambs slaughtered in the Temple never cleansed anyone’s kitchen. They only signaled that it was time to clean. The sacrifice of Jesus, on the other hand, actually cast out the leaven and made a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). John sees the same truth when he times the condemnation of Jesus to the hour the Passover lambs were being killed (John 19:14) and notes that not one of his bones was broken (John 19:36).^[5]

That is why the Christian Passover never ends. “Let us celebrate the festival,” Paul says, in the present tense, with “the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Sincerity here is a word that means unmixed. A Church that sweeps sin under the rug is celebrating with the old yeast.

Watching For A Reason To Accuse

Luke’s scene is the second of two Sabbath controversies. In the first, the disciples rubbed grain in their hands and Jesus answered the Pharisees with David and the bread of the Presence (Luke 6:1-5). Now he goes into the synagogue on another Sabbath, and Luke adds a detail found in no other Gospel: the man’s withered hand is his right hand. For most of us that is the working hand, the hand that earns bread, so the detail heightens the man’s misery. It may do more than that. Psalm 137 has the exiles by the rivers of Babylon swear, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither” (Psalm 137:5). Israel in Jesus’ day still lived under the shadow of exile, its tribes scattered and its land ruled by Gentiles, and the man with the dead right hand stands there like the nation itself, waiting to be restored.^[6]

The scribes and Pharisees “watched him.” Luke uses that verb for hostile surveillance, the same one he will use when they watch Jesus at a dinner (Luke 14:1) and when they send spies to trap him over the tax (Luke 20:20). They were looking for a charge, and the word Luke chooses is the technical term for filing a legal accusation, the same one that will be used at the trial before Pilate (Luke 23:2). The trial of Jesus begins here, in a Galilean synagogue, over a man’s hand. Cyril of Alexandria saw the irony exactly. The envious man, he said, feeds his grief on the good done by another. They wanted Jesus to heal, because the healing would give them something to use.^[7]

Jesus knew their thoughts, which for Luke is the mark of a prophet (Luke 2:35; 5:22; 7:39). So he took the initiative. He told the man to stand in the middle of the assembly, where everyone could see him, and then he asked the question that turns the trap around: “Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” Bede reads it as a rebuke of those who thought the Sabbath required rest even from good works, when the Law only ever forbade servile work, which is to say, evil. Cyril presses harder. The Sabbath was instituted for mercy. God commanded rest so that your servants and even your animals could rest. A man who has mercy on his ox and refuses it to a man with a crippled hand has become an accuser of the Law itself.^[8]

That is exactly how Saint Thomas Aquinas reads the third commandment. Servile work is forbidden on the Sabbath, and the deepest kind of servile work is sin, since whoever commits sin is a slave of sin (John 8:34). A bodily work done for the health of another is a different thing altogether. Thomas cites this very sort of case: “a bodily work that is directed to the bodily well-being of another is not contrary to the observance of the Sabbath.”^[9] The Catechism draws the same conclusion from this Gospel. Christ declares the Sabbath a day for doing good and saving life, because it is the day of the Lord of mercies.^[10]

The Hand That Stretches Out

“Stretch out your hand.” Jesus heals by a word, and the man obeys a command he could not physically fulfill until the moment he tried. Luke’s verb, “restored,” is the word the prophets use for the regathering of divided Israel (Hosea 11:11; Jeremiah 16:15), and the apostles will use it when they ask whether Jesus will now “restore the kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1:6). There is even an echo of Jeroboam, the king who split the kingdom. When he stretched out his hand against a prophet, it withered, and a prophet’s prayer restored it (1 Kings 13:4-6). Jesus has come to proclaim the jubilee (Luke 4:18), and a restored right hand on the Sabbath is a sign of a restored Israel.^[6]

Bede reads the man as all of us. The human race withered in its capacity for good works because our first parent stretched out his hand to take the fruit, and it was healed by the innocent hand stretched out on the cross. He adds a hard line: the withered hand was fittingly found in the synagogue, because where the gift of knowledge is greater, the fault of the sinner is heavier.^[7]

The Pharisees were “filled with fury.” Luke’s word literally means senselessness, the loss of one’s mind, and Plato used it for madness. The men who had come to guard the Law had, by the end of the scene, stopped thinking at all.^[11] The opposition that will end at Calvary has begun, and Jesus answers it in the very next verse by going up the mountain to pray all night before choosing the Twelve (Luke 6:12-13).

Daily Application

Both readings ask the same question of you. Is your holiness for life or against it?

Start with Paul, because his is the harder word today. The Corinthians thought they were being gracious. They were being cowardly, and Paul says the honest response to a brother’s public sin is grief that acts. Somewhere in your life there is probably a version of the Corinthian man: a relative living in a way that everyone at the table knows is wrong and no one names, a friend whose drinking is a joke until it is a funeral, a parish volunteer whose conduct makes the Church look like a lie. The pressure to say nothing is enormous, and we baptize the silence with the words of Jesus, “Judge not” (Luke 6:37). But Jesus in the same breath tells you to remove the beam from your own eye so that you can see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s (Matthew 7:5). He assumes you will help with the splinter. What he forbids is doing it while blind. The Church’s whole practice of fraternal correction rests on this: go to the person alone first, then bring others if you must (Matthew 18:15-17), and do all of it so that the person may be saved on the day of the Lord.^[12] Paul handed a man over so that his spirit would live. If your correction has no love for the sinner’s salvation in it, it is only the old leaven of malice in a new disguise.

Now turn to the synagogue, because most of us who take the faith seriously are more tempted by the Pharisees than by the Corinthians. We keep the rules. We know the rubrics. And we can end up watching. Watching the family that shows up late every Sunday, the young priest who does something differently, the neighbor whose life is a mess, and hoping in some small corner of the heart that they slip, because it confirms that we are the ones who got it right. Cyril’s diagnosis is uncomfortable. Envy feeds on the good done by someone else. The moment you find yourself disappointed that a person you dislike did something good, you are sitting with the scribes.

Blessed Frédéric Ozanam knew both temptations. He was a young Catholic in the Paris of the 1830s, brilliant, argumentative, winning debates against atheists at the Sorbonne. Then a member of his club said, in effect, that is fine, Mr. Ozanam, but what do you do besides talk? He was stung, and he decided that his words needed feet. He and a friend started climbing the stairs of the Paris tenements with bread and firewood. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul grew from that decision and still stretches out its hand in nearly every parish in the world.

Saint Ambrose ends his commentary on this Gospel with a line I cannot improve on. You have heard the Lord say, “Stretch out your hand.” That, Ambrose says, is a common and frequent cure, and you who think your hand is healthy should beware that it is not contracted by greed. Stretch it out to help your neighbor, to protect the widow, to defend the one being treated unjustly, to the poor man who begs from you, and to the Lord to ask pardon for your sins. As the hand is stretched out, so it is healed.^[7]

That is the whole of today. The man in the synagogue could not move his hand. He tried anyway, at the word of Jesus, and the trying was the healing. You may feel that your hand has been withered for years, by resentment, by fear of confrontation, by the comfortable habit of watching instead of helping. Jesus does not ask you to feel ready. He asks you to stand up in front of everyone and stretch it out. Do it today. Name the sin you have been silent about, gently and for the sake of the sinner. Give the help you have been withholding. Ask the Lord’s pardon with an open hand. It is the Sabbath of the Lord of mercies, and there is no better day for restoration.

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Notes

1. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 92; Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 209. ↩
2. Montague, First Corinthians, 92–93; Collins, First Corinthians, 210. ↩
3. Collins, First Corinthians, 207, 212. ↩
4. Montague, First Corinthians, 93–94; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1463. ↩
5. Montague, First Corinthians, 95–97; Collins, First Corinthians, 214. ↩
6. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 123–24. ↩
7. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 6:6–11, citing Cyril of Alexandria, Bede, and Ambrose. ↩
8. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 6:6–11 (Bede and Cyril); Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 102, 104. ↩
9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 122, a. 4, ad 3. ↩
10. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2173. ↩
11. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 610–11; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 102. ↩
12. Montague, First Corinthians, 98–99. ↩

Books Cited

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• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)