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Luke 13:10-17
What was he teaching? You know, Jesus…right at the beginning of the passage it says, well, it says this…
Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.
Well, what was he teaching? Was he teaching out of Isaiah:
Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.
Or perhaps from Exodus:
You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger,
for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt.
What was he saying just before he noticed this woman, bent over and suffering in the middle of the place that preached these very phrases and whose priests walked by her? Perhaps his mind was set on larger things, like the oppression of entire ethnicities by the Romans, or the economic subjugation of his people by empire after empire, or the sort of cosmic injustice that lies concealed within each of our hearts. That’s the kind of stuff you give sermons on, right?
But he doesn’t choose to speak on any grand dilemma, or to place upon his listeners the burden of having to solve the world’s problems. No, he simply looks at what is in front of him and preaches Isaiah and Exodus by doing what he can, where he is, with what he has. The crowd, the text tells us, rejoices as they witness this, and I think that the people are rejoicing because they finally see in the example of Jesus a God they not only recognize, but a God who is actually on their side rather than one who is no different than a king or Caesar. Jesus reveals to them a God who seeks freedom for the oppressed and liberty to the captive, even if it is their own body in which they are trapped. And in turning to the woman in front of him, he unburdens them from the crushing weight of obligation to fix the world, to eliminate all evil, to create the kin-dom all by themselves, a trap we too easily fall into…a trap that moves us from action to apathy.
This is one of the most profound lessons of this story. Perhaps this is Jesus re-shaping God for his audience more than anything else he has done, for with his simple actions he turns the conversation from the praise of God, from the ritualized observance of God, to the practice of faith…from a God under whose arbitrary will you and I reside to a God who participates with us in the creation of the world. It is this same Jesus who will go on to reveal to them that the kin-dom, “…will not come with observable signs. Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is.’ For you see,” he will teach them, “the kin-dom of God is in your midst.” (Luke 17:20) He will teach them, and us, that God is revealing a new world to us, not dropping it in our laps nor erasing one to start another…or promising only a “heaven to come” while the world around us goes to hell.
When Jesus heals this woman, he is doing more than flaunting the authority of the temple priests. He is doing more than making some statement about the law of love versus the love of law. He is making a claim on the people who God sees, even when we won’t. The temple authority says, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day”, as if we’re supposed to believe this her first time to the temple, the maiden voyage of her search for healing, and if she’ll just come back tomorrow. Was that the answer for 18 years? Was that the claim for almost two decades, a shame and rejection that may have marked this woman so profoundly that it stooped her over, bending her to something that kept her enslaved?
2000 years later, Dr. King made the same claim as Jesus, in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, in which he asserts that no tradition, no theological principle or theory or scriptural interpretation, is an excuse for willfully extending suffering or delaying wholeness. As Matthew Skinner points out in his commentary on this passage, Jesus is actually demonstrating to the synagogue leaders their misunderstanding of the purpose of the Sabbath. Deuteronomy 5:12-15 states:
Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Got that one down.
Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God;
you shall not do any work… Yup, got that, too.
It’s this part that gets left off…Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.
Skinner writes: “In Luke 13, Jesus reaffirms what his scriptures (and what his tradition) told him: God sees no virtue in suffering. Nothing can be gained by consigning a fellow human being to one more day of unnecessary torment. To perpetuate injustice is to defile the holiness of the weekly Sabbath day that God ordained. To deny freedom is to offend the God of the Exodus. It’s because of who God is (emphasis added) that Jesus can’t wait.” And this is not new to Jesus, mind you…this is the ethos of Isaiah and Exodus, and the heart of the rabbinic tradition in which Jesus follows. This is part of the seemingly eternal struggle for the soul of the church…how do we praise God? With our endless prayers and loud praise, or with lives filled with the same compassion and grace God has showered on us despite our own shaky relationship with the rules?
I’ve had a chance to live this out this week. Typically we don’t get many un-sheltered people coming by this church, maybe because of our location or how we sit so far off the road, but this week I’ve met a guy who has been using one of our outside plugs to recharge his phone. And it was the sight of someone sitting down out here, right in front of the sanctuary that brought the comments to my desk…who is that guy? What are we going to do? And suddenly I had thoughts of systems of poverty and budget cuts, of global markets and job insecurities, of addiction and abuse and issues so large that I just sat at my desk and fretted. Then I decided to just go give the guy some water and a granola bar and ask him his name.
Now it is your preacher’s prerogative to tell you only the shining examples of his faith, the times that he listened to that small voice and just did what it was prompting, and to conveniently omit the times he fails to do the remotely Christian thing. I walk away. I shun. I make snap judgments about people and places before I ever even say, “Hi.” I am far more often the synagogue leader, quotes rules and regulations, placing walls of policy ahead of real, human interaction.
All that got me paying attention to the eighteen years, and how many people this woman surely passed who apparently never tried to raise her spirit, to fill her heart back up, to give her hope or try to show her some light. For it takes a heavy spirit to stoop someone over like that and I think those words are there on purpose. This isn’t scoliosis or some spinal disease, this is 18 years of looking at the ground, a sense of self so powerfully twisted that it dictates your actions; how you speak, where and when you go, how you act, how you think of yourself, and think of others. It is bondage, as Jesus calls it, maybe from abuse or shame, or addiction to any number of things that she may have internalized so deeply that she is identified only as the “bent over woman.” And Jesus calls her by name. He stops, perhaps in the middle of some grand speech on a huge topic and notices this woman…and calls her by name. And hearing her name she thinks, “I remember her… I remember my life before all of this.” Hearing her name is like that breeze this morning, cool and refreshing after the endless, muggy summer mornings. And Jesus reminds her of who she is…and whose she is. And it is a miracle.
The religious leader steps right in, of course, to remind people that this is all heresy and suspect and that the rulebook clearly states…and I think how many times I do the same. I think that grace isn’t in the right package or that politics like those can’t produce anything good or that I might want the Spirit to move, but only the way I want it to move.
Still, I hope the Spirit is moving here today, reminding us that following Jesus is not about shaming people into community, or marginalizing those who struggle, or reaching outside the circle to help those in need as if it’s some noble gesture on our part. I hope that I will listen more often to the Holy Spirit whispering her love song in my ear, asking me to risk relationship and to find the kin-dom with courage. I hope the Spirit is reminding us that our task, our job in following Jesus is not to fix the world, but to reach out to the people right in front of us and be God’s cool breeze on them, if only for a moment.
May it be so. Amen.