The following sermon was preached at saint benedict’s table on Sunday August 25, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Here’s something I’ve been wondering about for a very long time: Jesus can heal people. So, why doesn’t Jesus heal everyone? Why does he seemingly pick and choose who he is going to heal? Why didn’t he just walk through the crowds of people who tended to form whenever he was around with his hands outstretched and just zap everyone in the crowd with his healing power?
Isn’t that more efficient? Isn’t that more compassionate?
Well, as I thought about this throughout the week, I came up with a couple of hunches.
The first, is that Jesus values consent. I didn’t do an exhaustive search of every healing narrative this week but as best I can remember, Jesus never heals anyone who doesn’t wish to be healed. They either come to him asking to be healed, or he directly asked them if they wish to be healed.
There is no consent in a practice of just walking through a crowd zapping people, and so Jesus doesn’t do that.
Consent matters.
Hunch number two: I think that when Jesus looks at people, he sees them very differently than I do.
If Jesus and I walked through a crowd together and counted the number of people who required healing, I think that my number would be a lot higher than his because even though I know in my head this is not true, I still have a tendency to think that every person who is deaf wants to hear, and every person who thinks or moves or looks different than the standard I have internalized wants desperately to conform to that standard.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, and I’m working on getting better, but I still tend to think that the ideal for humanity looks a lot like a Ken doll and a Barbie doll. And if you don’t look like that, then there is something wrong with you, and you know it, and you want to be healed so that you can conform to that standard.
A standard I don’t conform to. A standard no one conforms to.
But God’s standards and my warped standards are not the same. Thanks be to God.
God’s vision of what is means to be human is infinitely more diverse than Barbie and Ken. Humanity is more complex and beautiful than anything I have ever tried to reduce it to.
And we need the diversity. We need people who move and think and look and love differently than we do. That diversity enriches and deepens community.
Healing isn’t about making us all the same. Healing is a way of saying, you are not currently living the life you were created to live, and I want to help you with that.
The woman in today’s story is in need of healing. We are told that a spirit has been crippling her for eighteen years, bending her down towards the ground, and making it impossible for her to stand up straight. (v.11)
This is not how she wants to live or was meant to live.
Being freed of this crippling spirit would dramatically improve her life.
And we’ll get to her in a moment, but first, let’s look at the circumstances that frame her story.
Today’s gospel begins with Jesus teaching a crowd in a synagogue. This means he must have impressed the leader of the synagogue, who allowed him to teach, and also the people of the area, who have gathered to hear him speak.
The synagogue leader’s positive impression of Jesus will change, however, when Jesus chooses to heal on the Sabbath. Healing is work, and you’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath day.
The idea of Sabbath is one of the most powerful and precious gifts we have ever been given. One that we’ve largely forgotten and desperately need to reclaim. Sabbath has both individual and communal implications, and today’s story focusses on the communal.
Sabbath was a gift that God gave to the people of Israel after they had been enslaved for generations in Egypt. When the people spent a day without working, it was meant to remind them that once they were slaves, but now they were free. It was a day that was always meant to be about freedom, not legalism.
Luke’s gospel is carefully structured and so when we read this story of Jesus teaching in a synagogue, it’s helpful to remember an earlier story of Jesus teaching in another synagogue. In that earlier story, Jesus says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” (Luke 4:18-19)
Sabbath is about freedom and liberation. When he heals the woman he says she is to be “set free” and “released” from her “bond.” (apoluo, v. 12; luov.16, desmosv. 16). Jesus also draws directly from the 10 Commandments where Sabbath is directly linked to Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt when he debates with the synagogue leader. (Deut. 5:12-15).
Jesus therefore sees the Sabbath as a day to both remember and celebrate freedom from slavery so actions which liberate Israelites in the present day are in keeping with the spirit of the Sabbath.
Which is why Jesus argues that his decision to heal the woman and restore her to full participation in her community is in keeping with the tenants of Sabbath. She also deserves to be free and so Jesus frees her.
Additionally, given that his contemporaries had found a work around to their strict “no work on the Sabbath” practices that allowed them to care for animals, then surely it was also OK to provide care for a human being?
Or was that perhaps part of the problem. Did the people actually need to be reminded that this woman was a human being?
Jeannine K Brown imagines the woman’s story in this way: “She had gotten used to looking at people out of the corner of her eye, by looking up and sideways.
After eighteen years, she could hardly remember any other way of seeing the world.
On this particular Sabbath, there was a special excitement at the synagogue, where she regularly went to worship. A Galilean preacher and prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, had arrived in town and would be teaching there. She and the others in town had heard reports about Jesus–how he talked about God’s reign arriving soon and how he healed sick people.
She was not sure how many of the rumors to believe, but she was trying not to get her hopes up. Her life already had too many disappointments to count.
When she entered the synagogue, the place was abuzz. As Jesus began to teach, however, the room was hushed. Moments later, his words turned from teaching to invitation. He had caught her eye–no mean feat, given that he had to lean over and incline his head to do so. “Come here,” he said to her. She slowly made her way to the front of the assembly.
What happened next amazed the whole congregation. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When this man, Jesus, spoke those words and put his hands on her broken, bent body, she felt power surge through her. Without hesitation, she straightened her once crooked back. She stood tall and praised her God . . .”
Imagine being this woman. Because of your distinctive bent posture, people can spot you from a mile away. Plus, in a small town everyone knows everyone else’s business, so everyone knows yours. You can’t blend in or hide so you’re always visible. But your posture also makes people uncomfortable so they ignore you, ostracize you, making you simultaneously overly visible, and invisible.
It’s a lonely way to live.
In his article, Disability and Healing: A Rereading Based on the Synoptic Gospels, Cuban theologian Rolando Mauro Verdecia Ávila takes this further by explaining that at this time, in order to be understood to be human, you had to conform to certain standards and one of the key standards was the ability to be in an upright position, a position that would allow you to look up at the sky, to look up to where God was believed to live. This was one of the key criteria that distinguished a human being from an animal.
So when her neighbours saw her, shuffling bent over through the streets, they did not see a human being, they saw someone who was inferior, an animal, and therefore, they saw no reason to treat her with respect, no reason to include her, no reason, really, to notice her at all.
And so, when Jesus heals her, he does not simply straighten her back. The healing begins when he notices her, takes an interest in her, touches her, and it continues when he gives her the dignity of a name and a place within the context of that community.
She is not just healed of a physical ailment. She is liberated from societal isolation, she is liberated from the forces that have enslaved her.
Rolando observes that “Jesus reinterprets the physical illness in terms of oppression and slavery. But, as if that were not enough, he also has the boldness to highlight the identity and dignity of that woman by calling her daughter of Abraham. (v.16) acknowledging that she has always been a legitimate member of her people, and not just now that she is no longer a person with a disability.
So all those affirmative actions, together with the controversy with the head of the synagogue, who opposed the fact that the healing occurred on the Sabbath day (vv.14-16) become, on the one hand, an indisputable denunciation of the hypocrisy and injustice of those who place institutions and traditions above the value of the life and wellbeing of person, and on the other hand, a radical and integral liberation for all the social, economic, cultural and religious burdens that weighted heavily on the back and on the life of that woman and kept her oppressed and enslaved.”[1]
Jesus does more than simply heal this woman’s bent back. He restores her to the community that has rejected her. He provides her with dignity and a name, calling her “daughter of Abraham,” a phrase that does not occur anywhere else in the entire Bible. This name emphasizes that this woman is a member of the community and even more than that, that she always has been. She does not receive this name because she has been healed, it is a name that has always belonged to her. Even if many people have forgotten it.
When Jesus heals the Daughter of Abraham the first thing she does is praise God. When the people hear Jesus’ argument that if animals can be lead to water than can’t a woman be set free from eighteen years of bondage on the Sabbath Day they also realize that he is right and Luke tells us “the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that [Jesus] was doing.” (17)
They too were set free in that moment. Set free from a legalistic way of thinking. Which is certainly something to celebrate.
In what ways have you been bent out of shape? It is a series of poor choices? Institutional systems that have not been designed with you in mind? Patriarchal forces? Old, hurtful stories or lies from your past?
What unnecessary burdens are you carrying? Where have you been bent out of shape and are in need of healing?
Today’s gospel is a story of individual healing but also of a person being restored to her community. What kind of community do we want to be? Do our religious traditions help or hinder us in that process? If a “daughter of Abraham” joined us today, would she find welcome or condemnation? And if condemnation, what do we plan to do about that?
Because when someone is being oppressed, when someone is being bent down towards the ground, we need to do something to lift them up.
May we always be a community of freedom and liberation that inspires each other to live fully into being who we were created to be.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1]Disability and Healing: A Rereading Based on the Synoptic Gospels by Rolando Mauro Verdecia Ávila , 18.