Preparation:
SurelyI don’t get the opportunity to watch many novellas. It a shame because I enjoy the plots – how the sweet but poor maid from the country falls in love with the son of the wealthy businessman and they marry against the wishes of his parents.
You meant
When You lifted
Her up
Long ago
To your
praise
Compassionate One
Not one woman
Only but all women
Bent
By unbending ways.
--Miriam Therese Winter
This passage from Luke would make a great Novella – not because there are any romantic scenes with Jesus or anybody else….but because a crippled woman with no claim, no hope for healing, who is ignored by everyone, this woman is noticed by Jesus – the son of God. Healing and new life triumph over repressive rules and regulations. I find Jesus to be described in a way that makes him my hero!
You can see it in your mind, This woman, crippled and bent over, as she has been every Sunday for 18 long years, comes quietly into sanctuary, she comes a little late because she walks so slow and if she comes after the service has begun, she knows that she won’t have to talk to anyone. Its not like anyone would say it to her face, but everyone in the sanctuary pretty much assumes that she must have committed a terrible, scandalous sin for God to have given her such an illness and bent her back like that. They often fish for details when they talk with her and she doesn’t like to talk with people who hold such harsh judgment in their hearts, so she avoids conversation.
This morning she shuffled quietly towards her usual seat in the back. She was so accustomed to being invisible that it startled her when Jesus called her over. She looked up to be sure that he was talking to her when he said “You are set free from your ailment” She wasn’t certain what was happening as he laid hands on her, but then she felt the liberation of healing course through her body. Her back straightened, as if by its own accord. She shouted out her gratitude and praise to God – all of the people around her seeing what had happened, started doing the same and the whole synagogue broke out in praise!
It’s a helpful exercise for us to try and find our place in the text, to try on the different Points of View. As we enter the experience of the bent over woman we can think of the things that bend each of us over.
– Sometimes it our jobs – I remember a few years ago a neighbor on Mariposa who used to work in the garment industry. The shop where he worked washed denim and he sprayed the acid on the jeans. Over the years his hand became permanently bent from squeezing the trigger on the sprayer. When I met him he could no longer open his hand all the way. Our work imposes a cost on our bodies and bends them. Sometimes it’s the fear of loosing our job that burdens us.
- Sometimes its our place in society that feels so fragile. Worrying about Immigration - The threat of deportation and having to rearrange a whole way of living to avoid la migra. Just walking down the street no longer feels safe and rumors fly around about this place and that street being raided. Pretty soon everything is contorted in an effort to hold on to what we have worked so hard to secure.
Our bodies and our spirit get bent over. Just like the woman who was bent over, its not like we are complaining, we are grateful to God for our job, our families, our homes, our lives. But sometimes the load is more than we can bear and it begins to break us and we are crushed by the weight of it. And bit by bit, people get used to seeing us all bent over and we get used to being bent over and pretty soon 18 years goes by and know one remembers the true “us”, all we remember is the broken down, bent over shadow of who we used to be.
But then Jesus sees us. And that is just the way that Jesus can see – he notices the outside, the broken and bent shell, but he also can see the inside, he can see, no matter how dim its grown, he can see the light of who we are. And with a word and laying on of hands, Jesus releases us from the prison of what has been breaking us – whether its our fears or our struggles and we are healed!
The Greek word in the original text that Luke uses to describe the healing is unusual. Given the context, we might assume that Luke would use the word “healing”, but the Greek phrase is actually “you are set free from your ailment” Set free – the same word used for liberation and release, as though a dove has been released from a cage.
How wonderful! Jesus healed a woman who had suffered so much for so long ! She was released from her suffering and set free!We would imagine that everyone there would be rejoicing and praising God! We could end right here and it this passage would be a happy little novella,
But that isn’t what happened, well at least for the leader of the synagogue. He starts to pick a fight with Jesus. Over the joyful shouts of praise he chastises the crowd. “ It’s the Sabbath, remember – work 6 days, rest on the 7th!. It’s almost as though he is saying, she’s been this way for 18 YEARS, what would be the big deal about coming back to tomorrow (18 years and 12 hours more) when its not the Sabbath and Jesus could heal her? It wasn’t right for Jesus to work like this, this is an UN-documented healing! This is an ILLEGAL healing!
People start to stare at him, all red in the face and then they turn to see how Jesus is going to react…will Jesus apologize? – it is after all the Sabbath and work is not supposed to be done…
Will Jesus take it back and Un-heal her and will her back bend over again?....The synagogue leader has really put Jesus in his place….
Jesus turns everything upside down and dishes it right back to him – You are crazy! you would give your ox and donkey food on the Sabbath – You allow that under the Sabbath law and that’s pretty much “work”. How can you deny this woman, who is a child of the covenant, obviously more important to God than a donkey, from being set free this very moment?
But 12 more hours Jesus? You could have avoided this whole conflict if you had just waited 12 hours to do exactly what you did during the Sabbath. Of course God wants healing, but in the appropriate time and place…Just be reasonable Jesus…
But maybe Jesus needed to make a larger point, just like Elvira Arellana needed to make her larger point last Sunday.
Maybe Jesus needed to do something so radical that it would make a clear distinction between the new order he was preaching and the old order of what had been.
When we look closely - the Synagogue leader and Jesus start out with a lot in common. They both love God with all their heart soul and minds. They both agree that this love for God needs to show up in our actions with other people.
It’s the next part where Jesus and the leader start to part company.
For the leader of the synagogue, well, he believed that the thing God wants most from us is obedience. And he believed that the most clear way that he could show his love for God was by obeying God’s commands. So when God’s law was “do no work on the Sabbath”, he was going to love God by obeying the law, no matter who needed to wait for her healing.
Now, before we start to see this synagogue leader as the bad guy in the novella, we need to take a deep breath and own the fact that often we are a lot like him. We too have grown comfortable with the way that the church works and the way that we understand Christians are “supposed to” behave and we find it troubling when people break the unspoken rules. When someone cuts into the line for coffee after the service, or maybe someone’s cell phone rings during the sermon. A part of us feels that God is being disrespected by the out of line behavior and we get indignant about it. So find a soft place, a little soft place in your heart for the synagogue leader, he’s trying hard and he is doing it out of love for God.
Its obvious to say it, but its clear that Jesus saw the whole thing differently. Jesus also loved God with all his heart and soul and mind. Jesus also believed in the importance of obeying God’s law and living in God’s way. But Jesus was teaching something different about what was most important thing to God. Jesus was teaching that the one thing God wants most from us is love. The law and commandments help guide us in loving and caring for each other, but they are a means not an end.
Jesus is teaching a radically new message. That God wants us to care for people…not keep them in line.
I imagine that the tension was pretty high in the exchange between Jesus and the synagogue leader. I wonder if later that day, after he had calmed down, if the leader felt embarrassed for actually objecting to the woman being made well.
I wonder what the woman thought of it all, if she found spiritual freedom in her physical release from being bent over?
I wonder if Jesus anticipated the impact of his words, if he could understand how radical it is for us to leave the predictability and comfort of a world ruled by law, where things are black or white for us to embrace a world where generosity and giving, restoration and healing and encouragement and renewal are the currency….
For some of us it is terrifying to leave the security of the world ruled by law. When everything is black or white, it is clear where we stand in terms of God.
When we leave that and embrace what Jesus is talking about, it is harder to have points of reference. We have to trust in God’s love for us each minute of each day. Its like the difference between swimming in an indoor swimming pool and the ocean. When we are in the pool, sure we feel the delicious wet and weightlessness of the water, and we are bounded by the sides of the pool and our feet meet the smooth tiles on the bottom of the pool and a filter takes out the impurities from the water. Its manageable and predictable to swim in a pool, just like its manageable and predictable to live life bound by the law, earning our place in God’s heart by doing right and being good.
Now when we swim in the ocean it’s a whole different ball game – the waves knock us around, the seaweed clings to our legs, the shells cut into our feet, some times a rip tide carries us where we don’t want to go AND when we bob and float and feel the ebb and flow of the enormity of the whole ocean and we find our selves being held by something so much bigger and more powerful than ourselves we can find our selves surrendering and joining in the flow of life. It is un-manageable and unpredictable to swim in the ocean, just like it is unmanageable and unpredictable to live a life of love, to trust that God’s love has set God’s seal upon our hearts and that forever and ever we will belong to God – whether we have parking tickets, whether or not we have papers, whether or not we seek healing on the Sabbath.
In just a little while, during the All Together Worship, we will have a healing service of prayer. I invite you to take some time to consider the ways that you might find yourself, like the woman in the Gospel, consider the ways that you are bent over this morning. What has burdened you? how has it changed you? And then, live into the second part of the passage and begin to trust the healing and wholeness that Jesus longs to restore in you, no matter what rules have been broken.
Let us live together in the love that God has for each of us.
Amen.
