WOMAN, YOU ARE SET FREE OF YOUR INFIRMITY

Luke 13:10-17

It is a Saturday morning in the Jewish synagogue, the Sabbath day for Jews, and Jesus is teaching the multitudes, when suddenly, out of nowhere, a crippled woman appears. Stooping at the waist, hunched over like a candy cane, she had been this way for 18 years. She doesn’t ask Jesus for anything, she doesn’t beg him for a miracle. She does not speak, does not have a name, she does not ask to be cured, she takes no initiative. One is struck by her passivity. She just appears there, her twisted, crooked self. But Jesus felt compassion on her and calls her to come up to the front of the synagogue, and he placed his hands on her. “Woman, you are free from your ailment.” And immediately, the woman stood up straight, something she had not been able to do for 18 years, and she began to praise God.

Many of the people cheered the healing. They had witnessed a bona fide miracle, and they rejoiced with the woman. But the leader of the synagogue, the senior rabbi, if you will, was upset. Not because the woman had been healed, but because she had been healed on the Sabbath.

What for the President of the Synagogue is observance of the Law, for Jesus is hypocrisy: "Hypocrites, is there one of you who does not untie his ox or his donkey from the manger on the Sabbath and take it down for watering? And this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan has held bound these eighteen years – was it not right to untie this bond on the Sabbath day?”

            With this example drawn from every day life, Jesus indicates how illogical these men are. They see no difficulty in working for the sake of their ox or ass by untying it and taking it out to water, a mere animal, yet they object to Jesus untying this woman who have been tied by Satan for eighteen years.  If it is permitted to untie an ox or a donkey on Saturday to give it water, much more will it be permitted to untie a daughter of Abraham to free her from the power of evil. The true sense of the observance of the Law which pleases God is this: to liberate persons from the power of evil and to make them stand up, in order that they can render glory to God and praise him. Jesus imitates God who sustains those who are unsteady or weak and lifts those who fall (Ps 145, 14; 146, 8).

Walter Wink, in his book Engaging the Powers, suggests that Jesus' action represented a revolution happening in seven short verses. In this short story, Jesus tries to wake people up to the kind of life God wants for them. He often talks about the Kingdom of God where people have equal worth and all of life has dignity. But in the latter part of his ministry, he begins to act this out. In the midst of a highly patriarchal culture Jesus breaks at least six strict cultural rules:

   1. Jesus speaks to the woman. In civilized Jewish society, men did not speak to women in public, even their wives. Remember the story in John 4 where Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well? She was shocked because a Jew would speak to a Samaritan. But when the disciples returned, the scripture records, "They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman." In speaking to her, Jesus jettisons the male restraints on women's freedom.

   2. He calls her forward to the center of the synagogue. By placing her there, he challenges the notion of a male monopoly on access to knowledge and to God.

   3. He touches her, which revokes the holiness code. That is the code which "protected" men from a woman's uncleanness and from her sinful seductiveness.

   4. He calls her "daughter of Abraham," a term not found in any of the prior Jewish literature. This is revolutionary because it was believed that women were saved through their men. To call her a daughter of Abraham is to make her a full-fledged member of the nation of Israel with equal standing before God.

   5. He heals on the Sabbath, the holy day. In doing this he demonstrates God's compassion for people over ceremony, and reclaims the Sabbath for the celebration of God's liberal goodness.

   6. Last, and not least, he challenges the ancient belief that her illness is a direct punishment from God for sin. He asserts that she is ill, not because God willed it, but because there is evil in the world. In other words, bad things happen to good people.

You and I may be eight or eighty today, or eighteen or another in-between age. We may not be physically bent as the woman of the Gospel was. But who knows, maybe we do, perhaps there is always something that bends us low, keeps us from standing to our full height as children of God. It may be like the hypocrisy that the Pharisee shows, it maybe selfishness and narrow-mindedness, it maybe pride or lust, it maybe anything. Physically, we may stand tall, but emotionally and spiritually, we have been made dwarves, cripples and pygmies by our sins.

Let us ask the Lord Jesus to also heal us of our deformity and our own hypocrisy. Let us close our eyes and in the silence of our hearts, let us listen to the soothing and gentle words: “You are free from infirmity.” Believe that it will happen, not tomorrow, but right now. Believe that when you receive the Eucharist, the Lord will also whisper in your ears, “You are free from everything that bends you and weighs you down. You are free from all these because you are a child of God.