Year C

Luke 13:10-17

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

Straitened Up By Grace

My office desk is not usually known to be spotless. I do occasionally try and straighten it up a bit but I have a system, an order that works for me even if it sometimes looks messy. Today’s texts may look a bit messy. Our capacity to make a mess of things is always possible for us humans, but thank God, God raises up prophets and Jesus, and sends them into lives that need to be straightened out and put back into order. God is with us and comes to straighten up our messes as God did for the woman in today’s Gospel reading. She needed to be straightened up and rescued. As was his custom, Jesus went to the synagogue for worship that Sabbath morning. As he was preaching and teaching he noticed on the fringe of the crowd a very crippled woman. She was bent over and was unable to stand up straight.

When he inquired, Jesus was told the woman had been that way for eighteen years. Hard to imagine? For eighteen years, this woman spent every waking moment bent over. There is a man here in  in Vidalia who is afflicted by the same condition. Jesus, Luke tells us was moved with compassion by her plight. He calls the woman over and says, “Woman you are set free from your ailment” and immediately the woman stood up straight and started to praise and thank God. This absolutely irritated one of the leaders of the synagogue. Has he any idea what he sounds like? He criticizes Jesus for healing the woman on the Sabbath. This religious leader believed healing required work and that there is no excuse for working on the day set aside for rest and worship.

Obviously, his understanding of law and keeping it was more important than caring for people. Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, in 2007 wrote in the New York Times Magazine about his experience of having been educated in a religious school run by a group called “Modern Orthodox.” He tells of a school assembly in which a local physician, a member of the modern Orthodox movement, argued that ‘Torah, or the first five books of the bible, teaches one might break the Sabbath to save the life of a Jew, but not a Gentile, except under particular circumstances. This understanding of the Torah (which is not unanimously held by all Jewish scholars) underlines how seriously observant Jews take the Sabbath. Even if the Sabbath may be broken to save the life of a Jew, the logic of this view does not permit breaking it to heal an affliction that does not threaten the life of the victim.

The crippled woman in this text is not in mortal danger and the leader of the synagogue believes could wait another day or more. As we often see, Jesus identifies with the woman rather than the leader of the synagogue. The law of the Sabbath, meant to call people to turn from their usual daily work and allow God to be present to them and touch their hearts and minds, to straighten them up is used here to try to prevent God from healing this woman. Jesus refers to her as a “daughter of Abraham.” No other woman in scripture is referred to in this manner and he does this, to remind them of their mutual descent from Abraham and that in Genesis we read “God created the human being in God’s own image, in the image of God, God created male and female, God created them.”

Jesus has first pointed out the lowly estate in which most women were considered to live, and then elevated her to an absolutely equal status with the men who were criticizing her. The fact that Jesus was being more faithful to the Torah than the leaders of the synagogue is confirmed by Luke when he says: “All the opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.” Those wonderful things were both his works of compassion, his healings, as well as his words that Mark records “the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.” The leader of the synagogue could not see that Jesus fulfilled the very meaning of Sabbath in his healing which is finding wholeness in God.

God is not selective in choosing only certain people to receive God’s gift of wholeness and healing. Rather God draws near to all, awaiting their response in faith. In his day, Jesus denounced and straightened out the religious leaders regarding who God is and who they ought to be, just as the prophet Jeremiah did in his day. Jeremiah is a giant among the OT prophets. He is known and called by God before he was even formed in the womb. Despite his resistance, God commissions him to be a prophet to the nations. He had the task of watching over the demise of Jerusalem at the hands of Babylon around the end of the 7th century BC. Into this chaos, he speaks the word of the Lord and brings the presence of God to all the peoples.

His task involved both pulling down and building up, and the Lord promises “I am with you.” Hope has the final word. Through him as through Jesus, and also through the writer of Hebrews today, God straightens out any misconceptions. The author of Hebrews seeks to straighten us out by contrasting the OT’S God of wrath with the NT’S God of grace. Following up the extended examples of faith we’ve heard about in the past two weeks, the author warns against rejecting God’s grace. There is much more at stake in the salvation available in Christ than was at stake in the salvation available to Israel. We now have access to the living presence of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to Jesus, who mediates the new covenant that Jesus brings.

God, who formed us in our mothers womb, continues to come to straighten and save us, to be our rock and our fortress where we can find shelter from the storms that threaten to overwhelm us. Jesus came preaching that the kingdom of God is at hand even now in the lives of his people, revealing God’s healing power at work in him and through the Spirit of God, healing continues to happen through God’s people. I have seen people healed through prayer and medicine and I have experienced several instances of healing, myself. Jesus came to do the work of liberating bodies from sickness and minds and spirits held captive by the power of sin and evil, and  to commission us to carry on his work today. Let us give thanks for the new world God continues to usher in through the power of the spirit of the risen Christ, a kingdom that will not be shaken, a kingdom of sons and daughters who stand upright in virtue and grace before their God.