I grew up in a musical family and my twin brother is a saxophone player and performed a lot of jazz in his day. I remember hearing a story about a jazz musician, singer, and band leader, Cab Calloway. People who knew the legendary jazz musician, knew him as a man of dignity and humor. One night at Birdland, the well-known jazz club in New York, Calloway was on stage introducing a promising young saxophone player. As the sax player finished his set, a “self-appointed” jazz critic from the audience came over to him and said, in front of Cab, “You aren’t that good, man. All you can do is play like Charlie Parker.” Cab took the young man’s sax and handed it over to the critic. “Here,” he said, “why don’t you play it like Charlie Parker.”
Isn’t it true that whenever we try to do something significant, somebody comes along to criticize us? The world is full of critics, critics that think they know everything and they want something to be a certain way with no room for grace. And we get that in our Gospel text for today. Jesus is in the synagogue worshiping God, teaching, and praying. And we see that this Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke, is thoroughly Jewish. He is constantly in the synagogue performing his Sabbath responsibilities and rituals. And like I said, he was praying and teaching. But one thing Jesus tended to do while he was in the synagogue, something that wasn’t allowed, was healing. Do you remember in chapter six of Luke’s gospel when Jesus healed the man with the withered hand? Just as today with the bent-over woman, this man with a bent hand didn’t ask for healing. He didn’t need faith to make him well. No, Jesus saw the man who had come into the synagogue to worship God despite is illness, despite his circumstance, and despite the rejection of others. Jesus saw him. Jesus healed him. And, just like today’s text, it was on the Sabbath. And do you remember what Jesus said? Jesus said to all those religious leaders and critics, “I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?”
And so, we see a thoroughly Jewish Jesus teaching in the synagogues and keeping the Sabbath… mostly. And I say mostly because what we have seen is that loving, caring for, and healing people is more important than the Sabbath rules or any kind of spiritual law. Jesus made it clear that God chooses people over religion. God chooses life over death. God chooses healing over disease. God chooses love over rules. And so, as with most of the Sabbath stories regarding Jesus, a crippled woman comes to him seeking healing. And we see that her particular ailment is caused by a malevolent spirit. In the Greek, the disease is not only caused by a spirit, but more specifically the “spirit of weakness.” So, is this a healing story, an exorcism story, or a conflict with the leaders of the synagogue? Yes, to all. This is a classic story about the power of God to not only heal our bodies and heal our spirits, but to bring us into community with one other despite the religious, ethnic, and social boundaries we put around each other to isolate ourselves.
But as a good Jew, Jesus didn’t abandon the religious law totally. He just saw the law through the eyes of grace. Dr. David Lose recognizes this fact. He says, “But as important as law is – and notice that Jesus doesn’t set aside the law but rather offers a different interpretation of it – it must always bow to mercy, to life, to freedom. Law helps us live our lives better, but grace creates life itself. Law helps order our world, but grace is what holds the world together. Law pushes us to care for each other, but grace restores us to each other when we’ve failed in the law. Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God, and while the law helps us make sense of and get more out of life in the kingdom of the world, it must always bend to the grace that constitutes the abundant life Jesus proclaims. For above and beyond all the laws ever received or conceived, the absolute law is love: love God and love your neighbor. Or, perhaps, love God by loving your neighbor.”
You see, this woman was not loved as a neighbor. She was different. She was on the edges of society in every way. She was bent-over in body and in appearance, and she was pushed out to the margins. Because of her physical illness and her spiritual possession by a demon, she was ultimately unclean in the eyes of her critics. She was not even supposed to enter the synagogue at all. Maybe you can imagine this woman, small in stature compared to the men and also bent over at the waist, having to sit in the back of the room (because men sat in the front in the synagogue and women behind them). We can see from this that it might’ve been easy for this woman to go relatively unnoticed, hiding in the back, simply wanting to worship God. She was invisible. She was invisible to her community as people probably slowly stopped seeing her after 18 years of this condition. Not only did people stop seeing her but she probably only saw the dirt and dust of the ground. She couldn’t look people in the eyes. All she could see in her hunched over position were her own feet in front of her. She couldn’t fully see the world and the world didn’t fully see her.
But Jesus saw her. I don’t know how he did. She was used to being invisible and on the margins. But Jesus saw her. Jesus didn’t see the men at the front of the room. Jesus didn’t see the healthy people participating in the praying and teaching. Jesus didn’t see those who stood up straight and looked him in the eyes. Jesus didn’t see the religious leaders and critics. No, Jesus saw this unclean woman. Jesus saw this woman without a name. Jesus saw this woman with a disability. Jesus saw this woman possessed by a spirit of weakness. Jesus saw this woman who was different. Jesus saw this woman! And even though the woman couldn’t see Jesus, couldn’t lift her head or even her heart to the loving Lord, she didn’t have to. Jesus crossed all of the barriers of uncleanness and of religious law in order to recognize and heal her.
And Jesus saw her because I’m sure he had the prophet Isaiah’s words in his head, the words Jesus spoke to the assembled religious faithful at his hometown synagogue after being baptized in the Jordan River at the beginning of his ministry. He had the words reverberating in his mind and soul, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And this woman was oppressed. She was oppressed by a spirit of weakness. She had a spirit that made her back and her soul weak. She was oppressed and bound up by this demon. And Jesus knew the law so well that he responded to the religious critics, “You hypocrites… critics! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” Did you hear it? If even animals that are tied up and in bondage get released on the sabbath day, shouldn’t a beloved creation of God, a daughter of Abraham, be released from her bondage too? I can hear Jesus saying, “Isn’t that what the Sabbath is for? The Sabbath where we remember our freedom from Egyptian slavery? The Sabbath where we are called to celebrate and honor the God of life and liberty and love?”
Frances Taylor Gench in her book, Back to the Well: Women’s Encounters with Jesus in the Gospels, writes that since freedom and liberation are at the heart of Sabbath worship, “the release of a captive woman, then, is a highly appropriate way to make the day holy, representing the very fulfillment, rather than a violation, of the sabbath.” That is how Jesus answered his critic that day, not by being confrontational or contrary, not by debating and disputing, but by simply acting consistently within his tradition by setting her free. And by setting her free, Jesus set everyone in the room free, free from their social and moral superiority, free from their resolute restrictions, free from their narrow thinking of what God’s day of good rest should mean. This woman was freed from the spirit of weakness that held her down and encountered the loving touch of Jesus and the redemption of community that lifted her up.
In fact, was Jesus really working on the Sabbath? We see that Jesus rushed through the healing of the woman in only two verses when the rest of today’s gospel text was about Jesus’ critics. In fact, it might not have even been any work that Jesus did on the Sabbath. All he did was outstretch his arms and lay his hands on the woman. The text moves us quickly through the miracle in order to get to the conflict. So, the healing, although important, was not the ultimate goal. The lesson Jesus was trying to teach the critic and the crowd was the main purpose of this event. Jesus pushed against the spiritual leaders not with his extended hands but with what he announced. He said. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”
And this freedom was the most important thing in this text, not the healing. The healing was actually done in the passive voice, “She was straightened up.” It appears that Jesus was not the main actor in this healing as God, alone, is seen as the finisher of this miracle. But what Jesus did that was most important was to announce her freedom. He announced her freedom from pain; he announced her freedom from oppression; he announced her freedom from brokenness; he announced her freedom from poverty; he announced her freedom from isolation; he announced her freedom. And where there is freedom, there is power and praise. For when she was healed and set free, she stood up and praised God!
Friends, we need to rise up from our situations that are oppressing us and weakening us. For what we’ve learned in this text today is that regardless of this woman’s condition, she was brought back into community. She was given a name, “Daughter of Abraham.” She was made whole. And I know being free from oppression and being whole looks different to many of us. But in some ways, as humans, we are all bent down and bowed over by the weight of life. We have the weight of the world on our shoulders, the weight of failure, the weight of systemic oppression, the weight of debilitating illness, the weight of messing up and missing out, the weight that bends us down long before our spines succumb. No matter who we are or what our age, we all know there is something better out there that helps our spirits stand up straight and our souls set free from their prisons.
Leonard Sweet says it well, “We are all bent people. Life bends us all. In fact, life can provide an endless supply of weights to place upon our backs. Those weights bend our body and they bend our souls. [Yet], Jesus delivered the woman who was bent in two from the weight of life by offering her identity. Jesus did not define her in terms of her weights. Jesus did not define her in terms of her illness. Jesus refused to define her in terms of her weakness and bentness. Jesus referred to her by her true identity: ‘a daughter of Abraham.’”
What is weighing you down today? Is it knowing that cancer feels stronger than you imagined? Is it chronic, physical pain? Is it crushing financial debt? Is it your family in crisis or the welfare of your children? Is it the fear of the “other” or the systemic injustices you see every day? Whatever it is, God sees it and God sees you. Even if you are too weak to step out in faith, God sees you! Even if your eyes are downcast and your back is bent, God sees you! And although we might not experience a miracle like the bent-over woman, know that God is with you and God sees you.
So, even if the weight of the world is on your spirit, God wants to stand you up. Whatever it is, God wants you to be unleashed from your burden, even though you didn’t ask, and for you to look the divine in the eyes. God wants to give you freedom and to lift you up, knowing that there will be systems and policies and people and demons and evils that will try to keep you down and tell you that you don’t belong and to get out and to go back to where we came from as a crippled, lonely, outcast, and possessed person. Yet, in the spirit of this Sabbath day and through the power of Jesus, we must say “No!” We are called to more. We are called to stand up straight, whether it be in body, or heart, or spirit. No matter who we are, we must use all of ourselves to praise God! So, rise up, sons and daughters of Abraham. Rise up, the Sabbath was made for us, not us for the Sabbath. Don’t let the critics or the religious traditions or the stifling rituals or the pains of this world get in the way. Rise up, church, and praise God!
Amen.