Today’s Gospel
reading is a beautiful one, a story of a woman who is given back her life by
Jesus, quite unexpectedly. But as with all healing miracles, it isn’t just
physical healing which is going on here, and it isn’t just the woman who needs that
healing.
The story takes
place in a synagogue, probably somewhere in Galilee. Crowds are flocking to
Jesus, out of need or curiosity, but not everyone has made up their minds what
to think of him. Is he a good teacher, a healer, an inspiring leader, or is he
a troublemaker intent on causing mayhem? The jury, for many people, is still
out. On this particular Sabbath day he’s been invited to teach in the local
synagogue, the place where that town gathered for prayer – a bit like we do in
our parish churches. Maybe the synagogue leader who invited him was under
pressure from the crowds to do so, maybe he wanted to see for himself what the
fuss was all about.
But anyway, here is
Jesus, preaching to an eager crowd, when suddenly a woman “appeared”
who was clearly suffering. Where
did she appear from? Was she lurking quietly in a dark corner, or hovering at
the doorway? Was she a regular, or
someone who had just come because she’d heard Jesus was there? We don’t know,
but she doesn’t seem to want to push herself forward. She doesn’t seem to have
any expectation that she will be healed. After all, she’s been like this for
eighteen years, so why should today be any different. It is Jesus who notices
her and calls her into the centre of the synagogue.
She was bent over,
according to the Bible. Just imagine what that would have been like. As well as
the pain and discomfort, it would have meant that she couldn’t see what was
going on around her easily, that she couldn’t look people in the eye or join in
their conversations easily. She probably felt lonely and excluded. And to cap it all, in her culture, disability
was often seen as a punishment from God, a sign that you’d done something
wrong, so there would have been a religious stigma associated with it as well.
It must have been a miserable existence, but after eighteen years of it, she
seems resigned– this was her life, how it was, how it always would be.
But Jesus noticed
her, and Jesus called to her, and Jesus brought this woman centre stage where
everyone could see her. And then he laid his hands on her, and as he did so,
for the first time in eighteen years, she stood up straight. The words the
Greek original text uses to describe this are interesting. She’s described
first as “sunkuptousa”, literally
bent double – kupto means “to bend”. But when Jesus heals her the word that’s used “anakupsai” usually translated as “straightened up”,
but really meaning “unbent” – you can hear that word “kupto” in the middle of “anakupsai”.
In the Greek, Jesus literally unbends this woman, and in doing so he gives her
back her “standing” within her community of faith, as well as straightening her up
physically. He declares that she is a
“daughter of Abraham”, part of the Jewish family, equal in dignity and honour
to anyone else there.
Jesus unbends her.
But as it turns out, she isn’t the only one in that synagogue who needs unbending,
because we soon discover that the leader of the synagogue, the one who was
responsible for its smooth running, is just as twisted up psychologically by anxiety
and anger because of what is happening as she had been physically. Whatever he
thought Jesus would do, it wasn’t this!
I have some sympathy
for him. If I invite someone I don’t know to lead worship or preach here I’m
always aware that I’m taking a risk. What if they say something homophobic or
sexist? What if they tell you that you’re all going to burn in hell?
I was confident that
you were in safe hands with Adie and the others who led services and preached
here during my Sabbatical because I knew them. I knew that they were people
who’d do a good job, and would respect the values that are special to us. But an
unknown preacher is another kettle of fish. I’d have been mortified if I’d come back to find that anyone
had been hurt by what they’d heard from this pulpit.
This synagogue
leader was not a bad person. He was just unbearably anxious about what he was
seeing unfold in front of his eyes in the synagogue he was supposed to be in
charge of, because it seemed all wrong to him.
His problem was that
Jesus had healed this woman on the Sabbath. The Sabbath was supposed to
be a day when everyone ceased from their work, just as God had done on the
seventh day after he had finished creating the world. Observing a Sabbath Day
is good. It reminds us that we don’t have to work 24/7 to prove our worth – in God’s eyes we are
beyond price anyway. It’s a day when we can enjoy God’s goodness, treasure one
another, a day when we can stop doing
and discover that just being
is enough. It all sounds simple, but, of course, in practice it isn’t.
What counts as work?
That was the question which bothered the religious experts of Jesus time. Was
cooking work? Was carrying something work? Did that apply to everything? Could you stir a pot?
Could you move a chair? If so, how far? Agricultural
labour was certainly work, but cows still needed to be milked, animals needed
to be fed. Taking a Sabbath is a great
idea - but as with so many things, the devil is in the detail.
It is those devilish
details which are causing the problem here. This synagogue leader had come to
his own conclusions about where the lines should be drawn and in his mind,
healing was work, so it shouldn’t be happening on this day. When Jesus healed
this woman – and who knew how many others there might want healing – he was
overwhelmed by anger and anxiety. This was all wrong, and no good would come of
it, and he would get the blame because he was supposed to be the one in charge.
“There are six days on which work ought to be
done, come on those days and be cured, not on the Sabbath day”. He “kept saying” it, we told. He sounds frantic.
The situation is slipping out of his tidy-minded grip, and he is trying
desperately to get the crowd on his side, to regain control. But all he succeeds in doing is tying himself
in even tighter knots, bending himself even further out of shape.
He’s the one who
really needs to unbend here. His rigidity isn’t just hurting him; it’s hurting
everyone. This poor woman has lived for
eighteen years hardly able to lift her eyes from the ground, but he is living
his whole life with his eyes bent downwards over his precious rules and that
means he can’t see the effect those rules are having on the real, flesh and
blood people around him.
Now, it’s easy for
us to judge him, but the truth is that we’re all a bit like him sometimes. We
call it “sticking to our principles” or being singleminded in our commitment,
but often the things we refuse to bend on are really just the fruits of our own
anxieties and resentments. We want life to be tidy, black and white, with
simple rights and wrongs, and we lose all sense of proportion as we try to make
it so. We suffer, and so do those around us as a result.
Christian history is
littered with vicious infighting and bitter schisms over things which in the
long run look very trivial. Christians burned each other at the stake for
centuries over what, precisely, they believed happened to the bread and wine at
communion. In church communities people take offence because someone else sat
in “their” seat, or because they didn’t happen to like the hymns that day, or
they were inadvertently left off an email list. Families are torn apart by
things that, in the long run are ridiculously unimportant - an unintended
slight, a unwise remark - and one branch of the family never talks to the other
again. “There’s a principle at stake” we declare, self-righteously, as we turn
our backs on each other. Small wounds become running sores that never heal. We
can’t see the wood for the trees anymore.
This synagogue
leader wasn’t wrong to value the Sabbath day and want to keep it holy. It is a
precious thing to set aside time to rest and to worship. But his devotion to
the Sabbath had blinded him to this woman’s needs, and to the love of God which
brought about her healing. He held tight to his principles, but she paid the
price for them.
The Sabbath was
meant to be a foretaste of God’s kingdom, a mini-Eden, a day when people could
catch a glimpse of the peace and freedom God wanted them to enjoy all the time,
but the synagogue leader had missed that completely, because the rules had
become an end in themselves to him, and a dead end at that. In truth, this woman’s healing wasn’t an
interruption of the Sabbath, it was the Sabbath, a glimpse of God’s
power at work in the world. It wasn’t just about one individual being enabled
to stand up straight, but a part of the unbending of the world, the unknotting
of the tangles of sorrow and trouble which twist us all out of shape.
It is, as I said, a
beautiful story, one which speaks to the twisted up places in all of us, which
calls to us to let God unbend us, release us, show us his freedom. The story ends by saying that the entire crowd
rejoiced at the wonderful things he was doing. I like to hope that maybe that
included that anxious synagogue leader, that he, eventually, was unbent too,
and stood up straight and looked around him and saw God at work, and found it
in him to rejoice.
Amen
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