Scriptures:
Isaiah 58:9b-14 & Luke 13:10-17
I am a member of one of those generations that has the questionable habit of mindless scrolling on my phone. I’m sure there are plenty of downsides, but one of the upsides is the diversity of people I have to learn from right at my fingertips – people who teach me the kinds of things that I might sound wise for saying later. One account that pops up in my feed pretty often is that of a woman named Miriam. As she says in her intro on every video she posts, Miriam is an Orthodox Jewish woman who tells what her life is like. Her posts talk about how she and her husband parent their children, what it’s like to participate in Jewish rituals and religious observance, and the ways being Jewish impacts her work as a labor and delivery nurse. She often fields questions from her followers, like this one from a couple of months ago: [On the sabbath] Could you use your phone in an emergency?
The person asking the question had been around the account long enough to know that, Miriam, her husband, and her daughters, along with many observant Orthodox Jewish people, don’t use phones, turn electricity on and off, or drive in cars on Shabbos, or the Sabbath. These are part of their modern applications of the ancient laws around what is and isn’t permissible on the day that God set aside for creation for rest. In the video answering this question, though, Miriam pointed out that certainly, if there is a medical emergency, an Orthodox Jewish person could call 9-1-1 or if needed they could drive someone to the hospital, because, as she says, “We live by the laws, not die by them.”
This is pretty similar to how Jesus answers the challenge of the synagogue leader who critiques the woman who has come to the synagogue on the day when Jesus was teaching. On first hearing this might sound like a completely reasonable thing for her to do, for anyone to do. Sabbath observance is extremely important in the Jewish faith tradition; it’s important to Jesus and to those who share his spiritual lineage. We heard the prophet Isaiah talking about the importance of the Sabbath and giving a warning against “trampling it” by pursuing one’s one interests rather than, we can assume, God’s interests.
But her presence at the synagogue may have been more extraordinary than ordinary. As preaching professor Jared Alcántara points out:
She had a chronic disability in a time and place when a significant percentage of religious people associated her disability with God’s judgment….
The woman also faced challenges on account of living in a patriarchal society. At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, she lived in a society in which the voices, needs, and rights of men were usually privileged, and the voices, needs, and rights of women were usually ignored.
Women were not permitted inside the sanctuary of the synagogue at that time, so [Jesus] had to seek her out and break with custom. According to New Testament commentator James R. Edwards, “People with physical deformities were expected to remain socially invisible, especially if they were women. Women rarely if ever approached rabbis, nor did rabbis as a rule speak to women.”
Knowing it is against the custom, the expectations, maybe even the rules as defined by her synagogue leader, she made a conscious choice to break through the barriers and show up. And for what?
It’s interesting that this story, one we would probably quickly categorize as a healing, doesn’t actually use the word healing in it at all. Instead, Luke talks about a spirit that had crippled the woman or Satan who has bound her. She is depicted not as a someone whose body is not working the way we might think it should, but as someone who is being held back, constrained, restricted. The woman’s condition was not only crippling her body; it crippled her life.
It held her bound to her home or at least away from this building at the center of religious life. It held her back from her community and from living her faith. What she could do, where she could go, and even how far she could literally see was restricted by a spirit that would not let her live free.
So her presence that day at the synagogue was beyond the expectations of the synagogue leader, and Jesus’s effort to seek her out, to first see her, then call her over, and then to even touch her felt well outside of the boundaries set around the Sabbath, the physical space of the synagogue, and the religious community and life as a whole. In fact, maybe what Jesus said and what he did pointed out that a binding spirit could also hold religious leaders, religious communities, and how they interpret and live their faith. In deciding who was acceptable and who wasn’t their community was bound from welcoming all people. By dictating who could be seen and included and who couldn’t, they were held back from their fullness. In addition to the woman bound by her body, the faith community itself was also bound, being kept from all it could be, all God designed for it, all that God designed it for.
The Sabbath setting of this story is significant. It is the focus of the rhetorical tussle Jesus finds himself in with the synagogue leader. It’s what makes this story about more than a physical restoration for the woman, but instead about liberation, because Sabbath itself is about liberation. It’s about freedom from the economic system of work. It interrupts the endless cycle of get up, go to work, and sleep, get up, go to work, and sleep. There are six days, the synagogue leader points out, on which work ought to be done. But on the seventh, God places this great intrusion on our economic order.
On the seventh we should be reminded that creation is “durable and fruitful and abundant” enough that we can rest. (Jacobson, Rolf. Sermon Brainwave podcast, Episode 1038.) On the Sabbath we are freed from trying to produce, trying to hit metrics, trying to make our own way in the world. On the Sabbath we are set free. On that day even more than any other, we are liberated to rest in God’s love and pursue God’s interests – food for the hungry from the abundance of all that God provides, satisfaction of the needs of the afflicted who are bound unduly by custom and circumstance.
In response to the synagogue leader’s rebuke of the woman for seeking a cure on the Sabbath, Jesus points out that a person observing the Sabbath would untie a bound ox or donkey to make sure it had the water it needed for life. Using an argument style familiar to the rabbis, “how much more,” Jesus essentially asks, should we treat this woman to life, she who has been bound for 18 years. Toe to toe, rabbi to rabbi, he intervenes on the woman’s behalf and presents an interpretation of his own, drawing attention back to the idea that liberation, removing that which binds people and communities, is the point of the Sabbath.
“We live by the laws, not die by them.”
Friends, what binds us? What holds us back? What feels like a holy law, but is instead keeping us from life, our own life and the life God desires us to live in community, live as a community of faith? What spirits are keeping us from looking up to see the world around us as Jesus sees it – worthy, welcome, and free?
Maybe we are bound by feelings that we don’t belong or measure up. Maybe we are bound by worries that we don’t have enough to share. Maybe we bound by fear that there is too much to do. Maybe we are bound by exhaustion from trying to keep up. Maybe we are bound by guilt that we have been a part of creating the problems that Jesus wants to fix.
What about our church? Are we bound by looking backward to some glory days of generations past? Are we held back holding onto some 20th century understanding of what the church should look like, what the church should be? An organization that exists for the benefit of its members with big programs and busy classrooms? Are we restrained by rules of politeness that attempt to silence us from speaking up about gospel values – the values that hungry people should be fed, people with needs in body, mind, and spirit should be tended to, homes that are crumbling should be rebuilt for those who need them, not just those who can afford them, foundations like education and healthcare should be strengthen?
Whatever it is that holds us back, whatever spirit binds us – this is the good news for us today – Jesus has more power than it. Jesus lays his liberating hands upon us and frees us from our feelings of inadequacy, our worries about scarcity, our fear of the enormity of the task, our guilt for our place in it, our exhaustion from just looking at what is needed in the world. Jesus speaks to us the same words he spoke to the woman at the synagogue – Daughter of Abraham, be set free.
This is a promise, not just about her past and her ties to the ancestors of old, but also about her future. In this naming, Jesus fully includes the woman in the community, not because she is healed, remember those words are never said, but because she is free from anything and anyone who kept her out. He fully includes her in the covenant God made with Abraham that he and his descendants are blessed to be a blessing. This woman isn’t bound by the restrictions placed on her from someone beyond her, but instead she is free to embody God’s blessing, to be God’s blessing in the world.
Children of Abraham, Jesus sets us free. He unbinds us from our own expectations, from slavery to arbitrary metrics. Jesus sees us. Jesus loves us. Jesus frees us, stands us up straight so that we can see beyond what holds us back from serving his purposes in the creation around us, beyond this property that we think of as our own, serving only our interests. Jesus calls us children of Abraham and draws us into God’s covenant so that we will see ourselves as he sees us; we will know ourselves to be blessed to be a blessing.
In him, we are set free from all that binds us – our own insecurities, outside forces the imposes their values on us, the systems that try to control us and exploit us. We are set free from looking down and looking back. We are set free from trying to look perfect instead of look outward. We are liberated from the practices of the past that held us inside instead of driving us out, that focused our attention on building structures rather than building God’s kin-dom.
We are set free from feeling we aren’t good enough, we don’t have enough, we can’t do enough because we have been liberated from anyone’s expectations but God’s own, and God sees us, God calls us, and God lifts us up for God’s purposes. We will be called repairers of the breach, restorers of streets to live in.