Jeremiah 1:4-10
Now the word of the Lord came to me saying,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”
But the Lord said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’;
for you shall go to all to whom I send you,
and you shall speak whatever I command you.
Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.”
Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me,
“Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”
Luke 13:10-17
Now [Jesus] was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! 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?” When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.
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Now [Jesus] was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight (Luke 13:10-11).
It is an annoying habit in Luke’s storytelling, that women mostly go nameless, and we don’t get much in the way of their backstories.
What we know from our gospel today is that this woman has been bent over for eighteen years, burdened by what we might call a “spirit of weakness,” or some other euphemism for an unexplained physical ailment. We don’t know her name or where she grew up. We don’t know her exact medical diagnosis. We don’t know anything about her family. We don’t know her pain level or her emotional state.
We don’t know much about this woman at all, save two details: 1) that she has lived much of her life with a physical ailment, and 2) that she comes to the synagogue on this particular sabbath, and and has probably come here on other sabbaths, too, over these last eighteen years.
By Jewish law, there is nothing about her condition or her gender that would have excluded her from the synagogue, a gathering place for instruction in faith and praise of God. Because the synagogue is and was a place of welcome for all who entered to worship.
This is why the woman in our gospel reading came to the synagogue on this particular sabbath: to worship. Not in search of Jesus, not in search of healing, not in search of a miracle. (Remember that it is Jesus who seeks her out, and not the other way around.)
This woman came to the synagogue on this day simply to receive what she was used to receiving there: instruction, fellowship, encounter with stories of faith, a community with which to offer praise of God. She came because she knew herself to be a valued member of the community.
And so one of the things I find remarkable about today’s story, even just a few lines in, is this beautiful picture of how communities of faith can reflect the care and love of God, for all who enter. I find it remarkable and beautiful that there is no physical or emotional or spiritual limitation that keeps us from having a place in a community of praise. God loves us, in all of our diversity, and each of our bodies and our faces reflect the expansive and unsearchable image of God in which we were created.
God looks upon us with the same tenderness and love that he speaks to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.”
This is the first lesson in our gospel reading today: that God loves us precisely as we are, burdens and limitations and ailments and all. And he calls us, as a community of faith, to do the same.
God calls us to be a community of kindness and care and respite for all who walk upright and all who are bent over and all who do not walk at all. To be a community of hospitality for all bodies and all minds and all ages and all abilities.
And God asks us to trust that in this community, Jesus will not just show up, but that Jesus will seek each of us out, and extend a hand to us, loving us and blessing us for who we are, where we are, and see in each of us our beautiful potential for serving God and serving one another.
It is because the woman in today’s gospel is already blessed and loved and a child of God - a “daughter of Abraham,” as Jesus calls her - that Jesus reaches out to heal and liberate her.
This is an incredibly important nuance in the text. She doesn’t become beloved once she is standing straight. She doesn’t become valuable to God only after she is healed. She knows her worth in God’s eyes, and she knows her worth in the community of faith.
She comes to praise, and Jesus sees her. Jesus loves her, and so he reaches out to her. He chooses to heal her, or more accurately to liberate her from her ailment, because that is what Jesus aims to do, what he declared from the start of the ministry to be his mission: to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, to proclaim recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.
Jesus doesn’t heal this woman to imply that her limitations are something that separate her from God, or to imply that only healed, able bodies are blessed by God. The curve of this woman’s spine is not a value judgement. It is simply her reality.
Jesus does not heal her because he thinks she is incomplete. He seeks her out because he wants to free her from that which is holding her captive. He wants to liberate her spirit. The miracle Jesus performs is less about healing her body than it is about setting her heart free to praise God, in whatever body she has.
Because when Jesus touches her, she stands straight and immediately begins praising God, which is precisely what one is supposed to do in the synagogue. He opens to her the possibility of participating more fully in the life of faith and the life of the community. He gives her a liberating word that both blesses her and opens her heart and mouth to rejoice in the presence of God.
This is the second lesson in our gospel reading today: that the word of Jesus is always a liberating word. Whatever we profess and preach and teach in Jesus’s name, it is only true and faithful if it offers freedom.
Which is not to say that Jesus’s words don’t convict us, but that even his most difficult teachings set us on course to be freed from the things that hold us back from lives of praise and service. Even his most troubling words seek to set us on course to seek freedom and liberation on behalf of those who are least able to secure that freedom for themselves.
Liberation and grace, for Jesus, are neither optional nor secondary concerns to the life of faith and the life of God’s kingdom. Liberation and grace are at the center. They are essential.
This is the heart of the scuffle between Jesus and the leader of the synagogue. The leader sees healing as a work, and as a non-essential work, something to be done any other day of the week, but not on the sabbath, a day of rest.
Jesus, on the other hand, sees healing as an act of necessity, something as crucial as making sure your livestock are adequately fed and watered, no matter what day of the week it is. Jesus understands healing to be an act of liberation, in line with the the gift of the sabbath, which was itself a day blessed and set apart, that all creation and all people, regardless of rank or class or profession, might be set free from the demands and burdens of toil and work. Jesus liberates this woman on the sabbath precisely to honor the sabbath in the most basic and literal way.
Jesus offers us the same gifts of welcome and liberation that he offers the woman in today’s gospel. And Jesus works through us to bring these gifts to others.
Jesus sees us, as we are, and reaches out to us. Jesus gives us hope for liberation. Jesus loves us, broken bodies and spirits and all, because Jesus himself became for us beauty in his own broken body, and in the broken bread that we share together at his table. At this table, filled with the Spirit, we become more than the eye can see. We become vehicles for joy and praise. We are empowered to serve. We are the body of Christ, and we are more than the sum of our parts.
The poet Rupi Kaur writes,
“i want to apologize to all the women
i have called pretty
before i’ve called them intelligent or brave
i am sorry i made it sound as though
something as simple as what you’re born with
is the most you have to be proud of
when your spirit has crushed mountains
from now on i will say things like, you are resilient
or, you are extraordinary
not because i don’t think you’re pretty.
but because you are so much more than that”
This is what Jesus offers you today: You are beautiful, but you are more than beautiful. You are more than your body, you are more than your limitations, you are more than your appearance, and you are more than the things that bind you. You are worthy of God’s attention, and you are blessed. You are set free in Christ for joy and for service. You are loved. And you are extraordinary. Because God made you that way.
Amen.