The Crooked and the Crook

Proper 16C: Luke 13.10-17

“Now, don’t go getting any ideas.” That’s the message the synagogue leader has for everyone gathered who’d just witnessed the healing of the crippled women. “Not here, not today, not for the rest of you. It’s not right. It’s not proper. It’s the Sabbath. You’ve got six other days to be healed. The Sabbath is off limits. Come back tomorrow.”

Can you imagine seeing someone who’s disabled, who’s been disabled for years, getting healed, cured of their infirmity, only to have a pastor, or really anyone, get mad at them because the miracle happened on the wrong day?

This poor woman had been bent, crooked over for years. Yet it is the synagogue leader who shows himself to be the real “crook,” for trying to steal this woman’s joy at being healed—and steal other people’s opportunity for healing. Talk about a miser, a wet blanket, a killjoy, a party-pooper! The synagogue leader’s response reminds me of H.L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: “Puritanism is the haunting sense that someone, somewhere may be enjoying themselves.” That may not have been true for every Puritan, but it well characterizes the incredible pettiness of the synagogue leader. How could someone be so callous and obtuse? Where’s his sense of compassion? His decency? It’s so ridiculous as to be a caricature! It’s so clear, what’s the right and wrong thing to do here.

That in itself should cause us pause. For it is precisely such instances, when things seem so cut and dry, black and white, as it appears to be here, that we would be wise to stop and ask if we are perhaps missing something. For if the moral of the story is so obvious, why include it in the Gospel? I mean, out of the multitude of things Jesus likely said, all the encounters he had in the course of his ministry, why did Luke think it important to record this one? Just to make a synagogue leader out to be a pompous buffoon? Might there be something in this story that we’ve overlooked in our easy moralism?

A good place to start to answer that question, I suppose, is with the woman, a woman Luke says who has had a “disabling spirit," literally a "spirit of weakness." This probably means that her condition was not due simply to a slipped disk or arthritic growth along her spinal column, but to something that medicine couldn’t account for. Some today think that the problem was not physical, but psychological. Some people probably thought so then as well, though they might have said it differently, as being a soul-ailment. Maybe someone had persistently abused her, verbally or physically, when she was younger, and her knotted-up emotions expressed themselves in her body, as she tried to make herself as small as possible.

Or maybe she was like the woman I knew in a congregation I served. This woman’s marriage was falling apart. Their business was going broke. Her three children were demanding more time than she had to give. She had spent so much of her life trying to please others, she was watching her own life, her ‘self’ disappear. The “incredibly shrinking woman,” she called herself, after the old movie title. Could this be what was going on with the bent-over woman?

Maybe. But maybe there’s more going on here than that. Consider the way Luke describes her condition. The words he uses aren’t the usual words used in describing other healings that Jesus does. Instead they are words used elsewhere for moral and spiritual matters. She had a “spirit,” she had been “bound by Satan,” she was not healed but “unbound,” “untied,” and “made straight.” These are words used elsewhere not for disease but for sins and demonic oppression. This may give us a clue to what was really going on.

You see, there’s an old understanding, going back to St Augustine of Hippo but most effectively expressed by Martin Luther, that describes sinful human nature as being doubled-over, curved in upon itself, incurvatus in se (to use the fancy Latin term). The idea is that, on account of sin, one’s will and desires are fundamentally self-serving. A person reaches out to others, not out of love or charity, but in order to take, to grab, to possess. Imagine an arrow. The arrow goes out from us, but instead of going straight to its target, to give ourselves to others, the arrow turns back, bringing others into our control, so that we can get things from them. This way, we bend everything, even God’s best gifts towards ourselves. We seek to use everyone, even God, as a way to get what we want. Our desire is perverted, turned back towards ourselves, as we try to get as much as we can for ourselves. As a result, our soul is curved, crooked, bent. And not just bent, but bound, with the patterns of selfishness and self-centeredness so well-worn, so rutted that we can’t get out, can’t do any different. We are bound up in sin, hogtied by it. This woman is then an apt symbol, an embodiment of the human condition, a representation of all of us, how we all are.

But however we understand her, as a real woman or a representative character or both, Luke says that Jesus singles her out of the crowd, to free her from her bonds. Woman, thou art loosed! The only problem is that it’s the sabbath, the day of rest. That’s why the synagogue leader objected, or at least that’s the reason he gave: “Healing is work, and there’s no work on the Sabbath. Come back tomorrow.”

As mean-spirited as this guy clearly is, though, we have to acknowledge he does have a point. Jesus didn’t have to heal the woman right then. She’d been suffering from her condition for nearly two decades. What’s one more day going to do? Or even just a few more hours? The Jews reckon the day begins at sunset, so all Jesus had to do was wait till suppertime. This woman wasn’t in any emergency; she wasn’t getting worse. So why did Jesus have to fix her on the Sabbath day and unnecessarily, purposely cause conflict?

Well, as I said last week, Jesus is not one to shy away from conflict, especially if it serves to reveal God’s will, and correct misunderstandings about how God is working to fix the brokenness of the world and its crooked ways. Such is the case here. For, while the synagogue leader is not wrong in wanting to keep the Sabbath, it’s clear he is mistaken about what keeping the Sabbath means. There’s more at stake here than mere human religiosity. It touches on the very nature of God’s effort to restore his creation.

You see, the provision of the Sabbath—to observe the Sabbatha and keep it holy—is one of the oldest and most important laws of God, one of the Ten Commandments. These commandments are so important, Exodus lists them twice, in nearly identical terms. Except that when it comes to the Sabbath, two reasons are given to explain the commandment. In the first instance, God connects the Sabbath to the story of creation, to how after the six days, God rested on the seventh day. The second time it is brought up, though, God relates the Sabbath commandment not to creation, but to redemption. “Remember,” he says, “that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”  God had just rescued his people from Egypt, where they worked non-stop without any time-off. But under God’s rule, they would be allowed—in fact were commanded—to take a day off, to rest. With this second instance, God makes clear that the Sabbath is not only built into the order of creation, but it is also part of God’s effort to fix creation, part of God’s liberation from all that is evil and injurious and destructive of God’s created order. To observe the Sabbath is a gift , given to us to take joy in remembering—celebrating—that God is redeeming creation, salvaging all that evil has sullied and damaged, so as to return to it the glory God intended from the beginning.

This makes sense when we understand that the point of the Sabbath isn’t simply to have a chance to rest, to take a breather, so that we can dive back into work with renewed energy. Rather, the Sabbath is why we work in the first place. It’s the goal, not an intermission. We are to observe the Sabbath, set it aside as special, a day not to toil and labor, so that we are able to (and for many of us are forced to) put our tools down, close our laptops, and embrace and revel in all that is, to feel gratitude and give thanks for the fruits of labor, our own and more importantly God’s. The Sabbath is intended to free us from being wage-slaves, from running the rat race, and from taking on so much stress and responsibility that we become bent over like this woman under the weight.  

The synagogue leader didn’t get this. He was too concerned with the outward observance of the Sabbath, the rules, what you can and can’t do. Which is why Jesus took the opportunity then and there to remind him and everyone else who was there about what the meaning, the purpose of the Sabbath is—a sign of the redemption of humanity.

This is precisely what Jesus came to proclaim and to perform. He announced this in Nazareth at the start of his ministry in the synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captive, to restore sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.” (Luke 4:18) Now, in another synagogue, he shows them what that means, what it looks like. Jesus came to unbind those tied up in sin, to free the oppressed in body and soul, and set free those who are captive to small-minded notions of how God is working to bring the world to rights.

The synagogue leader was oblivious to this. He was too busy trying to make sure everyone followed the rules. In the process, though, he was denying God his glory and praise, the very thing he as a religious leader, was tasked with protecting and promoting. Which is why Jesus called him not just a killjoy but a hypocrite, a faker, a counterfeit. He claimed to have studied God’s Word, but he failed the test. He was then understandably ashamed when Jesus corrected him.

The rightness for Jesus’ action is affirmed in the last line of this passage, which says that although the leader and others went away murmuring into their beards over their humiliation, the people were “delighted.” And that’s the purpose of the Sabbath, what it should be about, what God promises, what the leader missed—Delight!

When God established his word, his commandments, it was not to restrict our fun, as many believe, but for our delight, because he wants to free us from being bound to passions, tied up in sin. To be sure, not everything that God tells us to do will make sense to us, but we can trust that God wants good for us, wants to give us good things, wants to give us himself. Our challenge then is not simply to obey, blindly, but to search out the reason behind the rules, the wisdom behind the restrictions. For then, not only will we be able to understand better the goodness of God’s ways, but we will have more reason to praise Him and celebrate his gracious work. And you can be sure, when we do, it won’t matter what day it is! Thanks be to God!