This week’s readings are Isaiah 58:9b-14, Psalm 103:1-8, and Luke 13:10-17. Thanks to Tim Kunze for his GodPause reflections this week, Emilie Townes for her essay in Feasting on the Word, Tim Brown for his ELCA World Hunger Sermon Starters reflection on the Gospel text.
Here’s the entire worship service (although somehow the slides during the sermons didn’t get included on the livestream) and the audio of just the sermon:
One of the joys of going to seminary is learning a bunch of very technical words, and even as professors teach them to future pastors, they warn you, “Don’t ever actually use these words in a sermon.” I’m going to ignore that today, and teach you a new word: “Hermeneutic.”
Anyone know the word hermeneutic?
It means a lens or perspective, a method or approach to reading the Bible. We as Lutherans read the Bible with a Lutheran hermeneutic, a lens looking for God’s grace in every section.
So today, we have a straightforward story of Jesus teaching in the synagogue one Saturday, and when a woman who’s been crippled for 18 years comes in, he heals her.
I want to explore this story today through the hermeneutic of the 10 commandments, the way God calls us to live. Hopefully, this makes sense. And if not, at least you know a new word!
So, there are a few commandments at stake in this story.
One, obviously, is the sabbath issue, the third commandment: Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. As a good, faithful Jewish rabbi, Jesus is in the synagogue on the Sabbath day teaching, which sets up this story.
The seventh day of the week is to be a day set apart, a day made holy to honor God. Of course, that brings up the question of what it means to honor God.
One way of honoring God is taking time to rest, pausing for one day each week to worship, to focus on who God is and what God has done for us. And if we’re going to focus on God and God’s work, that means we need to not focus on ourselves and the work we do. So, on the Sabbath day, no work is to be done. Everything else can wait; God comes first.
That idea of Sabbath as rest, as a time to not do work is certainly in the Bible, and it’s a commandment at least I tend to be really bad at following.
And I don’t mean because I’m a pastor and you’re paying me to lead worship as my job. Our culture doesn’t believe in taking a weekly sabbath day, particularly not in the way Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Scriptures call us to. I suspect just about all of us could do better at taking intentional time to rest and focus on God.
But simply not doing things is not the only way to honor God. Jesus gets in trouble here with the synagogue leader because he does something on the Sabbath, something good. Healing people, taking care of others, loving your neighbor honors God, even if it’s on the Sabbath.
Of course you should still give food and water to your animals on the Sabbath. Of course this woman ought to be healed as soon as Jesus encounters her, even on the sabbath.
That’s the 5th commandment, the one that says, “Do not murder” right? In his Small Catechism, Martin Luther says don’t murder means more than just not killing people; it means helping and supporting our neighbors in all of life’s needs.
But from the religious professional’s perspective, this is a slippery slope. This woman’s been suffering for 18 years; she can wait one more day? He’s not entirely wrong either—we’ve almost totally lost the idea of Sabbath toady in our culture, even as people of faith.
The Sabbath is also there to protect people from being exploited. That’s part of what Isaiah is prophesying against in our first reading, calling God’s people to refrain from trampling the sabbath and pursuing your own interests on God’s holy day. The sabbath is a gift, a “delight” as Isaiah puts it.
But it’s a slippery slope the other way too, when we start putting laws and technicalities above people. The Puritans made doing things on the Sabbath a legal crime—that’s not the right answer either.
If we’re going to err, let’s follow Jesus’ example and take care of people, err on the side of love and grace rather than legalism. That’s a very Lutheran hermeneutic, by the way.
I also think commandments 9 & 10 are in play here, the ones about not coveting, not being jealous of your neighbor’s blessings. In the story, something good happens to a member of the community, and there are two reactions.
One reaction you’d expect. Luke says “the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that [Jesus] was doing.” I hope we do that as a church community too, right? We rejoice with each other when something good happens, when someone receives a blessing. Paul instructs the church in Romans 12:15, “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” That’s living life together.
And the woman who’s healed is the first to rejoice. “Immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.”
Luke doesn’t tell us her actual words, but as a faithful Jewish woman in the synagogue, she would likely have known the Psalms by heart. Maybe her words of praise came from Psalm 103.
Can’t you picture her saying, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits— who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases?”
But there’s another reaction to her healing, represented by the synagogue leader. Maybe he really is upset because the healing occurred on the Sabbath, but his reaction seems so ridiculous that I have to wonder if something else is going on, if he’s more upset that her healing isn’t fair, or if he’s jealous.
I can understand that. I have a hard time preaching on healing stories and miracles, because I wonder why other people we pray for are not healed. We all know faithful people who pray persistently for healing from cancers, from neurological ailments, from viruses, who are still sick. Why does this one woman get healed? It’s like she won the lottery without even entering—did you catch that she didn’t even ask to be healed? Jesus just sees her and calls her over.
I don’t have an answer, of course, for why others are not healed, except to say God’s grace is unfair, and to spiritualize and say all of us have received grace we don’t deserve. That’s theologically sound, but not very satisfying.
But I do know we are commanded not to covet, but to rejoice, to give thanks for where blessings are given, and to trust in the one who gives the blessings.
We’re called to gratitude and praise, not to bitterness for something we feel entitled to. All of God’s grace is a gift. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus says “Your Father in heaven makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Our call is to give thanks.
This healing, and all of Jesus’ miracles, are of course about the person being healed, but more than that, Jesus’ miracles are glimpse of God’s kingdom breaking into the world.
This is a preview, a promise of the life to come, when all tears will be wiped away, when death and mourning and crying will be no more, when God has made all things new.
One more commandment I want to connect to this story: The first commandment, “You shall have no other gods.” This is a more quote-on-quote “spiritual” interpretation of this story—a spiritual hermeneutic!—, but I think it’s fair with the language Luke uses.
Look at the way Luke describes the woman. For 18 years, she has been bent over and quite unable to stand up straight, because a spirit has crippled her.
This is dangerous because plenty of people have back issues, and I 100% do not believe everyone with physical challenges has related spiritual problems.
But this particular woman, Luke tells us, has a spirit causing her to be bent over, and just for a moment, I want to explore what that means symbolically, through the first commandment. Luther described the human condition of sin as being curved in ourselves. All sin, on some level, is looking for life in ourselves, putting ourselves in God’s place, rather than trusting God to be our source of life.
Being bent over means being self-centered, looking down at yourself instead of “up” at God, instead of out at your neighbor.
Looking down means being able to see the dirt on the floor, maybe where your feet are, but not to look up and see the horizon, to see the stars, to see the brightness of the sun.
In his action of healing, Jesus untwists her, mending her soul as well as her body.
Beyond the literal, physical, what is it that causes us to be hunched over, unable to stand up straight? In a reflection on this story, Pastor Tim Brown suggests looking at people walking down the street bent over cell phones (and I’d add no judgment here—I’m terrible about looking down at my phone while I’m walking—but what do we miss around us?)
What about checking bank accounts, or looking away from people in need of help?
Again, I’m not talking about people in need of physical healing. Don’t you wish that could be sorted out with just a touch?
But spiritually, what might it mean for Jesus to set us free from being curved in on ourselves? Where are we looking to ourselves, instead of toward God?
God is in the business of liberation, setting people free. Free from ailments spiritual and physical, free to live the way God calls us to live, loving God first and our neighbors as ourselves.
May we too give thanks and praise for what God has done for us.
Amen