…………………There are moments when the world as we know it changes on a dime – like a kaleidoscope of mirrors, where the whole picture explodes in new expressions of movement and colour with a twist of the wrist.  The familiar patterns of daily living have disappeared and something new is required.


After 9-11 I saw a video documenting people’s response to a world turned upside down by the attacks on the world trade centre – people of all faiths searching for answers, in the face of an inexplicable tragedy.  Most striking to me, distinct amongst those who attributed their rescue to God’s providence or a loved one’s death to God’s ultimate plan, was a response by an atheist who was visibly flattened by the attacks.  “I rejected the idea of God,” he said, “because I knew that humans were basically good and could be relied upon to come through for each other in the end.” The horrors of 9-11 had taken even that from him, and he was left with nothing.   The world had changed, the kaleidoscope had turned, nothing was the same.

Sometimes the reordering of the world is such that it requires something different from us, that our usual patterns of behaving and relating to each other are no longer relevant, when the rules we cling to and live by ring hollow.  Something new is required of us in these moments.  And so it is with the kingdom of God.

Our story this morning reads like a typical conflict/healing story similar to others found elsewhere in Luke.  Jesus heals some anonymous person – maybe she is bleeding or maybe he has dropsy (whatever that is), or maybe he can’t walk – and gets in trouble for it – trouble he was probably looking for. Why else would he perform this healing in the middle of the synagogue – on the Sabbath, no less, when such work is explicitly prohibited?  Oh Jesus was spoiling for a fight, all right, and the bent over woman makes the perfect foil. The real story, it would seem, is about the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders, and the healing simply provides its subject matter.  As usual Jesus wins the verbal sparring match and the leaders are publically shamed.
 
I’ll suggest this morning that there’s more to the story, though stopping there does no violence to it.  On first reading, the Sabbath seems to be what’s at stake – what’s ok and what’s not ok to do on the Sabbath.  The Sabbath, ordained by God at the beginning of time as a day of rest, a day to replenish one’s energies from the work of the days before and to prepare for the work that is to come.  A day to charge one’s proverbial batteries, to set down one’s burdens and take time instead for worship and spiritual nourishment.  The Sabbath, not arbitrary or irrelevant, but set out for a purpose for the benefit of God’s people. 

Among religious observances, it ranks pretty high – it’s number four of the ten commandments found in Deuteronomy 5, right after taking God’s name in vain and right before honouring your father and mother.  Most striking is the attention given to this instruction, with more ink than any other commandment.  Listen:

Read (Deuteronomy 5:12-15)

To put all of this in perspective, among the Ten Commandments, murder, adultery, stealing, and bearing false witness each gets one line a-piece.   You shall not murder.  Period.   Something more is at stake with the Sabbath, having to do with a deep sense identity and calling.  Keeping the Sabbath holy enacts a remembrance of God’s saving work among their people.  Remember – you were slaves in the land of Egypt and God brought you out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.  Therefore, you must remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

And keeping the Sabbath holy  involves not working one day per week.  Not you, not your sons or daughters, not your slaves, not your animals, not even strangers among you, so that everyone in your community gets to rest on that day, not just you.

Naturally, when it comes down to brass tacks, it’s hard to get a group of people to agree on what exactly God meant by the instruction to keep the Sabbath day holy, what is involved when it comes to not working.  We’re still trying to figure this one out.  I knew of Mennonite families in southern Manitoba for whom it meant cold Sunday meals, prepared on Saturday, eaten in dark kitchens on dinnerware set out the night before.   For other families, it means children do their homework on Saturday so they can have one day in the week when the pressures of school and work can abate and they can breathe for a moment.

In the case presented to us in Luke 13, the norms for Sabbath observance had been set generations earlier and when it came to healing, the norms were these:  healing on the Sabbath was expressly forbidden except in life and death situations.   Life and death.  The woman in this story is simply bent over – had been for 18 years and has no reason to fear for her life on account of her ailment.   You can see how it looks like Jesus is spoiling for a fight!?!  He seems to expect opposition and isn’t surprised when the leader opposes him, saying – there are six days on which a person can easily come and be healed – such work is not to be done on the Sabbath.  Jesus expects this response and his answer is ready, quick and cutting – don’t every one of you untie your ox or your donkey and lead it to water?  Why would you not extend the same courtesy to this woman, bound these 18 years, and set her free from her bondage?  These words shame his opponents and the crowd rejoices.

Jesus’ lesson seems clear – rules of the Sabbath mean nothing if they do not attend to the wholeness and restoration of others.  If the dignity of another is undermined in the process of keeping rules that exist for their own sake, those rules are best broken.   The Sabbath is made for people, not people for the Sabbath – this he’s said before, demonstrating his point by breaking Sabbath rules publically. 

But the plot thickens, especially when we turn our attention away from the conflict between Jesus and the leaders of the synagogue, away for the moment from the debate surrounding the Sabbath, and focus our gaze on the woman.  I think she is unaccustomed to being looked at.  For one thing, she is a woman in a synagogue, and while a synagogue might be
a place where a man might go to have his voice heard, a woman was likely there to listen.  Her back is bent, and those around her probably knew exactly what that meant.  In a world where physical characteristics were often thought to reflect one’s moral character, a weak back denotes weakness in moral fortitude, a condition most often associated with women and especially derided in men.  Our English language still reflects this bias – a youth who shows promise can be described as a “fine upstanding young man.” Funny, even as I say it, how the maleness of such good moral fibre comes through.    Betrayed by her body, this woman epitomizes this weakness assumed by her stature, for she “was quite unable to stand up straight.”   Indeed, she had had a “spirit of weakness” for eighteen years (a better translation option, in my opinion, for “a spirit had crippled her,” v. 11). 

Jesus is teaching when he sees her, and, seeing her, calls her, touches her, heals her, right there in front of everybody.  Immediately she stands up straight and begins praising God, surely the only possible response after a lifetime of looking at her toes, unable to lift her head to the song of a bird in a tree (where’s Lena?); the only possible reaction after a lifetime of living under the stigma of weakness.  For this woman, standing up straight for the first time means more than simply being able to lift her head to a breeze – her straight back restores her honour and dignity among her people, enabling her to, so to speak, hold her head high. Says Jesus, is the Sabbath not the perfect moment for such restoration to take place?

But there’s more.   Jesus, immediately after calling his opponents hypocrites, calls this woman a daughter of Abraham.  At first reading I was uncomfortable with this pronouncement.  What if she hadn’t been a daughter of Abraham, hadn’t been a member of the community, however peripheral?  Certainly Jesus is here naming her forgotten dignity by recalling to his listeners her central place in the community, but does this not further emphasize the closedness of the group to outsiders?  Would she have been worthy of such a healing had she not been a “daughter of Abraham?”

Here’s the rub.  There’s no such thing as a daughter of Abraham.  Really none.  Nowhere in the vast collections of Jewish or Christian writings had anyone anywhere called a woman a daughter of Abraham.  Sons of Abraham, certainly, but not daughters.  Except in one document, written in approximately the same time frame as Luke’s gospel, give or take a century.  The reference occurs in 4 Maccabees, a Jewish text, in which a woman becomes “the daughter of Abraham’s strength” (4 Macc. 15:28) on the basis of her willingness to suffer and die for the sake of her faith. 


Echoes of this Maccabean woman may just have resonated in the minds of Luke’s first hearers.  In our text, Jesus imbues the bent over woman with the strength of Abraham, not that she has become a daughter of Abraham now that she is healed, but that she has always been Abraham’s daughter, fully incorporated with pride of place within the community of faith, bent back notwithstanding.  Her straight back makes evident what Jesus could see all along.

See, Jesus isn’t just breaking rules in order to make a point.  He’s not picking fights in order to shame his opponents.  He’s got a whole new thing in mind, a whole reordering of priorities and a restructuring of the community,.  He’s giving the kaleidoscope a twist, unsettling those whose place has been assured and envisioning a new world where those excluded are given pride of place, where pedigree extends to everyone, where the presence of God is discerned in the least likely of places.  Luke is unabashed by this new thing, proclaiming through John the Baptist at the very beginning, “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ”we have Abraham as our ancestor,” for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (3:8). 

That’s what the cross did – broke all the rules – the very bonds of death – in order that we all might be reconciled to God and to each other.   Indeed, restoration and reconciliation are Jesus’ entire program embodying a Sabbath reinvented to fit the coming kingdom.  Jesus is about Sabbath-making rather than Sabbath breaking.  Give this woman a rest already!  Not only from her own infirmity, though it’s been a long 18 years.  Give this woman a rest from her own invisibility, from the bondage that has made her less than a full participant.  The kingdom of God, folks, exceeds everyone’s expectations.  See, it’s like a mustard seed planted in a garden that becomes a tree where birds can come to rest.  It’s like a persistent gardener who refuses to cut down an unproductive tree, but notices instead that all it needs is fertilizer and tender loving care in order for it to thrive.  In the kingdom of God, the bent over woman is already a daughter of Abraham – the kaleidoscope has turned and the order of things Is upsidedown.

This happens – the moment of realization that the ground has shifted causing us to perceive the world entirely differently.   I know of a mother who watched in resigned horror as her son, whom she had raised to be respectable and good, began to grow his hair, leaving the house with torn jeans all unkempt, various pieces of jewelry hanging from his face.  He was a good kid, but his personal grooming was beginning to reflect poorly on her mothering.  She didn’t know how much she had changed until one day, driving down a downtown street, she saw a young man with long, unkempt hair and ripped jeans, piercings all over the place.  And she noticed that her first thoughts, rather than contempt or derision, were that – this was someone’s son, and he’s probably a good kid.  The kaleidoscope had turned – and she was able to risk looking beyond the limitations of her perceptions. 

Mennonites do pedigree really well.  Just ask any non-ethnic Mennonite in any Mennonite congregation.  So do wealthy people.  So do educated people.  So do married people.  So do able bodied people.  So do men.  So do heterosexual people.   We abide by so many rules which order our community and so many of them exclude and deny rather than include and build up.  Our worlds get locked into soothing and predictable patterns and in the meantime the bent over woman passes invisible in our midst.

How can we tell when our best attempts at living faithfully fall short of Jesus’ kingdom vision?  What do we do with our own internal rules that construct walls of propriety around us, including those who fall within our comfort zone and excluding difference (albeit politely and with a smile that hopes someone else will extend the welcome). Transgressing our familiar and familial boundaries is risky – It’s takes loving someone, risking relationship, even across your own personal boundaries.  It takes noticing who sits on the periphery of our community, and wondering how we can acknowledge the fullness of their participation as sons and daughters of God.

And it might be painful. 

But it’s easier when you consider it’s not you who’s reordering the world.  The world has been reordered.  The kaleidoscope has turned.  The kingdom has come, even as it is still coming, with or without us.  The bent over woman is already a daughter of Abraham, Sabbath healing or no.  What will it take to get us to notice?