Crooked World
Luke 13:10-17
You may have heard the recent news story out of Texas. No, not that one. The other one. The one about the Texas state legislature passing a law mandating that the Ten Commandments (King James version, of course) be prominently displayed in all public school classrooms beginning September 1. Implementation of the law is on hold, however, with a federal court judge issuing an injunction.
The injunction should surprise no one. The law is on its face transparently unconstitutional. No doubt lawsuits were being filed against it before the ink was dry on the legislation. The whole thing was a farce from the outset, more about creating political theater than crafting serious legislation.
But that’s not the only bit of comedy in this story. Among the Ten Commandments, of course, is the fourth one, which says, “Keep the sabbath holy.” Traditionally that has been understood, at least in part, to mean refraining from doing any work on the sabbath. And yet the final draft of the bill was completed on a Saturday, the day of the Jewish sabbath. How ironic!
They say everything is bigger in Texas, which I suppose includes irony as well, because the final vote on whether to pass the bill into law took place on a Sunday, the day of the Christian sabbath.
I bring this up because Jesus confronts a similar hypocrisy in today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke. The synagogue leader is outraged that Jesus would work on the sabbath by healing a woman who had been crippled for 18 long years. And yet Jesus is quick to point out that the religious authorities have no qualms about making exceptions for themselves to do work on the sabbath. They allow themselves to lead their livestock to water, in clear violation of the letter of the law.
Luke doesn’t tell us where the synagogue in today’s passage was located. Maybe it was Texas. (I’m not picking on Texas. Hypocrites can be found everywhere, including in this pulpit.)
Over the course of the next three months, right up until Thanksgiving, with a few exceptions, we’ll be working our way through the Gospel of Luke. We begin today with Jesus teaching in this unknown synagogue. Jesus is in the midst of preaching, when Luke writes, “And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.” The words “And just then” would seem to suggest that she has done something to draw attention. Maybe she’s arrived late and just taken her seat. Maybe she is trying to move closer to better hear what Jesus is saying. We don’t know. We can only speculate.
We don’t need that much imagination, however, to picture what her experience in that synagogue, or anywhere really, would have been like. Her condition, being bent over so that she could not stand up straight, would have kept her from being able to look anyone in the eye, unless people were willing, quite literally, to stoop to her level. Can you imagine not being able to lift your head to speak, to look out the window, or to gaze at the stars?
On top of that, she lived in an age when illness and infirmity were often attributed to God’s righteous punishment of sin. Remember that in another Gospel passage, when Jesus and the disciples encounter a man born blind, they ask him, “Who sinned, rabbi, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” (John 9:2).
It’s also likely that her condition would have drawn the attention of onlookers, and yet at the same time made her virtually invisible. What do I mean by that? It would have taken effort to interact with her. You would need to accommodate yourself, bending your body to match hers. How many people do you think would make the effort? It would be much easier simply to ignore her, to pretend that you didn’t see her.
When I was living in South Korea, I lived in a highly developed, fairly affluent neighborhood. Lotte Tower, the tallest building in South Korea, was just a few blocks from my apartment. Throngs of young couples on dates strolled along the walking path around Seokchon Lake. Teenagers screamed in delight to the twists and turns of the rollercoaster at Lotte World, an amusement park designed to look like a Disney castle.
But when I walked the back streets I saw another side of Seoul. In the back streets, tucked away from the high-rise towers with five-star hotels and shops full of luxury goods, I would often see the elderly poor, usually women, pulling these enormous handcarts stacked several feet high with cardboard. The cart looked somewhat like a rickshaw. It had two wheels, a flat base, and a curved pole in front that attached to the base against which the driver leaned to propel the cart forward.
The women would walk the streets pulling these carts, looking like refugees from a war as they collected cardboard that had been discarded from homes and businesses. Once the cart was full, they would bring the mound of cardboard to a recycling center where they could redeem it for cash. A full cart might bring in the equivalent of about five dollars.
The women who pulled these carts were often severely hunched over—I’m talking nearly 90 degrees—either from age or from pulling the cart or both. Every so often I’d come across an article in an English-language newspaper about the so-called “cardboard grannies.” In one such article, the author of a book profiling several of these women lamented the lack of public advocacy for the elderly poor. “Compared to children or animals, which are weak but adorable,” he said, “there are few civic groups that advocate for the elderly poor. They just quietly remain in the blind spot of society.”
They just quietly remain in the blind spot of society. They’re right out there in the open, but for all intents and purposes, they’re invisible.
Maybe you feel that you’re invisible. Age can do that. Our society celebrates youth and puts a premium on looking as young as possible, as if looking your age were a sin.
Poverty can make you invisible, not just in South Korea but here as well. When you’re poor, people will avoid you because they think that you’re going to ask for money. We avoid the poor also because they tweak our conscience, making us feel guilty about the latest electronic gadget that we purchased or the amount of money that we waste on monthly subscriptions that we don’t use (Netflix, Prime, etc.).
Even seemingly insignificant things can make us feel invisible. When you sit down by yourself at a social gathering and no one joins you or invites you to their table. When you post something on social media and no one likes it or comments on it. When you enter a church for the first time and no one greets you or talks to you after the service. We think, “What am I, invisible?”
To the world, perhaps, but not to Jesus. Jesus sees you. He sees you just as he saw the woman in today’s passage. Verse 12 reads: When Jesus saw her, he called her over.
Jesus saw her. He took note of her. He called to her. He laid his hands on her. He healed her. He freed her. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment,” he says.
Let’s also note what doesn’t happen. The woman doesn’t ask for healing, nor does anyone approach Jesus on her behalf. She doesn’t seek Jesus, he seeks her. Nor does Jesus ask the woman whether she believes in him. The woman makes no profession of faith. It’s not a matter of, “If you just believe and don’t doubt, if you would only pray often enough and with enough fervor, then God will surely heal you.”
No, Jesus takes the initiative. Jesus reaches out to this woman whose back has been crooked for 18 miserable years, and he heals her.
But the woman’s back is not the only thing that’s crooked in this passage. In a righteous world this woman’s healing, whether it occurs on the sabbath or any other day, ought to be cause for celebration. But we don’t live in a righteous world. Ours is a crooked world, a world bent with sin. It was then, and it is now.
Rather than celebrating this woman’s healing, the leader of the synagogue becomes indignant because Jesus has come into his synagogue and broken the fourth commandment. He has done work on the sabbath. He has not kept the sabbath holy.
Now, it would be all too easy to point the finger at the hypocrisy of this religious leader—this man who is all but wearing a tall black hat and twirling his mustache as he ties the damsel to the train tracks—without directing the finger where it belongs—right back at ourselves. I have met the enemy, Pogo, and he is us!
We all have our rules by which we believe that God should act. Surely, the grace of God does not extend to those people. They don’t deserve it! We all want to tame the wildness and the wideness of God’s grace. We want to be in control of how and when and for whom God works God’s wondrous, healing, saving grace just as much as the synagogue leader, this pathetic little man who is worthy not so much of our scorn as our pity.
The truth is that we are all crooked. We are all bent by the weight of life’s burdens and of our own sin. It weighs us down, all this baggage that we’re carrying. But Jesus has come to straighten us out.
Now, Jesus doesn’t come saying, “Straighten up, people! Get your act together. Shape up!” That is the voice of the law. That is the voice of the synagogue leader.
No, Jesus comes to us not with the weight of the law but with the joy of God’s liberating grace. He says to us, “You are set free from your ailment. All the weight that you’ve been carrying…the guilt, the resentment, the anxiety, the fear, the doubt…give it to me. Lay it upon me. I will take it from you and make it my own.”
When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.