C Proper 16 21 Ord Paul 2025
Luke 13:10-17
August 24, 2025
The
story is told of the bent-over woman who entered the synagogue with a crippling
spirit that had kept her that way for 18 years.
Eighteeen years! Can we imagine
any person that we know our love in our faith community walking into the place
of worship for eighteen years without asking or the leaders of our church
asking, “What ails you? Why has this
become your lot? What can we do? How might we help?”
` In
reading the Bible, one of the first lessons we learn is that ancient peoples
did not necessarily see themselves as a-part from the wider society. When we read the beautiful hymns from the
Psalms, and hear one of the voices say, as in my favorite Psalms, “As a deer
longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God. My tears have been my food day and night, as
my enemies say to me, ‘Where is your God?’”
The point is that that is not just a singular voice crying out to
God. We are to read that Psalm as a
voice of the community, crying out on behalf of the community. “People who want our destruction think that
you are a joke, God. Where are you in
the midst of such suffering and pain in our lives? Why have you been silent, O
God?” Psalms like that one made it into
holy Scripture because people heard voiced in that Psalm their own voice, the
voice of their people.
So many Scriptural stories are written not to
tell the story of one individual but of the whole community. Like a good movie or a good story, the
stories are meant to be something the whole community understands and
experiences. When we hear of a bent-over
woman who walks into the worship place with a spirit that has her crippled,
unable to stand up straight, think of what that might be saying about the
plight of the whole people during the time of Jesus.
If
we could step back for a moment from seeing this story literally, imagine the
story being told to reflect a dispute going on within the Jewish faith. At the core of Jewish faith is the Exodus
story which also reflects all the rules and regulations for keeping the Jewish
people right before God and maintaining their freedom.
The
most common phrasing for understanding the Exodus story is that the Egyptians
and their Pharaoh held the Jewish people in bondage, and through God’s
deliverance, God liberated or loosed them.
Moses then taught the Hebrew people through what was called The Way,
what was bound (not permitted, and reflecting a life of slavery) and loosed
(permitted and what reflected a life of freedom). In the same manner, everyday Jewish teaching
then became about what was bound (not permitted and slavery) and loosed
(permitted and freedom).[1]
These
are the same verbs found in Matthew, where the author of that book strongly
alludes to Jesus as the second Moses.
Not unexpectedly then, Jesus says to the apostle Peter, a verse often
quoted by the Roman Catholic Church to reference the authority of the Pope, “I
will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth
will be bound in heaven. And whatever
you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”[2] Because the Roman Catholic Church traces all
of the Pope’s authority back through Peter, they are drawing a beeline back
through Peter to Jesus and then back through Jesus to Moses and the Ten
Commandments to say, “Whatever the Pope says . . .goes.”
Ok,
I took a small detour there. Let’s get
back to our story to see the Jewish dispute that is going on. On one side in this story are the synagogue
leaders who believe the Exodus story and the giving of God’s Way which includes
the rules and regulations around the Sabbath, that whole story, is about a
personal morality that must be observed and honored to maintain integrity
before God. Honor the rules to honor
God. Those who do not honor the rules
bring shame upon themselves and their community.
After all, and this
is important, if you start asking why this woman is bent-over, is to invite the
hard work of analysis, looking upstream, to see who is really responsible for
her suffering. And that just begins the
hard work, the conflict we might have to endure, to be involved in bringing
healing to an entire people. And
remember, going back, this story is a story intended to be a metaphor for the
whole of Jewish people living in rural Galilee.
Do you see the suffering? Do you
hear the cries of the people? Bent-over
and crippled these 18 years? But who is
ready for that? Who wants to enter that
conflict?
Jesus notices. Though he is teaching in the synagogue, he
notices a woman held in bondage. He
hears the cries of his people, as God did and said to Moses when the Divine
Deliverer first related the reason for speaking to Moses out of the burning
bush. “I have heard the cries of my
people, and I have come down to deliver, to loose my people from slavery.”
Throughout the
Scripture passage read for us today, the verbs used repeatedly are “bind” and
“loose.” What does it mean that this
bent-over woman is bound by this spirit and that Jesus says in response, to
characterize what happened to her, “[W]as she not bound to be loosed from this
bondage on the day of the Sabbath?”? The
overt repetition of the language tells us what is at issue here.
Jesus is effectively
saying, “It is necessary to alleviate her suffering, for her to be freed.” Jesus does not say that she is healed. “Heal” is the term used by the synagogue leader—a
term he uses to invoke the rules and regulations. The synagogue leader is trying to say this is
about this woman and the woman only.
The synagogue leader
does not blame Jesus for this interruption.
He blames the suffering woman.
Jesus says that she is not healed but “loosed”[3]—a
term that invokes the deeper meaning of the Sabbath, rooted in the Exodus
story, and invites the Jewish people to collectively see themselves in this
woman.
The Jewish crowd in
this story gets it. They, collectively,
know this story and suffering. They
rejoice at her being loosed, knowing God’s intent for all of them. The Jewish crowd know themselves to be the
bent-over people whom God necessarily frees.
Again, the synagogue
leaders try to do a go-around. They see
the bent-over woman as an easy target and try to move around a conflict with
Jesus. They do not cast their aspersions
at Jesus but point the finger at the easy target, a woman, who is shaming their
synagogue for being free from her suffering, the Satanic spirit.
Today we are still
arguing over the interpretation of the Exodus story. Who is right?
The synagogue leaders? Who invoke
individual rules and regulations to say religious faith is about shaming those
who do not abide by the rules, regardless of how they suffer? Is it the easy play to make faith about
personal morality so that we do not have to do the hard work to do the critical
analysis, look upstream, and seek to loose a whole community bound in the
suffering slavery? Is suffering a
signpost of sin?
Or is Jesus right
about the Exodus story? Does real
physical suffering call us to do the hard work to bring about freedom? Is true suffering a signpost a wider sin of
societal breakdown which we then necessarily move against? And are we willing to enter into that
conflict? Because my reflection is that
many of the world’s ills are a result of an unwillingness to enter into
conflict, to look deeper. Like the
synagogue leader, we take the easy way out and blame how things are going on
those who suffer.
One of my favorite
writers, Sarah Kendzior, revealed in her column this past week that she is a
big fan of horror movies. And now I
cannot love her more. I pray that I
don’t offend anyone by admitting that.
Kendzior was
traveling in Austin, Texas, this past week and wrote of her fandom for the
movie, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
In particular, during her college years she had interviewed the actor
who played Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen, and had become somewhat a friend to the
guy who played Leatherface, the wielder of the titular chainsaw.
Hansen had been a
former graduate student in English, and a Herman Melville scholar, the writer
of Moby Dick. And he was
philosophical about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, referenced that Raiders
of the Lost Ark was much more explicit in its violence. And to remember, Hansen said, that was a
movie aimed at kids But that the
violence in Raiders of the Lost Ark was a polished violence, a polite
violence. The problem in the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre was that it was filled with impolite violence. Hansen went on to explain,
What’s happening is
that we’re going after these films not because of their violence. We see the violence as something we can hang
on to. We’re offended by horror movies
because we’re middle Americans who don’t want to see things in which the values
are not the same. The vision in horror
films is often very dark. We want to
have a movie that tells us that everything’s okay.
A horror film does not pretend that death is not horrifying. It does not pretend that violence is not bloody, grotesque, and painful. What’s irresponsible are the films that show violence with no ramifications.[4]
For the writer Sarah Kendzior, Gunnar
Hansen made her feel normal, to recognize that the violence and the resulting
suffering in the air could not be polished to become palatable. And to complete Kendzior’s thought, I think that
we often demand polite violence so we can get our necessary fill of it. Or we find ourselves turning aside and
shunning the real effects of violence, the people who remind us of what it does
in the world. We just want them to go
away.
I
think that is why when I imagine God personified, I always imagine God with
kind, weathered eyes, because God refuses to do individual rule-making to turn
aside from suffering. God knows the
horrors of it. God openly weeps through
it and rails against it. God’s heart
grieves the suffering, wailing and screaming against it.
There
are times when I am a very poor excuse for a Christian. But then there are other times when I am
aware that God is moving through me to move upstream, seek answers, and ask,
“Were they not bound to be loosed from this bondage on the day of the
Sabbath?” I remember this past winter,
going out to one of the piers on Lake Michigan in the midst of a snowstorm, and
shouting out into Lake Michigan on behalf of one of my kids who was going
through continued, tremendous pain, begging for them to be loosed from it, to
be impolite, the snot flying in my face, my tears and the snow making it
impossible for me to see anything, the biting wind whipping into me. I cried and screamed for them until I lost my
voice. I opened my mouth to scream
against it and all that I had was a hollow hoarseness.
It was not only me
crying out to God on their behalf but also a promise that I would do “whatever”
to loose them from the bondage in their lives.
For one moment and following, I was faithful. Would that I could find the strength, the
courage, the wherewithal to do that when there is so much polite and polished
violence and suffering in the world.
There
are any number of peoples and places in the world bent-over by Satan, maybe
that describes you in your time of life, feeling like the suffering is too much
to bear. We know of whole peoples who
are bound to be loosed and necessarily need to be freed. When we speak of our faith, can we talk about
how our suffering and deliverance is wrapped up in the suffering and
deliverance of others? Do we hear Jesus
critiquing the polished and polite religious faith which shames individuals,
those bent-over women? That religious
faith too often saying that if the woman had only been of more character,
followed closer the morality code, been more faithful, learned their lessons,
only did things legally, God would have delivered them by now? Are we enslaved by a faith that speaks of
individual sin so that we do not have to do the hard work of taking on the
wider systemic and structural issues that break our backs?
So
it is that when we pray today, we bind ourselves to others who suffer or
rejoice so that those who are bound may be loosed and those who are loosed may
hear our shouts of gladness and jubilation.
What
the Scripture teaches is that others may not even know us by name or just refer
to us as “bent-over,” but Jesus and his followers notice, go to our place in
the sanctuary, make eye contact . . . maybe for the first time in eighteen
years and declare God’s will for us to be loosed in the world. Certainly . . . as God wills that for us, God
wills it for people, communities, and nations today.
May
the followers of Jesus, the ones who believe that Jesus’s interpretation of the
Exodus story carries the day, join in crying out. May they bind themselves to one another so
that they know God’s will for them to stand up straight, to be lifted. May they see the suffering in the world and
recognize that the sons and daughters, siblings and cousins of Abraham and
Sarah and Hagar deserve our notice and our hard work. May it be so.
Amen.
[2]
Matthew 16:19; D. Mark Davis, “A Bound Woman Bound to be Loosed from Bondage,” Left
Behind and Loving It. http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-bound-woman-bound-to-be-loosed-from.html.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Sarah Kendzior, “My Friend Leatherface:
Remembering a creative conservationist as plutocrats take a chainsaw to
Texas,” @sarahkendzior, Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter on substack, August
20, 2025.
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