Six Days
Luke 13:10-17

March 11, 2007


Often the Lectionary readings will add a few extra verses with parentheses protecting them from the rest of the text. I have made myself take notice of those extra verses, for sometimes like the road less traveled they have something very important to say. The Lectionary Guys are notorious for cutting up the verses in a Biblical story and leaving out what they think are the boring or irrelevant or too gory parts. Not sure what that says about them. The “official” reading is the first nine verses of Luke 13 and verses 10-17, albeit a different story, were left out. Today is the Revenge of the Omitted: I have left out the regular reading to read and hear instead a story found only in Luke and almost forgotten, a road less traveled.

Jesus is back teaching in a synagogue for the last time, for by now, he is a marked man. Sure, they let him teach and preach, but their intentions were more to give Jesus an uninhibited opportunity to put his unclean foot in his mouth. I don’t believe Jesus was naive about the circumstances and he did not disappoint them. What he was teaching or preaching we have no idea and the Pharisees weren’t interested. They figured that Jesus would do something anyway, for after all, it was the Sabbath. What would Jesus do again to violate the Sabbath?

Jesus knows the Beatles: “And he saw her standing there.” That is, if what she was doing can be called standing. Everybody sees her in that synagogue, no one misses her, but bent over by some infirmity, probably a severe form of arthritis, she could not straighten up and this had been 18 years in the making and now she was part of the landscape. Perhaps because of the congregation assembled that day she could not even see Jesus, could not lift her head up high enough to angle her eyes towards his. But he saw her and he asked her to come to him. You know that the Pharisees now had their eyes focused on Jesus; this was not a normal part of the synagogue worship service, not a liturgical move.

“Woman, you are free from your infirmity.” Laying hands on her, she immediately straightened up. He said “You are free” before he laid hands on her. Jesus actually seldom laid hands on people, but that’s one reason why today we still lay hands on confirmation students, on people being ordained into the ministry. We are laying on hands as a sign that God’s power and overwhelming love is somehow being channeled through our bodies and arms. That may have been the liturgical gesture that Jesus was enacting on behalf of all the worshipers there. And from how they acted at the end of the scene they participated heart and soul in this unbelievable liturgical gesture.

But all of us here know what happens and what is mumbled or blurted out loud whenever something happens or is said in a worship service that doesn’t seem to fit our patterns and traditions. “That isn’t worship! That’s a mockery of what you’re supposed to do in church, and God is not mocked!” It does not take much for you and me to think that somebody else’s version of worship is not worship at all.

It was no surprise the president of the synagogue was affronted that Jesus had dared to heal someone on the Sabbath - worship isn’t supposed to be work. There are a full six days in which to work, he declared with a heavy solemnity, come and be healed on one of those days, not on the Sabbath Day. The president, by the way, did not direct his words directly to Jesus. He could not look at him in the eye, so instead he talked to the congregation. It was their fault, her fault in particular, that after 18 years of being bent over, she came here into this holy space and on this holy day to be healed in such an unholy way. Isn’t that the technique? Blame the victim, though actually, she was the winner, the one who was really blessed by this act of worship. The fact that she was a woman should not be overlooked in his complaint about Sabbaths being profaned. Everyone knew her, everyone ignored her suffering, no one remembered her name. Woman, you are free!

In our worship services, we are polite. We don’t argue and would find argument and debate unworshipful. We are not even comfortable with the call and response of the Black and evangelical churches. Yet, by the first century the culture of the synagogue in which the Holy Torah was read and meditated upon day and night was one of lively debate and an almost gymnastic playing with the words and ideas of Scripture. Jesus often found himself cornered by the Pharisees’ clever usage of Scripture and he responded famously on a number of occasions with a comeback from Scripture itself that usually made his opponents look silly. And the crowds hanging around listening in loved it all and probably cheered in this the spiritual blood sport of that era.

Hypocrites! Not a word you can go back and withdraw. Jesus is playing the game hardball, yet based upon compassion. For the Pharisees and other interpreters of the Law abhorred treating animals cruelly in any fashion, so even on the Sabbath it was quite legal to loose animals from their stalls and give them water. It was legal on the Sabbath to work to make life better for animals.

Therefore, see this woman, bound up in a stall of infirmity, bent over by the weight of Satan for no less than 18 years, not just six days! Is it not right to let her loose, and isn’t the Sabbath, God’s Day, the best of all days to do it? The Pharisees blushed and slunk away, the crowd roared. Wow! She was freed and the Sabbath is now free to do the work of God. The reason the congregation cheered, loudly shouted Amen, was because the Pharisees were always ready to nail them on some Sabbath work violation. They couldn’t do anything on the Sabbath except go and listen to those Pharisees drone on; they couldn’t even be kind to someone struggling for sure enough that would be considered the blasphemy of work on the day God rested.

And he saw her standing there, then. This nearly forgotten story, omitted perhaps by the scholars because Jesus had healed lots of other people in other passages, had even healed other women before, and had challenged the sacred cow of the Sabbath prohibition against work a bunch of times before. In other words, this passage says nothing new or unique. It’s redundant, so they downsized the Lectionary at the expense of hearing about the woman finally straightened up.

I hardly need to tell you that we have our own brand of problems with the Sabbath. Sunday for Christians is Sabbath only for those who want it to be the Sabbath, a day of rest and a day of worship, and perhaps only for those of us who have the leisure. Worship fundamentally is rest, a way to restore one’s body and soul. Sometimes it seems like work; sometimes you have to work at worship. But most of the time, it is God who works in you and frees you to stand for at least another six days.

The real problem with the Sabbath does not lie in the abolition of the blue laws that allows stores to stay open on Sunday, but how we, the church’s own people, deal with time and other people. The Sabbath was the logical symbol of an approach to religious faith that Jesus had to deconstruct, to use the post-modern verb. What Jesus had to break down was the belief that the system is more important than the individual, that the process is what we have to trust and remain faithful towards and then we shall be saved. It is the evolution of many a denomination that utilizes a rational approach to faith, for eventually we tend to substitute the Process for the Gospel and lose the ability to distinguish the two.

When we are beholden and committed to the Process that means that everything has to be done according to its scheduled time, and things done out of time, out of sequence, undermine the logic and supposed success of the process. The six regular weekdays are the proper time to do work, while the seventh day is a non-work day. Healing was defined along the way as work. So therefore, this bent over crippled woman was not allowed to be healed on the Sabbath in the sanctuary of the synagogue because she was out of time, not in the correct sequence of the Process. The feminists are right as well, that as a woman being selected by Jesus was outside the guidelines and rules for eligibility for healing.

But the Gospel is not interested in scheduled time. The Gospel even has a word for it: kairos, a Greek word that means “the right time.” Jesus saw her standing there and intuitively knew that the Sabbath, God’s holy day, the day of rest, is the best time, the right time, to restore one’s body and soul.

Daylight Savings Time began early this morning, the earliest ever, a moot point for Saskatchewan, the land that forgot the time, but that is part of our calling in this 40 day Lenten season to get the time right, to make our Sabbath holy and restorative, to see a woman or a man standing there who needs to be free and for you to work to set them free, even on the Sabbath.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan