Healing Stories: The Bent Over Woman

Luke 13:10-17

April 29, 2007         (Click the date to see the bulletin)

 

1.  Today is the beginning of a new series of sermons about Jesus’ healing miracles.   Miraculous healings are mysteries even today, when we can see firsthand what is happening. Records of miraculous healings in the Bible are even more mysterious, and generate a variety of responses.  Some adamantly claim they could never have happened the way they are written because they’re supernatural – they violate the laws of nature.  Others say that’s just the point -- Jesus is God, and God can violate those laws whenever necessary.  And then there is somewhere in between we’ve come to call psychosomatic healing that looks at the role one’s faith plays in physical healing.  So we in this room today may very divided in our thoughts about the healing miracles.  What about  this bent over woman?  Some of us may think it’s symbolic; others may think it is based on some real event that developed into a sort of legend that Luke wrote down years later; still others may believe it is a true miraculous faith healing.  It’s hard to know, because there were no cam-corders to tape the event and play it back for us in slow motion.  We don’t know what really happened, but more important than  “what really happened” is what this miracle means.

2.  So let’s plumb the depth of this particular healing story.  What was going on here?  That’s pretty clear.  Jesus was teaching in the synagogue one Sabbath day.  In our own time, he might have been teaching a Sunday School class in Church one ordinary Sunday morning.  Nothing at all unusual about it.  And then, while he was teaching, a woman appears.  Nothing too strange about that, either.  This was the synagogue, not the Temple, so it would not be unusual for a woman to enter a room where a man was teaching.^[i]  But this woman did not look like most women – this woman was bent completely over.  Luke’s gospel  is the only place in the whole Bible where we find a person described as “bent over.”  Today we might assume she had arthritis in her spine – you may have seen the attendant at the Tulsa airport who walks bent over like that.  Or maybe she had scholeosis, like my brother and my aunt.  The muscles on one side of their spines have been weakened, which pulls part of their spines to one side and leaves them quite bent over – unless they have surgery to straighten the spine with steel rods (a surgery which my brother had 40 years ago).

3.  Whatever this bent over woman’s condition was, it had afflicted for 18 years (probably half of her life), but it had nothing to do with arthritis or back muscles.  Verse 11 says “her spirit had crippled her . . . she was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight.”  But she came to the synagogue anyway.  How she got there, we don’t know.  As we’ll see during the next few Sundays, some of those who needed healing were brought to Jesus by friends or family, others came to Jesus on their own and asked to be healed.  But this woman apparently came by herself.  We don’t know if she had heard Jesus was there and wanted him to heal her, or if she had heard Jesus was there and wanted to hear him teach, or if she didn’t even know Jesus was there, but came beause it was the Sabbath and the synagogue is where people went on the Sabbath.  The story as we find it gives us no clue.

4.  But there she was!  And before we can find out who she was or why she was there, we read that Jesus sees her.  And the moment he saw her, he must have felt compassion for her because the very next words we read are these: “He called her over and said, “Woman you are set free from your                   .”  You fill in the blank.  Some translations have “infirmity; others “disease,” still others say “ailment.”  All those words have merit.  The original word here means to be strengthless, to be feeble in body or in mind.   “Woman, you are set free from your strengthlessness.”  And the moment Jesus spoke those words, he touched her, and she was not bent over any more.  “Immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.”

5.  Wonderful healing miracle!  We might think that would be the end of the story, but it isn’t!  The leader of the synagogue was watching all this unfold.  The leader was the one whose duty it was to make certain everything was done the right way.  It was the Sabbath, by golly, and he knew that working on the Sabbath was forbidden, and because he saw the woman stand up straight after Jesus touched her, he called it a healing, and healings were “work.”  The leader became indignant, and laid down the Law.  Jesus did not hesitate.   “You hypocrites!”  Then he launched into a two-minute sermon that’s taking me 15 minutes but can be summarized in six words: PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN RULES.

6.  People are more important than rules.  What does this mean to us – to you and to me?  I believe we find the meaning in Jesus’ two-minute sermon, a meaning which is often overlooked.  When he says “this woman whom Satan bound for eighteen long years,” he’s not painting a picture of a little red devil with horns and a pointed tail carrying a pitchfork wrapping her in chains.  The word SATAN has the same letters in Old Testament Hebrew as it does in New Testament Greek as it does in our English translations!  And it’s pronounced the same in all three languages, too.  But we moderns have given it a meaning which it did not have then.  When people who lived during Bible times heard “SATAN” they knew it meant “opposition.”  So when Jesus said this woman was bound by s-a-t-a-n he meant conflicting messages had her all tied up in knots; she couldn’t stand up straight because the weight of all those rules kept her bent like a pretzel – she could not live like God wanted her to live all twisted up like she was.  The rules kept her bent over.

7.  Life has not changed much, has it?  We, too, have rules that oppose the new life Jesus brings!  What rules have us so bent over that we cannot stand up straight and move ahead in our own lives?  There is no single answer to that question.  The “rules” are many and varied.  Most of them we learned early in our lives.  They’re not all bad.  Some of them save our lives and the lives of others.  But some of them cripple more effectively than any arthritis or scholeosis.  These are the rules about who’s in and who’s out; who we should associate with and who we shouldn’t.  Imagine for just a moment that you’re one of those who is “out.”  Picture other people turning away from you because you’re not like the rest.  Then imagine Jesus calling you over to where he is, touching you on the shoulder, and including you in his circle of friends.  Can you see it happening?  And now reverse the picture.  Imagine that you’re in a room full of people, and you just caught sight of someone who is very different from the rest.  What do you see yourself doing?  What would Jesus do?

8.  You really don’t have to imagine occasions like the one I just described.  Sometime this week each one of us will encounter someone who is bent over from the weight of some rule.  It may be you!  Or it may be someone else.  When it happens, I hope you and I will find some way to be a friend.  Who knows?  In a world full of hypocrites, ours may be the only kindness that person will know.