She at once stood up straight and glorified God

Being a woman of a certain age, I can easily identify with the bent over woman in today’s Gospel.  Doctors tell us that after age 40, people typically lose almost one half inch of height every ten years, owing to the decrease of spinal cartilage that occurs with normal aging. After a bone density test my doctor told me I had the best bones he had seen all year.  Thanks to my Irish heritage, I probably won’t be physically bent over any time soon.  

But it is hard to watch lifelong friends become increasingly frail as their heads and torsos slowly begin to curve and tilt downward.   The bent over woman in today’s Gospel probably suffered from osteoporosis, which could easily occur with the poor diet that was all too common among oppressed Israelites, especially among women who fed their children first.  

Yet here she is, painfully shuffling into the synagogue to honor her God on the sabbath day.  

And here is a compassionate Jesus, watching as she stumbles along.  Moved by her sad state, he tells her:  “Woman, you are set free of your infirmity” and lays his hands on her.  Immediately  she stands up straight and glorifies God.  I’m guessing the woman could hardly take in what had just happened.  After all, she hadn’t even asked Jesus for a healing.  He just knew what she needed and released her from long years of suffering.

Unfortunately the hall monitors of the universe at the synagogue couldn’t let this go on.  They issue this order to the woman and the crowd:  “There are six days when work should be done. Come on those days to be cured, not on the sabbath day.”  

Seriously?  Were they afraid that teeming hordes of the afflicted might come to God for healing on the sabbath?   Why would that not be a good thing?  Why not rejoice in the healing power of God,  that on this day had freed their sister from a terrible affliction?  

Reflecting on this text, I realize that even though my own body is not bent over, my spirit very often is.  I too am the bent over woman, too often weighed down with my carefully constructed to-do list, and myriad other obligations some of which aren’t even mine,  (my default being a rather compulsive hyper responsibility.)  

One trouble with being bent over—whether physically or spiritually—is that one’s vision is seriously confined to a very small expanse.  Jesus’s spontaneous desire to heal allows the woman in the Gospel—and me on my good days—to stand upright and take in the larger horizon which includes a healing God who is not bound by narrow ideas concerning the appropriate time for healing—(or the appropriate timeline for my task list.)

Now is the time for healing, says Jesus. Now, today, on this sabbath day, is the time to celebrate and praise the abundant love and vision of our healing mother- father God.

Jesus decries the rigidity of the rule keepers—a perennial affliction of religious leaders of every denomination even to our own day— "Don’t you understand? Freeing this woman, this daughter of Abraham is more important than freeing the ox and ass as your religious rules allow?”   The phrase “Daughter of Abraham” occurs nowhere else in either the Hebrew or Christian scriptures.  Jesus is saying “ This woman is a fully equal member of God’s own people,  and her dignity and well-being must be the priority here.”

A recent meme circulating of Facebook says it all:  “Religious people will destroy a person to keep a tradition, but Jesus will break a tradition to help a person.”   Traditions are important.  But they are not the most important consideration when it comes to people who are hurting. For Jesus, healing the hurt is the most important consideration.

I think Jesus asks religious people – who, perhaps like me, also suffer from being spiritually bent over - to expand our horizons; put wounded, hurting people first, and leave our valued traditions and necessary rules in their proper, secondary place.  We cannot create rigid boundaries that miss the point by excluding people from God’s expansive,  overarching love.

So today, let each of us also stumble into the presence of Jesus.  Let us bring our own bent over brokenness to his healing horizon which is  broader than any we can imagine.  

And then we too can rejoice and stand upright in praise of an amazing God whose love can never be confined.