Sermon: Who is This Woman? (Luke 13:10-17), Aug 25, 2019

Sermon: Who Is This Woman?

Text: Luke 13:10-17

In today’s reading, Jesus challenges the authority of the religion at that time, saying, “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?”

Who is this woman? This is the main question for us as we explore today’s story together. Who is this woman? What is happening in this story, at this synagogue, on this Sabbath day?

Generally, a storyteller should be clever. And very often, and very effectively, storytellers know that just addressing the gender of the person in the healing story can reveal a lot of information before they even begin the story. So - the storyteller tells us Jesus “was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath, and there was a woman there” and the storyteller adds one more piece of observable information: “who was possessed by a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent double and quite unable to stand up straight.” So, she is a bent woman crippled by a spirit of bondage for eighteen years. That is a very long time.

The Bible says she is “bent double” - - and this “double” could bear multiple meanings, actually, in her lived life experience. Not just the disability, (even though it is huge… in the first century, sick people were kept apart, excluded from the realm of the healthy.) but also her gender. (and we never know what gender understanding this person actually had - would her disability have barred her from being fully considered a woman?) and how she found herself and her place around these huge judgements and bondages - for example, what she could do, what she was not allowed, what she was passionate about, what she might be proud of or feel shamed about… The clever storytelling that starts with letting us know the character’s gender, ironically, helps us to identify our life experience with hers through our imagination and study… 

So, who is this woman? 

It’s helpful to start with an existing study about Jewish women in the first century in Palestine. The claim is often made that women in Christian church/in the ministry of Jesus are much more liberated than Jewish women of the first century, but this is not true. Studies show that there was great diversity among Jewish women. Some Jewish women were leaders in synagogues, were financially independent landowners and businesswomen, could go to the courts, acquired religious education, even devoting their lives to the study of Torah. Others were disadvantaged and powerless. Today’s story tells us that the woman was in the synagogue on the Sabbath day, which indicates that she, like other women of her time, regularly took part in the synagogue worship; some of her sisters may even have been leaders in the synagogue. She was there with others to worship, to pray, to offer praise and fidelity to the God of the Torah. What her prayer was like would be left to us to imagine with empathy, and in the spirit of solidarity.

So, who then, was this woman to Jesus?

This question inspires us to ponder the relationship of God with this woman, and how God’s divine acts of love and healing are performed in her life, which includes the 18 years of being crippled.

We can’t think of the time period of eighteen years as the vacuum of God’s relationship with her, God’s absence in her life. In verse 16, Jesus calls this woman, “And here is this woman, a daughter of Abraham, who has been bound by the oppressive spirit for eighteen long years: Was it not right for her to be loosed from her bonds on the Sabbath?” Jesus argues that the Sabbath is a day of restoration and wholeness; what better day to heal and make people whole?

To describe the implications of this woman’s illness: Being severely bent over for a long time, all she would see would be downward rather than out in front of her. She would not be able to stand straight to greet others, to look ahead, or even to rejoice with upstretched, open arms. As the story is recounted, it seems that she does not see Jesus. Rather, he sees her and he takes the initiative with his unusual words of greeting: “You are rid of your trouble.” as he lays his hands on her. The verb is in the perfect passive tense, indicating that Jesus simply recognizes the healing action - the spirit of wholeness, compassion and the power of liberation - that has always been with her, performed by God. By touching her physically, what Jesus brought into the new reality is her spirit of freedom to match her body representation - to be straightened up and stand tall, and she “immediately” began to praise the God she already knew. I am quite sure that Jesus really meant to say, by calling her “a daughter of Abraham”, that she already existed as one of the God's beloveds, the descendent of the venerable ancestry. It is really an unusual designation, rarely used, to affirm her dignity, and God’s strong hands on her, even before Jesus (It’s my interpretation.). This unnamed woman is tied into the lineage of her faith at the highest level.

Our bodies… the evangelists claimed our bodies to be the temples of divine activity, in the Letters, (so they are sacred..) yet, the Christian church has a history of considering the spirit to be more important and prominent than the body. The body, with its needs and frailties, is considered despicable, when the spirit is the permanent soul that would enter God’s eternal realm in the end. Contemporary Christians now try to overcome this dualism and honour the bodies, the physical, the material (not wealth or possessions but this container created wonderfully by the material world’s temporal elements…) and that could, I hope, invite us to imagine a pot or a container. Richard Rohr says, “A pot is like our life’s journey, and a primary task in our life can be building a strong “container” or identity… The second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.” 

I once participated in a group activity in which each of us decorated a pot and then broke it with a hammer. The instructor let us decorate our pots with feathers, ropes, and colourful stickers and then, to our dismay, told us to break them. She then introduced us to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi… and invited us to think about how we define identity, life’s stories, being broken and being put back together. Survivors decide how they choose to be resilient; eventually what faith teaches us is that through our whole lives, both the troubled and harmonious times, God is the pot, not we, so rather than ‘us’ being broken, God in us is broken, and we are to put God back together inside us when we are healed. That’s how we become whole; God as a part of us, never apart from us.  

Wabi-sabi is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection - - sometimes described as beauty in what is ‘imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” (In Japanese culture, everything is supposed to be in order, and being in order means peace. But there was the point in history that people saw things do break in the culture of thinking everything is in order.) People in Japan, in the ceramic culture, take pride in beauty, but perfection is not sought; every bowl made for the ancient, reverent tea ceremony, even bowls worth tens of thousands of dollars, is made with a deliberate flaw. (This bowl’s flaw is on the bottom ring: a little semicircle of imperfect glaze) These flaws are individual to the bowl, and the participant in the tea ceremony, while turning the bowl and admiring its beauty, notes the flaw and is reminded of the imperfection of all life, all ceremony. Wabi-sabi is a time-honoured part of Japanese culture; teaching that imperfect things are treasures; traces of life. 

Along with wabi-sabi, there is Kintsugi, the use of gold to put broken things back together. It does not hide the breakage; it outlines it, binding the pieces together in beauty. There’s real spiritual strength in being imperfect, impermanent and incomplete, when God, as gold, can hold and God, as gold, is held…  This art of Kintsugi is sold at a very expensive price. It should be noted that bowls are not broken in order to imply Kintsugi. It’s only used when precious things are broken by accident. It’s a treasure, just like our lives are.

Just like Truth and Reconciliation may never be as perfect as it is on paper, but, like the gold tracings on a restored tea bowl, people will marvel at the resilience and legacy, which are what really matters, transforming the world to peace.

The way we are put together, the way God is put together in our lives teaches us how to step out of where we were and create our own ritual of becoming with God…   

I believe this is what Jesus saw in the woman… not a trouble, but a treasure. God’s treasure, God’s pot, who knew how to plant God in her pot… The 18 years of being bent was not a vacuum of God’s love… It just grew the gold of patience in her. Jesus saw it. Jesus saw her, a daughter of Abraham… 

So, who is this woman? 

We hear from the story that Jesus’ participation in her healing immediately caused controversy among the male authorities in the synagogue. These men wanted control. They wanted to control the meaning of Sabbath, the woman’s body, the healing activity of God. They wanted their order, their idea of peace to prevail. Those in the story who saw how true freedom and liberation in God can shine like gold, beautiful, holy and fearful, truly fearful, rejoiced in all the wonderful things Jesus was doing, and the woman rejoiced and praised God with wide-open, outflung arms, and everyone saw the world turned upside down - the kin-dom of God - where this story ends, the clever story ends, with our favourite ending line, so “everyone who celebrated the true union with God lived happily ever after”. The end. 

Taking back the dresses ; Sherry Farrell Racette