Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, August 25, 2019

Proper 15C: Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

If you were asked to make a list, from memory, of great healing miracles in the gospels, you probably wouldn’t include the story we just read. The Man Born Blind, yes, the Woman with the Hemorrhage, the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter. You probably wouldn’t think to add the Healing of the Women Who Was Doubled Over. That may be partly because it only appears in Luke’s Gospel, but partly, too, because we don’t get a very clear picture of her. Her name isn’t given—or any other details, even her age. All we’re told is that for eighteen years she’s been stooped over and completely unable to stand up straight. 

Well, whatever her age, eighteen years is a long time. She can’t see ahead of her without craning her neck. She can’t do the work she wants to be doing. She probably can’t pick up a child or a grandchild. If she’s talking with people, she can’t see their faces. If she’s at the market, it’s hard to measure the crowds around her and protect herself in the press of business. And, besides all that, there was the physical pain, the strained muscles, the aching joints that must have gone with her infirmity. She is a compelling example of the kind of physical suffering that can afflict us human beings during a lifetime.

She’s also a compelling image of all the other things that weaken us and cause us suffering, mental and spiritual as well as physical. Anthropologists figured out, over the past couple of centuries, that walking erect is the very thing that set our earliest humanoid ancestors on the evolutionary path that led to us, the existing human species. Being deprived of it is distressing in so many different ways—spiritual, emotional, physical. We can hardly help being moved by her trouble. It can evoke from us responses that range from wanting to help to a desire to distance ourselves. We may even feel a vague, but deeply rooted fear of contagion, of somehow “catching” her ill fortune.

But Jesus sees her and calls her over and touches her. He’s always doing that, isn’t he—touching people? Even the unlikeliest of people—lepers, for example. He never seems to worry about catching something from someone else, whether disease or simply misfortune. And from the moment he touches her, she can stand erect, and she begins to praise God. Yes, I should think so after the burden of those eighteen years was lifted from her! She could actually look Jesus in the face. She could see her family and friends. Her body was once again balanced and poised over the supporting legs, free of the constant strain. Lifting her head was no longer a painful struggle. It was pure delight to be praising God there in the synagogue, where it had all just happened. 

The local clergy, of course, were less happy. After all, no work was supposed to be done on the Sabbath, and here are people coming into the church (well, synagogue is the actual word; but you see what I mean) to get healed—certainly a form of work. And Jesus just encourages it by healings like this one—encourages the violation of serious religious standards. I’m guessing that the ruler of the synagogue would have liked to reprove Jesus directly, but that must have seemed a bit awkward under the circumstances. So he reproves the people instead: “Stop coming to be healed on the Sabbath; we can’t have that. It’s against the Law.” Not to mention that it was disrupting the service and confusing the decency and order that we clergy do tend to hold very dear. I feel a certain sympathy with my Jewish counterpart in this story, even while I rejoice with the woman who’s been given back her ability to stand upright in the human community.

Jesus’ response, of course, is one we find him making over and over again. He doesn’t make light of the Sabbath at all. But the central commandment of the law is love: Love God with your whole self! Love your neighbor as yourself! Love those around you. Even his critics water their animals on the Sabbath. What could be more fitting than for this woman to be set free from her infirmity precisely on the Sabbath. She gets to stand erect again and praise God for it. Churches and synagogues and laws and Sabbaths have their genuine value, but they’re not the central thing.

Isaiah was making the same point in the passage we heard earlier: Keeping the Sabbath isn’t primarily a matter not lifting things, not doing things. The Sabbath means not”pursuing your own interests, your own affairs.” It means “removing the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil.” It means “offering your food to the hungry and satisfying the needs of the afflicted.” 

Isaiah, in fact, goes on to say that this is what makes a nation great—to refrain from exploitation, to share with the poor, to meet the needs of those who suffer. It’s the society that receives with gratitude and shares with generosity that will flourish. This is a message that needs to be reaffirmed loudly and persistently in an age like ours that has sanctified human greed and brute force instead.

Then your light shall rise in the darkness, says Isaiah,

and your gloom be like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually

and satisfy your needs in parched places,

and make your bones strong;

and you shall be like a watered garden,

like a spring of water,

whose waters never fail.

We keep Sabbath not only by gathering and worshipping, but by acts of love, love for God and for our neighbor. And this isn’t just an arbitrary demand on God’s part, a duty imposed on us from above. It’s part of God’s gift of grace. This whole universe began with God’s original, pre-emptive, enduring act of creative love, a love God extends even to us. This love is a gift to us, a grace. And our love is a response to God’s love, a sharing in God’s love, even a participation in God’s love. It, too, is a grace. For this is what all love longs for, isn’t it? That the beloved will love in return and love those whom we love. Love, we hope, will be a kind of contagion, transmitted back and forth among all who are loved—a contagion of grace,a contagion to be caught by us from God and from one another.

Luke underlined this in some verses that come right after this story of the woman who was bent over—two little parables that we didn’t read aloud this morning, but we know them well: the mustard seed and the leaven. The mustard seed turns into a virtual tree with birds nesting in it! (Well, Luke exaggerates a bit in his enthusiasm!) The leaven leavens the whole batch of bread! The grace of God is like that! It spreads, it grows, it affects people and turns them into lovers, it changes things, it makes things new. It’s the gift of God’s love.

The writer to Hebrews offered it to us as an image of our future: not the thunder and lightning and legal demands of Mount Sinai—(God had to get our attention somehow!—but “the heavenly Zion with innumerable angels in festal gathering and the souls of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven.” The woman Jesus cured is certainly one of them—one of them already as she praised God in the synagogue. What grace leads us toward and promises to us is a whole world of rejoicing—a world where the contagion of grace, the contagion of love, drives out the contagions of sickness, fear, greed, arrogance, brutality—for ever.

It was already happening right there as the crowd rejoiced with this woman in her restoration. She wasn’t the only person graced by her healing. Others got a new view of God’s love, a new hope, a new confidence from it. We still do, two thousand years later. And we have the opportunity to keep the contagion of grace growing and increasing by the way we worship and we way we live. God, after all, has been present among us—is still present among us—for good. God is not done yet. And we are invited to be part of what God is doing, part of the contagion of grace.