Luke 13:10-17

            It is a day of rest, a day of devotion.  For six days you have risen at first light.  You have toiled through the brutal heat of the day, earning just enough to feed your family and pay your tax.  You have driven your animals.  You have hauled jars of water through the dry land.  You have turned meal into bread at the smoking fire.  You have scratched out your existence for six unrelenting days.  But here is a day set aside.  You will not work the land.  You will not bake bread. You will not step in the intricate dance of the economy.  You will rest from you work.  You will be still in the synagogue and hear the words of scripture.  You will remember the God of your ancestors who gave you the land and provides sustenance for you.  You will thank the Holy One that this day is unlike every other.     

            So it was on the Sabbath in Jesus’ day, so different from the perspective of our modern American culture, where there is not much of a Sabbath left.  It is true that there are no banks open and no postal service on Sundays, but most large companies still woo consumers on the Sabbath.  Sundays used to be different, but the generation coming of age now has never known social restrictions protecting this day of rest.  I personally didn’t know what the widespread cultural observance of the Sabbath was like until studying in Geneva, the city of John Calvin, where no stores are open on Sundays.  You will find buses to the airport packed not with travelers but with shoppers as the grocery store in the airport is still the only place to buy food on a Sunday.  After so many years of Sunday being a little extra time to shop, see a movie, watch a game, order a pizza, and sometimes catch up on work for the Monday morning meeting or assignment, it’s hard to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. 

But that was not the way people thought in the time of Jesus.  Observing the Sabbath was part of what set God’s followers apart in a society where other religious influences were encroaching more and more.  Strict rules governed the observance of the Sabbath such that work and travel were prohibited.  Abstaining from work and attending to teaching in the synagogue; these were the marks of one living according to the covenant established by God.  The people did not view this as an oppressive system against which they were inclined to struggle.  It was not an inconvenience to them in the same way I might think of the mall closing early this evening being inconvenient.  The Sabbath was granted to ease the burden of what would otherwise have been ceaseless work and to provide a time to focus on God, who himself rested on the seventh day. 

            It is with this outlook that we can seek to better understand the leader of the synagogue.  Imagine if you were in his place.  You are the one with the authority and responsibility of seeing that God’s laws are not broken.  A certain respect comes with your position; you are accustomed to people deferring to your judgment, looking to you for help and answers.  But on this day, a crowd has gathered, not to listen to anything you have to say, but to sit at the feet of this Jesus.  Here is an itinerant preacher; he is not one of the well-known rabbis who, in advanced years after diligent study, has earned the respect of the religious community.  He travels with common laborers; it is said that he shares meals with the disreputable.  He has spoken out against the religious leaders before.  Yet without a scholarly background or even a powerful family, he presumes to come into the synagogue, your synagogue, to teach the people, your people, and they hang on every word.

            This would be bad enough, but then the unthinkable happens.  This Jesus singles out a woman from the crowd and calls her over.  You can clearly see she has some sort of ailment, and everyone knows that diseases are a punishment for sin.  Jesus touches this unclean woman!  The fact that it’s the Sabbath just amplifies his audacity.  If he knows so much, he ought to know not to touch that woman, and he certainly should know not to do it on the Sabbath.  One day out of seven, can’t that at least be sacred?  Where is the order and right practice amongst the faithful?

            But the leader of the synagogue was not the only one surprised by Jesus’ actions that day.  What a shock, though a wonderful shock, for the woman whom Jesus healed.  Imagine you have suffered an infirmity such that you couldn’t stand up straight for 18 years.  18 years is a long time for any illness or injury to linger.  Considering life expectancy at the time, 18 years is the majority of your life.  18 years is long enough to believe that things will never change—that whatever spirit has pushed you toward the ground will never let you be free.  18 years is long enough to know that, though many healers may have tried, no one is going to be able to lift you up again.

Contrary to the complaints of the leader of the synagogue, who like most of the rest of the town has never given you the time of day, you haven’t come with the expectation of getting healed.  You come to the synagogue because it is the Sabbath; God has called you there.  It’s not an easy trip, considering your condition.  You could have stayed at home and nobody would have faulted you.  In fact, it’s unlikely that anyone would have noticed.  You’ve lived with your condition for so long, you’re used to being on the outside of the community, because everybody knows you’re different.

            It is with no particular hopes that you come to the synagogue, but then that for which you dared not hope happens.  Jesus sees you.  How is that even possible, considering the crowd and your stature, bent over as you are?  Jesus calls to you, drawing you from your place on the outskirts of society to his side, into the center of everyone’s attention.  Jesus frees you from your ailment, which allows you to immediately stand up straight, something you haven’t been able to do for as long as you can remember.  And when the synagogue leader challenges this miracle in your life, Jesus defends his action by affording you great status.  Nobody even knows your name, but Jesus calls you ‘daughter of Abraham’.  You finally have a place in the family of the faithful that you haven’t had for a long, long time.

            We cannot put ourselves inside the mind of God.  But through the witness of scripture, we can see how Jesus cares for the world and those in it.  Jesus doesn’t overlook the woman the way the crowd does; he makes her visible.  He doesn’t leave her to fend for herself on the outside of the circle but instead draws her to him.  He heals her, releasing her from the torment of her physical impairment so that she rejoices and praises God.  Jesus does for her what he said he would do the first time Luke speaks of him teaching in the synagogue, when Jesus reads from Isaiah saying, “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives…to let the oppressed go free…to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  This is how Jesus observes the Sabbath, by making it an occasion to experience God’s liberation, to see God at work, and to respond with praise and thanksgiving.  Jesus makes this a day where the woman can glimpse God’s will for the redemption of his creation, God’s desire for his children to be made whole.

This healing is not for the woman alone, but for us as well.  Jesus sees the woman; he removes the barrier between her and the rest of the community, and he literally lifts her up. So God sees us as people in need. He brings us together in his family and lifts us up from those things that weigh us down, even lifting us up from death itself.  Therefore the Sabbath is for us an opportunity for celebrating God’s work in creating our world, in releasing us from the bonds of sin, in freeing us from death, in drawing us into fellowship with one another, and in giving us hope when our circumstances seem hopeless—giving us resurrection and eternal life.  We rest on the Sabbath day not only because we need the rest and God commanded us to take it, but because it forces us to realize that our work, however genuinely important and meaningful it may be, is utterly inconsequential without these works of God.  It is by observing the Sabbath that we see more clearly our nature as creatures and God as the infinitely powerful holy one who creates, redeems, and sustains us.

The Sabbath is the day our Christian family meets together to experience, however briefly and incompletely, life the way God intends it to be lived.  It is this sacred day when we  welcome others and make them feel included in the body of Christ.  It is this sacred day when we confess the ways in which we’ve failed to do this and are forgiven.  It is this sacred day when we  pray together that God’s will may be accomplished in the world.  It is this sacred day when we eat together at the table, joining with the faithful of all times and places as we await the future feast.  It is this sacred day when we sing praise to God who, though infinitely powerful, was lifted up on the cross so that we could be lifted up from death.  It is this sacred day when we live a little while in fuller consciousness of God’s kingdom so that when we walk away from this place, we remember to work joyfully in the kingdom, rejoicing with the woman and the crowd at the wonderful things God is doing.  Let us thank God for this sacred time, this Sabbath day.