Loosed!
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When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ -Luke 13:12
When I read this passage I always think of the King James version, which says, “Woman, thou art loosed!” It seems even more dramatic than the more modern language. But whether the woman was “loosed” or “set free,” the story is about an amazing liberation for a woman who had been bent over and unable to stand upright for 18 years long years.
There was a woman in one of my former churches that was bent sideways 90 degrees. She had to sleep in a recliner and couldn’t do any cooking and was in constant pain. She had dizziness from being sideways all the time, could not eat well and pretty much had a liquid diet, drunk with a straw. Her life for many years was contained in her own small house. If in some way she could have been loosed from this situation - set free - suddenly able to stand up straight, it would truly have been a stunning miracle. Many of us know people - or might even be a person - who has a physical ailment that has no chance of simply disappearing like this. So the hyperbole of this story is definitely meant to be stunning.
But equally stunning is the way that the religious authorities reacted - not with amazement, but with being indignant. They did not see her joy, her praising God, her new life. All they saw was that Jesus performed this amazing healing on a Sabbath. How could they possibly not be celebrating the woman’s liberation? I think that even if one of our worst enemies were freed like this, we could manage to muster at least a little joy.
Jesus is stunned by their reaction himself and names their hypocrisy. When your ox or donkey is thirsty, you lead them to water on the Sabbath. Do you not have even that much compassion for this suffering woman?
Frankly, this story has changed for me since I last read it, because a disregard for the autonomy and integrity of women has been expressed by our own modern authorities, not only in countries like Afghanistan where the Taliban took over again a year ago, but right here in our own country. It has been nothing short of stunning. So I am grateful that Jesus had a caring heart for women in his own day, despite their extremely low status in his society.
And as I read this story, I think about how important it is to open our eyes to see the suffering around us. We’ve developed blinders toward all kinds of suffering, whether it’s our unhoused neighbors spending their days on sidewalks or the suffering caused on the earth by our overuse of plastics or fossil fuels - or even our own suffering. Or maybe we’ve inherited blinders toward the suffering of people of other cultures or races that are different from our own, as we will hear about from our Sacred Ground group this Sunday.
Even though we’d rather not absorb the stunning magnitude of the suffering that is in this world, we can, like Jesus, show compassion and healing love toward ourselves. We may not have the ability to physically cure someone’s chronic illness or solve climate change, but we have the ability to share a kind word, a listening ear, a responsible action, a glass of cold water.
And may we never lose hope in the stunning healing power of Christ, that will help us get through the many sufferings of this world and of this life.
