Freed from bondage

Luke 13:10-17 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16 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?” 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

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My friend Yisrael is an Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem.  From the time Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday until it ends at sundown on Saturday he does no work.  This has occasionally cut our conversations off rather abruptly, because Included in the concept “work” are things like using any electronic devices, turning on an electric light, driving a car, traveling any significant distance, and many many other things.  For the Orthodox Jew, the Law of Moses is not a stagnant thing - it grows and changes along with the world, and it has always been that way.  As the years and technology march forward, the rabbis have been kept busy debating all the various laws as they apply in the world today.  In the case of Sabbath Laws, they focus on what is and isn’t work, so they know what is allowable on the Sabbath and what is not.  I mean, even things like putting on a wig and putting in your dentures have been examined carefully for their relative work-relatedness.  It is a very serious thing, the Sabbath.  Sometimes I envy my friend because he knows exactly what to do to “keep the Sabbath holy.”   Also because for at least 24 hours every single week he is disconnected from the frenetic, anxiety producing electronic world.  Even so, we spoke just this morning and he asked me to tell you that “Sabbath is a gift, and when done right, not very restful.”  I understand what he means a little, because every now and then I try to follow his example and take an electronic Sabbath, but so far I have only managed to abstain during daylight hours and even that is really hard.   The closest I come to actual Sabbath keeping is trying not to answer phone calls or emails that are related to work.  I can’t even imagine a day when I don’t cook or clean or do laundry or turn lights on or off or run errands or do any of the things I usually do on my one day off each week.  

And then there is this passage, in which Jesus heals on the Sabbath, and points out the hypocrisy involved in making sure your domestic livestock are cared for every day of the week but being unwilling to see someone who has suffered for 18 years healed of her affliction on the Sabbath.   Well, alrighty then.  We don’t have to worry about Sabbath rules.  But just to confuse things, there is that pesky Matthew 5:17 where Jesus says,  “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”     What’s that supposed to mean?   

There’s this to know about the Law.  Jesus said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”   (Matthew 22:37-41)

Here is the complicated part.  All the 630-whatever laws that make up the Law of Moses go back to the Ten Commandments. They are expansions on those commandments as well as regulations that help keep a large and growing community in line.   And the Ten Commandments are divided into two parts.  The first four are about how to love God:  You will have no other gods before me, you shall make no idols, you shall not use God’s name falsely, you shall remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.  The other six are about how to love your neighbor:  Honor your father and mother, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness about your neighbor, do not covet any thing or person belonging to your neighbor.   We sometimes interpret these commandments differently than they were intended back 3,500 years ago, but that’s because the world and our culture have changed so much that it never occurs to us that a word we use to mean one thing had quite a different meaning for the ancient Hebrew people.  

So, all of those 630-whatever laws, every one of them, stems from these two - love God with every part of you, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus, in telling the rabbi and the others who objected to his healing that unnamed woman on the Sabbath that they were hypocrites, was reminding them that the basis for ALL the laws was the requirement to love God and the neighbor, and that surely this woman was more important than an ox or a donkey.  One cannot honor God, after all, if one is unloving to the neighbor, when God’s commandment is to love.  Allowing someone to continue in pain when the means for healing is right there - how loving is that?   What Jesus was telling the crowd is that, where following a regulation conflicts with the greater Law that requires us to love our neighbor, it is always necessary to obey the greater Law, not the regulation.  When he said, “I have come to fulfill the Law,” he was saying that his mission was to remind the world of God’s intent in providing the Ten Commandments to begin with - to give us a framework around which we could hang our understanding of the two greatest commandments.   When he went off on the Pharisees and other lawyer-types about their rigid adherence to nit picking regulations, it wasn’t because they were bad people or because there was anything wrong with those regulations. It wasn’t even that there was anything wrong with following them.  However, they were letting the individual trees get in the way of seeing the beauty of the forest.  They were so focused on the right way to do things and on perfect adherence to ever changing rules and regulations, they forgot the reason for doing those things was so that the people of Israel could live together in harmony, knowing what was expected of them at any time in any circumstance.  They forgot that the overarching concept that was the basis of ALL of those laws and regulations was love - love of God, love of all of God’s children.  Not just the ones who obeyed the laws.  All of them.  

Back to the healing.  That woman, that nameless woman, was freed from the bondage of pain and disability.   We know absolutely nothing about this woman except that she is bent over, crippled with pain.  Maybe she has arthritis.  Maybe it’s something else entirely.  We don’t know.  Yet, strangely enough, the less we know about her, the more easily we can relate to what is going on with her.  

Because my back is causing me fits right now, as everyone who spends more than 30 seconds in my company knows, I can relate.  It is frustrating to be in pain every minute.  It is exhausting.  It is crazy making not to be able to do the things I’m accustomed to doing - or to have to ask for help doing really easy every-day kind of stuff.  If someone could just put their hand on me and make it all better, I would definitely feel freed from bondage.  

Leah chose today’s image because I really couldn’t find the right thing.  But when I looked at this I thought it was perfect because . . . look closely . . . don’t those links hanging from his wrists look like paper chains?  The kind we make out of construction paper at Christmas time?  Because, frankly, as much as I love the idea that my bondage to back pain could be broken as easily as I would break those paper chains, in reality I know that it is going to take time and exercise and continued treatments before I feel whole again.  It’s not going to just happen. I’m going to have to work for it. 

Jesus came to save - heal - the world.  He came to teach us how to do that - how to go out and love the world into healing, into reconciliation with God.  However, we can’t love the world very well until we first learn to love ourselves.  Luckily, we don’t have to be perfect before we can love others.  But we do have to be embarked upon a journey of healing.  Unfortunately, it isn’t a matter of just saying, “Heal me, Jesus!” and we are all whole and well.  The world’s bondage to sin is not as easy to break as the paper chains in this image.  Even our own individual chains are hard to break.  In some cases our attachment to our own particular ills more resembles the chains holding a ship’s anchor than a paper chain.   Let me give you some examples.  As a survivor of domestic violence, I know that one of the most important tools for healing is forgiveness.  That takes more than just saying, “I forgive him.”  It even takes more than, “Jesus, please help me forgive him.”  It took time and praying about it and writing about it and talking about it and more praying about it and finally, finally, one day I was able to speak the name of my abuser without becoming angry.  Then I knew I had finally forgiven. I had been healed of that particular sin.  Likewise, trying to forgive the church in which I was raised for the way I was raised and then forgiving myself for the outright hatred I held for that particular church for so many years took a really long time!  Healing came, finally, on Christmas Eve, 2014, after decades of praying and writing and talking, when I walked up to the altar of a church, allowed the priest there to place his hand on my head and bless me.  The feeling of freedom from the bondage of that sin was overwhelming.  I felt the healing happen.  All he did was touch me and say a word or two in Jesus’ name, and the chains holding that sin into place in my heart fell away as if they had been made of paper.   Now, in the place of anger and hatred is acceptance.  Now I can begin to truly love even those who hurt me.  

 Jesus came to free us all, every one, from the bondage of self and sin.  He was sent by God to heal the world, to reconcile all the world with God, our creator, to bring peace to all lands and all persons.  He was sent to remind us of the two greatest commandments, the two that everyone must follow:  “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind . . . and love your neighbor as you love yourself.”   Let us go out from this place today seeking healing and wholeness, for the world, and for ourselves.  Let us begin again a journey toward completeness and reconciliation with our God, our neighbors, and ourselves.