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Gospel: Luke 13: 10-17
Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath.
And a woman was there who for eighteen years
had been crippled by a spirit;
she was bent over, completely incapable of standing erect.
When Jesus saw her, he called to her and said,
“Woman, you are set free of your infirmity.”
He laid his hands on her,
and she at once stood up straight and glorified God.
But the leader of the synagogue,
indignant that Jesus had cured on the sabbath,
said to the crowd in reply,
“There are six days when work should be done.
Come on those days to be cured, not on the sabbath day.”
The Lord said to him in reply, “Hypocrites!
Does not each one of you on the sabbath
untie his ox or his ass from the manger
and lead it out for watering?
This daughter of Abraham,
whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now,
ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day
from this bondage?”
When he said this, all his adversaries were humiliated;
and the whole crowd rejoiced at all the splendid deeds done by him.
The Gospel of the Lord.
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This is the last time we see Jesus in a synagogue. He knows he has captured the ire of the religious authorities. They are now starting to plot his death. Breaking the Sabbath by healing a crippled woman only adds fuel to the fire.
As Christians – or simply people of good will – we can imagine the pain this woman endured. For 18 years, some 6,500 days of her life, she was unable to straighten her bent body.
The curvature of her spine produced tight knots in her shoulders and sharp pain in her neck, making simple tasks like getting dressed or looking up to see who’s in front of her torturous.
No wonder Christ was moved with compassion.
I’m sure the leader of the synagogue also felt bad for this woman, but there was something he valued more than her health: sticking to the rules. For Jews, no work – not even a work of compassion – was permitted on the Sabbath.
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Jesus heals her intentionally on this sacred day of rest in order to teach his people a lesson. There are times when the laws that define our lives, even religious ones, need to be stretched, re-interpreted, or updated.
There is no rule higher than charity. If we find our neighbor hunched over, weighed down by the pressures of life, then we are obligated to help them. Suffering should never last a second longer than necessary.
Yet how much human misery continues in our world because people are either blind, indifferent, or paralyzed by politics, culture, civic, even religious institutions?
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Beneath it all, we are human.
We share the common dignity of being made in God’s image and likeness. May we do something to reflect this truth today.
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Image credits: (1) Pointing the Way by Arrow (2) Bent Woman, Milos Todorovic (3) Facebook