Mulling over today’s Gospel, my butterfly mind lit upon James Bond’s recipe for the perfect vodka martini – shaken but not stirred. Bear with me for a few minutes, and you’ll see why.
In this passage from Luke, we read about one of Jesus’ many healing miracles. It’s helpful to see all those miracles as steps towards bringing God’s creation to perfection, as foretastes of that perfection. Or, to put it in Biblical language, as the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. It’s also important to see the healing miracles as examples of divine compassion in action. That God in Jesus is at work is clearer in the original Greek than in our translation which says that after Jesus laid his hands on her:
“…immediately she stood up straight…”
In the original the verb is passive. A literal translation would be
“…immediately she was straightened up…”
Divine compassion responds to human suffering and divine action puts right what is bent and imperfect.
I’m also struck by the unusual nature of the miracle. The unnamed woman doesn’t ask for healing. She doesn’t reach out to Jesus or touch him. There is nothing in Luke’s account to suggest that she believed that healing was possible. She is simply attending the synagogue on the sabbath. Her healing is not the result of any striving, effort or expectation of hers. It’s divine compassion in action, the Grace of God reaching out to her.
There are two contrasting responses to the healing. First, the leader of the synagogue. He is clearly shaken by what Jesus has done, shaken but not stirred. He is shaken by his belief that Jesus has broken the law by working on the sabbath but not stirred either by compassion for the woman’s long experience of disability or stirred into rejoicing at her healing. He tells the congregation:
“There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”
That word ought is very important. The leader of the synagogue is suffering from what the Christian psychiatrist Frank Lake called “hardening of the oughteries”. He is making the strictest possible interpretation of the sabbath laws. His religious instincts are all about control, rather than about freedom. Significantly, Jesus picks up on that word ought and makes it an important part of his response. He first makes the point that the sabbath laws allow people to have compassion on their animals by untying them and giving them water to drink and then he says:
“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?”
Jesus is speaking of a divine loving necessity, of God’s purpose to heal, to reconcile and to liberate.
Too many sermons have been preached on this passage which have criticised the Jewish faith for being over-legalistic and have suggested that Jesus was condemning that. Yet the Gospel writer makes clear that Jesus was working within the Jewish faith tradition. He was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath. That’s what Rabbis do. He refers to the woman whom he has healed as a “daughter of Abraham”. He’s speaking and acting within that faith tradition. But he understands that tradition more fully and more generously than the leader of the synagogue. The story reminds us that tradition can be a trap when it should be a springboard. Tradition should be what shakes and stirs us, but it can lead to hardening of the oughteries.
I said that there were two contrasting responses to the miracle. The second response is that of the woman herself and of the rest of the congregation. We read that the woman praised God and that
“…the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.”
There’s an echo of that at the end of today’s Epistle:
“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.”
The writer of Hebrews is clear that Kingdom of God cannot be shaken, but that worship should be a context in which we are. Unlike that fictional vodka martini, we can both be shaken and stirred; shaken out of any hardening of our oughteries and stirred into compassionate responses towards those who are marginalised or suffering.