Daughter of Abraham – Luke 13:10-17

A text – Luke 13:10-17

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 to 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 being done by him.

A reflection:

Jesus is in a synagogue. He is teaching. It’s the Sabbath. There are probably a lot of people present in the room and in the adjacent areas where the women and the other lower status people had to be. There are two encounters with Jesus in this brief passage, one with the woman crippled for 18 years probably with some kind of spinal disorder. She might have been old – that’s what I have always pictured – but she also might have been 40 or younger. The other encounter is with the synagogue leader and his colleagues whose issue was to object to a healing on the Sabbath. In a way, that latter encounter is between a miracle of freeing and a strict obedience to a law for which there already were loopholes.

So perhaps this incident is just one encounter on one issue. Jesus often reframes people’s reactions, doesn’t he. He takes what they are concerned about and shows them a different view – God’s view, which throws all the participants into different relationships. But always relationships. In this case Jesus is making the woman visible to the leaders, healing her of her ailment, and declaring that saving her from pain and suffering is at least as important as saving an ox or a donkey from pain and suffering, which one was allowed to do on the sabbath. Shouldn’t such a loophole apply even more to people than to animals?

The woman, Jesus says, is a Daughter of Abraham. She has always been invisible to the leaders, or a nuisance, perhaps, if she did not move fast enough and sometimes got in the way. Bible scholars point out that the only other time this sort of phrasing is used in Luke is when Jesus encounters Zaccheus, the tax collector, and calls him a Son of Abraham. Jesus gives these two invisible or outcast persons important names, reframing them into the blessed community. No wonder he irked the leaders, who were devoted to the Law and were simply trying to keep things pure.

How many times do you and I miss opportunities to include and make life better for those who are either despised or forgotten, invisible to our daily routines? If Jesus walked alongside us today on our usual paths, who would he insist we make time for, Sabbath or not, convenient or not, easy or not? I am wondering about that this week. I wonder what I might be missing.

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for being patient with us when we cannot seem to see what you need us to notice. Help us to open our eyes to notice and rename those whom we avoid or just don’t see. Amen.