God's Holiness Is Perfected In Love

August 25, 2019

Rev. Mary Erickson

Hope Lutheran Church

Luke 13:10-17; Psalm 103:1-8

God’s Holiness Is Perfected in Love

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

Feet. Her view was always the same. She was bent over. She had been for quite some time – eighteen years to be exact. As the years progressed, she had become more and more severely bent over. Her body looked more like a right angle than a figure standing erect.

So she was an expert on the ground. She knew the lay of the streets. She knew every uneven stone, each puddle. She didn’t recognize people by their face. She knew them by their feet – their feet and their sandals. She recognized her neighbor’s boy by his dusty, little bare feet that went flying by at 50 miles an hour. The wife of the synagogue’s leader wore the finest sandals she’d ever seen.

Because it was nearly impossible for her to look someone in the eye as they spoke, she wasn’t able read their expressions very well. Instead, she’d learned to pay attention to the tone of their voice.

She made her broken way to the synagogue that Sabbath. For years now, she’d learned to muscle through her pain. The constant pain in her back, in her neck. Gravity played its cruel game on her. But she’d learned that if she didn’t keep on keeping on, the world wasn’t going to stop for her. So she muscled through. At a slower pace than the typical person, but she did her best.

She did her best not to let her bent over condition dominate her life. Her daily goal was to live as much like anyone else as she possibly could. She kept her “chin up,” even if it wasn’t really up in her case.

She arrived at the synagogue. And present that day was that rabbi, Jesus, who was making such a name for himself. The synagogue leader did his best to make a show of welcoming Jesus. But she could detect in his voice a tinge of standoffishness. He welcomed Jesus, but something in his greeting sounded forced.

The woman pricked up her ears to the sound of Jesus’ voice. He had a hearty laugh. It seemed to start in his toes and work all the way up through his chest and out through his mouth. He greeted the people in the synagogue. His voice was warm and, and – how would she describe it – COMPASSIONATE.

As he spoke, the warmth emanating from him seemed to take hold of the rest of the crowd gathered that day. The timbre of the collective tone in the synagogue took on a joyful lilt. But then the call to worship came and the chatter silenced.

When it came time to read from the scriptures, the scroll from the prophet Isaiah was handed to Jesus. She could hear him manipulating the scroll to find the passage he was looking for. Then he began to read:

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

And the crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Is. 40:4-5)

And then he gave the scroll back to the attendant. But instead of sitting down to address the congregation, she saw that he began to walk. He walked through the congregation, and as he walked, he came closer to the women’s section where she was standing.

He stopped and called, “Woman, come here.” She looked sideways in his direction. He was looking straight at her. Her heart began to beat rapidly. “Yes, you! Come here!”

She was cornered. She couldn’t possibly ignore him, so meekly she approached him. When she came up beside him, she looked down at his sandal-clad feet. “Woman,” he said, “You are set free from your ailment.” Then she felt his hands on her crooked back.

Something tingled from his hands and up and down her spine. She could feel her vertebrae begin shift. They were moving! And suddenly she had the urge to straighten up. She arched her back and up she went. The old hump in her back uncurled. And there she was, as upright and as straight as she had been as a young girl!

What happiness! “Praise the Lord!” she cried. She couldn’t help it. “Oh, praise the Lord!”

But then she heard the leader of the synagogue clear his throat. She knew that sound. He did it when something wasn’t quite right. He cleared his throat before he made a pronouncement. And her mind had already figured out what he was going to say.

There were numerous laws governing activities on the Sabbath. Although the commandment on the Sabbath was quite simple in itself, with time questions had arisen as to exactly which actions were okay to perform on a Sabbath and which were crossing the line into labor.