An Interpretation

"All Bent Out of Shape"

Luke 13:10-17

August 26, 2007

My hunch is that Jesus didn’t just see her – he gazed down deep into her with compassion.

She was identified in this passage as “the bent woman.”

She was bent over, had been bent over, staring at the ground, back terribly contorted for many, many years now. She doesn’t have a name to anyone in town. They might have said, “here comes that bent woman, crippled woman.”

That was her name and in that name was her life, her destiny on earth. A name purely based on her disability. No identity other than that of a victim.  The burden of being different,  of not looking like everyone else, of being snubbed and overlooked.

Then, the way Jesus encounters her and places his hand on her. He doesn’t call her disabled or hindered or crippled or a victim of life’s unfairness. No, Jesus communicates the message he spent 3 years trying to convey – that God loves who she is and she is worth infinitely more than her family, friends, and town had ever communicated to her.

Jesus calls her “a daughter of Abraham.” That brought about a change in this woman. Her infirmity was healed and “immediately she was made straight.” But she was more than straightened….she was transformed! She became a new woman, the woman God created her to be in the first place.

Why did Jesus call her “daughter of Abraham’?   What does that mean? Abraham was the great, great-granddaddy of Israel. Abraham was the one to whom, one starry night, a promise was given. God promised to make a great nation out of Abraham,  a nation through which all the nations of the earth would be blessed. She is an heir to be blessings of God. As a daughter of Abraham, she is called to be a blessing to the whole world. She is meant for more than superficial, cruel, limiting labeling that only makes the majority feel better about themselves to name those different folks thusly, thereby easier to pigeonhole and discriminate without much guilt.

She, bent over though she is, is part of God’s great salvation of the whole world. Her life had been renamed, not as a long story of injustice, victimization, and sadness,  but as part of the great drama of God’s redemption.

Jesus means to name you.

He will not let you acquiesce to the names the world wants to lay upon you – crip, hunchback, fatso, peewee, stupid, slow, just a drunk, blind as a bat, gimp, retarded. You are daughters, sons of Abraham. Your life is meant to count for something, to take its place on stage in God’s great drama of redemption.

Therefore, in our church, when we baptize a baby, we ask what name has been given to the child.   You remember me asking that rather odd sounding question? And then, though the parents may have named the child  “John” or Joanne”    “Jack” or “Jacqueline” we now lay on the child a much more determinative, revealing name  -  “Christian.” Christ-ian….Christ follower.

We predict that this child’s life will be a long story of growing into that name. Living into God’s gracious dream for us.

Ironically, the very next thing we read in this gospel report is after the woman’s saving, transforming experience, Jesus is condemned for doing what he did because it was the Sabbath.

That kind of work should have been postponed until a weekday. Jesus responded quickly, noting that any of those present would surely have untied an animal and led it to water on the Sabbath Day, and why wasn’t this woman’s life of even greater value? The Pharisees and leaders of the congregation were all bent over, all bent out of shape. Not only are we in need of transformation personally, we are in need of it socially. Our society, beginning with our religious society, stands in the need of transformation.

The critics of Jesus in this episode didn’t even represent the best in Judaism. Abraham Heschel, rabbi and biblical scholar, has noted that organized religion can be as subject as anyone else to invasion by distortion and evil.

He says,  “The fact is that evil is integral to religion, not only to secularism… when religion speaks out in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.”

Well, that sounds very much like a description of what happened in that synagogue in this gospel report. Dallas Willard, in his book “The Divine Conspiracy” warns that in some churches the Christian faith has been reduced to what he calls “sin management” – concerned “only with how to deal with sin, with wrongdoing, or wrongbeing and its effects.” But that was not the focus of Jesus attention and action, and this story in the synagogue is a perfect illustration of that.

Jesus was not into sin management, nor did he call his disciples to be. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find any place in the gospels where Jesus called anyone a sinner. He called people foolish plenty of times. When Jesus criticized people for foolish or sinful behavior, it was in much the same way that my physician on Tuesday this week evaluated my health.

She didn’t say “You are a bad person.”

She said,  “You are a good person with a bad cholesterol, and you need treatment.” Jesus never lost sight of the essential, created goodness in everyone,  but he was aware of how that essential goodness easily becomes contaminated by the selfish defiance of God’s will or willfully turning away. People in that state of “ill health” needed treatment. They needed transformation.

You see, to Jesus, the Law often overlooked this crucial distinction between evil deeds and evil people. Frequently, Jesus reminded his Jewish listeners that the Law was a means to respond faithfully to the will of God, but that God’s will was never that people suffer unnecessarily in the name of the Law.

The Law, he said time and time again, is for the sake of people, not the other way around. Sinners are people who are untransformed from devotion to self to devotion to God.

The failure of the Law religion or sin-management religion lies not so much in the identification of the wrongdoer but in the arrogant identification of the do-gooder.   Holmes That is what Jesus challenged in his Sermon on the Mount. He declared that no one is entirely good. At one time, you may remember, Jesus even disclaimed that with reference to himself. 

No one stand outside of God’s judgment.

But it’s just as true a statement that no one stands outside of God’s redeeming Love.

That’s the bottom line.

So we see the need for personal transformation. We also see the need for societal transformation. And it doesn’t take many reads of a newspaper or viewing TV news to see how radically our world is in need of transformation. Not some – but much.

A nation like ours – the wealthiest in all history – where one-fifth of our children don’t have enough to eat – is in need of moral transformation. A nation like ours – capable of solving not only some of our own social ills but easing the pains of much of the rest of the world as well, but where the insane desire for profits supercedes the desire to help – we are a nation in need of moral transformation.

Don’t get me started!

Did you hear about the farmer who put a want ad in a farm journal that read,  “Wanted:  a woman in her 30’s interested in marriage who owns a tractor. Please send a picture – of the tractor.”

Sounds like a society that puts material values above human ones. We need transforming.

A Sunday School teacher put a hypothetical question to her class one time. “Do you think a leopard can change his spots?”

All the students in the class answered no.

Except for one girl.   Asked to explain, she said,  “If a leopard doesn’t like the spot he’s in, I don’t see why he can’t change it.”

The transformation of our society will not come by dramatic revolution but by the small, daily acts and expressions of individual people as well as churches who do what they can and say what they can, to people, to newspapers, to elected officials,  to transform our communities into being the instrument of the love of God that God wills it be.

Hear these words of the poet…

Have we not all amid life’s petty strife

Some pure ideal of a nobler life?

That once seemed possible.  Did we not hear

The flutter of its wings and feel it near

And just within our reach?  It was, and yet,

We lost it in this daily jar and fret.

But still our place is kept and it will wait,

Ready for us to fill it soon or late.

No star is ever lost, once we have seen

We always may be what we might have been.

Adelaide Proctor

Fred Craddock tells of meeting a man one day by chance at a restaurant.

“You a preacher?”  the man asked. Somewhat embarrassed, Fred said, “Yes.” The man pulled a chair up to Fred’s table.

“Preacher, I’ll tell you a story.   There was once a little boy who grew up sad.   Life was tough because my mama had me but she had never been married.  Do you know how a small Tennessee town treats people like that?   Do you know the word they use to name kids that don’t have no father?

“Well, we never went to church, nobody asked us.  But for some reason or other, we went to church one night when they was having a revival. They had a big, tall preacher, visiting to do the revival and he was all dressed in black. He had a thunderous voice that shook the little church.

“We sat toward the back, Mama and me.  Well, that preacher got to preaching, about what I don’t know, stalking up and down the aisle of that little church preaching.  It was something.

“After the service, we were slipping out the back door when I felt that big preacher’s hand on my shoulder.  I was scared.   He looked way down at me, looked me in the eye and says, ‘Boy, who’s your Daddy?”

“I didn’t have no Daddy.  That’s what I told him my trembling voice.  ‘I ain’t got no daddy.’

“O yess you do,’ boomed that big preacher,  ‘ you’re a child of the Kingdom, you have been bought with a price, you are a child of the King!’

“I was never the same after that.  Preacher, for God’s sake, preach that.”

The man pulled his chair away from the table. He extended his hand and introduced himself. Craddock said the name rang a bell. He was the legendary former governor of the state of Tennessee. 

Like that woman, Jesus sees us and longs to touch us and heal us and make us who God created us to be. You are a daughter or son of Abraham. Your name, whatever else we may call you, is “Christian.” Stand up straight. Act like it.

Go in peace.

Sources:  William Willimon, “What’s In a Name?”. Sermon delivered in Duke Chapel, August 23, 1998.

Robert Holmes, “Beyond Change to Transformation”, Day 1 speaker, August 26, 2001