Lectionary
readings: Jeremiah 1:4-10 and Hebrews 12:18-29 and Luke 13:10-17
One
sabbath, when the community were gathered at the synagogue, Jesus was opening
the scriptures so that they came alive for people, when a woman came in, late.
‘Excuse
me…Excuse me…I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to tread on your toes…Oh, hello, I
didn’t see you there. Are you keeping well?’
‘Be
quiet! I’m trying to listen. To Jesus.’
‘Do
you mind? You’re blocking my view. Would you just sit down!?’
Except
that Jesus doesn’t let her just sit down, because there are now two people
preaching in the synagogue, and, right at this moment, Jesus discerns, the
sermon being proclaimed by the woman is the one that the Holy Spirit wants
heard. So, Jesus stops delivering the sermon he had planned, and calls her over
to him—which takes several moments, and feels even longer, because she is bent
double and can only shuffle very slowly—and proclaims freedom. And in that
moment, she is set free, from whatever the weakness was that had been
constraining her for the past eighteen years. She stood up, straighter and
taller than she had been for years: one vertebra stacked upon another; back muscles
working in ways that have become unfamiliar. Healing and wholeness flowing
through Jesus’ hands to her. And right there, in front of everyone, she starts
praising God!
But
the ruler of the synagogue, the person who liked to exercise power over the proceedings,
was indignant. This is not how we do things around here. This is not the right
way to worship. Therapy is work, and there are six days for that: but not the
sabbath. Let another time be found. This disruption is unseemly.
Jesus
replies, you hypocrites! Play-actors, putting on a religious
performance, going through the motions, wearing your sabbath-best masks so
no-one sees what is really going on, so that no-one is made to feel
uncomfortable by your pain.
Jesus
says, you untie your ox and your donkey on the sabbath and lead them outside
and make sure they have water to drink. They have been tied up overnight. This
woman has been bound for eighteen years, bound by the satan, the Accuser. Bound
by accusing words, such as have just been spoken by the ruler of the synagogue,
who, in seeking to exercise power has taken on the voice of the satan. For
eighteen years, your weekly religious performance has done nothing to bring
freedom to this woman from the thing that restrains her and weighs her down. You’ve
given her nothing to praise God for. This is what God wants. It isn’t hard labour
to release praise: praise, offered up to God, is the very thing the sabbath is
supposed to gather, as we come, from our scattered lives, to celebrate God’s
goodness.
In
the Old Testament reading set for today, the Lord appoints Jeremiah to the
prophetic task ‘to pluck up and
to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.’ And in the
New Testament reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews, we are told that God is
shaking everything that has been created, so that only that which is
unshakeable—the unshakeable kingdom of God—will remain: ‘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’.
In
the synagogue, Jesus shakes things up. He is met with a power-struggle, by the
vested-interest to do things the way we like it. God, on our terms.
But
the sermon that the woman and Jesus tell together isn’t just something Jesus
did, once. It was a demonstration of what Jesus wanted to do for all God’s
people. To set them free from the things that bound them. Free to praise God, from
the heart. To set us free from the things that bind us, from the scripts and
roles we are afraid to depart from and improvise under the direction of the
Holy Spirit.
Come,
Lord Jesus! Set your people free to worship you without fear. Amen.
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