21 st August: 14 th Sunday after Pentecost

A friend of mind visited the GP not so long ago to talk about various physical ailments, and almost before he had sat down the doctor said, “You’re being bullied at work.” The friend was somewhat taken aback—it was true, but he hadn’t realised quite how easy it was to read what you might call a social-cultural phenomenon off his bodily stance, or in other words he was surprised at how perceptive the GP was. Perhaps we should be less surprised: quite commonly, we use phrases like “she has the weight of the world on her shoulders.”

We don’t know exactly how the woman that Jesus healed was suffering, except that she is described as bent over, unable to stand up straight, and that it had lasted eighteen years. While we can begin to form a picture of her, we do not know, either, whether she was young or old. What we do know is that the association of sin and suffering meant that for Jesus to say here: “You’re set free from your ailment.” is equivalent to his saying to the paralysed man let down through the roof: “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” (Luke 5:20). The doctor’s comment to my friend seems closer to the words of Jesus than we might wish to admit in the early twenty-first century.

As my experience of parish ministry grew, I began to feel more sympathy for the High Priest, or here, the leader of the synagogue talking to the crowd (note: not directly to Jesus). You can almost hear his voice, slightly desperate, slightly wheedling and yet with an undertone of steel: “Please follow the rules, healing is for other days, don’t disrupt the system.” This would be a Pythonesque moment, were it not for the deadly serious tone Jesus has already taken earlier in Luke’s gospel, and his particular reply here. For Jesus, it is literally deadly serious—these kinds of action against the grain of established faith, especially these outrages on the holy day, will prove fatal for him. And at this point in my thinking, I am embarrassed by my growing affection for the Jewish leaders of the time; I too am being quietly but assuredly domesticated by the system.

Jesus’ response unpacks the hypocrisy. Following the rules at this point means to sit happily with the fact that animals can be fed and watered on the Sabbath, but human beings cannot be made well—they have to wait for the correct day. (Exploring a parallel with the development of a seven-day NHS in England will have to wait for another occasion.)

Borrowing from the work of Paolo Freire, Jesus might be described here as a “pedagogue of the oppressed”. ¹ He not only supports by his words and actions those who are vulnerable, but, in teaching the people, reveals the hidden workings of institutional thinking which contributes to, or even causes, the vulnerability. The members of the crowd understand only too well after this explanation, and go off rejoicing. His opponents (now in the plural) are like the emperor who admits he has no clothes, they are embarrassed and ashamed.

Such is the work of a prophet, not the pop astrologer of the future, but the analyst of the deep present, with a particular turn to the workings of God. So today’s reading from Jeremiah underscores the breadth and power of the role “over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down”, and that there is no excuse for age, no option for refusal. The alternative from Isaiah is clearer about the rewards promised to those who help the marginalised: they will be like a watered garden, a restored ruin. Isaiah also emphasises the holiness of the Sabbath, but in a way which might even prefigure Jesus’ interpretation. Holiness is about not serving one’s own interests or affairs, so the well-being of others (human and creature) is not excluded; indeed, that benevolence might well make the Sabbath more honourable and delightful for God.

Jesus is not a prophet, although mistaken for one, or perhaps much more than a prophet: he is the inaugurator of a new kingdom, or what the author of the Letter to the Hebrews calls Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. I read this image of the kingdom of God as a future promise, an eschatological hope. If we are then living in the in-between times—Jesus has already come given birth to this kingdom but it is not yet fully grown or completed—we have the possibility now, or perhaps the obligation, to interpret our own ‘signs of the times’ in the light of Jesus’ words and teaching.

Returning to Luke’s gospel passage, I would suggest developing two paths to travel. The first is to see today’s church as a ‘site of struggle’ as Judaism was for Jesus. ² Without any sense of personal vilification, it means to examine the distance between the Good News, which Jesus preached with particular communities and the way in which the institutional church translates that preaching. It is a kind of ‘mind the gap’ exercise, or rather identify and close the gap. It is to ask the extent to which the system of the church is directed towards its own preservation or to the well-being and kingdom presence of others. When we talk of those included and those excluded, we are also talking the language of mission.

The second is to take the image of the woman bent double either through physical or psychological pain (or both), and magnify that to the level of our local neighbourhoods or national society. What do our bodies say now to the local GP or to Jesus in terms of communal or societal healing? I think they would see men, women, and young people who were tired and rather down-trodden; they would see fear and a lot of anger; on a bigger scale they would note the tension between the epidemic of obesity in the developed world and the slow to heal epidemic of hunger in the developing world and parts of the Middle East. I’m not certain what the doctor would say, but Jesus would tell us that we are unbound from these kinds of infirmity, and that Mount Zion and the kingdom are ours when we are open to and hopeful for their new possibilities.