© 2025 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.
For eighteen years, she made her way through the town, shuffling along, never once making eye-contact with another human being. Her spinal condition forced her gaze down to the ground. Looking as if she might topple forward at any minute, this bent-over woman was both familiar to everyone in the community and also completely foreign to them. Her name we are not told, and we, like those in the town, behold her as nothing more than her condition—her posture.
For eighteen years, this unnamed woman was weighed down, bent closer to the earth not only by the deformity of her spine but also by the uncharitable thoughts of her neighbors. No one ever said it out loud, but she could hear the way that parents, who held their children a little closer when she shuffled by, and upright and upstanding members of society, who stared without fear of being seen by the object of their scrutiny, declared through their actions their suspicion that this woman—or one of her ancestors—had done something to deserve this twisted fate.
Without realizing it, we put distance between ourselves and those whose burdens society cannot relieve. We are comforted by the separation between us and them—a space that permits us to ignore our inability to do anything about them. We find relief in not having to come right up next to someone whose illness or disability or misfortune could very well be our own—someone whose condition we cannot obviously attribute to a mistake of their own choosing. To know the names of the innocent and helpless is to invite them into our lives, into our prayers, into our anxieties, into our tortured dreams.
Jesus is different. Fully aware of both his belovedness and that of the woman, he sees her and calls her over, bringing her in close. Recognizing at once both the physical and spiritual affliction that has held this woman in bondage for so long, he sets her free. And, when Jesus lays his hands on her, immediately she stands up straight and begins praising God. The instantaneous transformation of this woman’s bent-over humility into an up-stretched posture of praise must have filled the congregation’s hearts with awe and wonder at the glory of God. But there was a problem: this day was a sabbath.
I think we Gentiles who live in a community with a relatively small Jewish population have a hard time appreciating the beauty and centrality of sabbath observance. Its strangeness evokes a fascination that borders on disparagement. I remember as a child learning about the sabbath in Sunday school and, backed by the writ of holy scripture, declaring to my parents that I no longer had to mow the grass on Saturday mornings. But you can guess how well that went over.
The Jewish tradition of sabbath observance is based on an understanding that we and all of creation were made for the sacred return to God that is the sabbath. The day of rest is not built into the weekly calendar so that the other six days might be more productive. The other six days of work allow us to attain the pinnacle of the week—the zenith of our creatureliness—which is the glorious resting in God that the sabbath provides. And, in the time of Jesus, sabbath observance was of central importance not only because of its inherent sacredness but also because it helped God’s people maintain a distinct and faithful identity in a wider Gentile culture that left very little room for their survival.
When the president of the synagogue, whose position gave him the authority and responsibility of holding the congregation to a life of faithfulness, saw what Jesus did, he felt duty-bound to act. “There are six days on which work ought to be done,” he said to the crowd, “come on one of those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” His was a plea for faithfulness. All of his training—a lifetime of study and religious practice—helped him know that this out-of-bounds healing could threaten everything that God’s people held dear. The prophets had rightly been critical of those who disregarded the sabbath for their own benefit. That sort of moral corruption had led to the downfall of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon’s temple centuries earlier. When the people of God forget the traditions that bind them to God and to their ancestors, they risk losing everything. And faithful leaders like the leader of this synagogue know what they must do to prevent that.
Jesus, however, will have none of it. “You hypocrites!” he declares to all whose religious instincts would prevent them from seeing what God is up to in this moment. “You untie your ox or donkey on the sabbath in order to lead it to water. How much more, then, should this daughter of Abraham be untied from her bondage to Satan in order that she might praise God on this sabbath day?” By invoking Satan, Jesus names what is really going on here. He shifts our frame of reference from a strictly medical diagnosis to a cultural, religious, systemic affliction that has kept this woman bent over for nearly two decades. And the desire to maintain a system that would, even for a day, delay this woman’s healing is nothing less than satanic.
Remember that Jesus is not attacking Judaism—the faith that he held dear—or even this synagogue leader, whose words represented a reasonable application of sabbath law. He is attacking any and all religious institutions and leaders that would prioritize the perpetuation of their own comfort and power at the expense of the weak, vulnerable, and oppressed. Jesus names as satanic those religious practices that devalue the God-imaged humanity of a person because of their gender, their disability, their poverty, or their illness in ways that express a preference for their continued subjugation over their promised liberation.
Such has been the way of the Christian church for centuries. As Tertullian, the Father of Western Christianity, wrote, “No woman who has come to know the Lord and learned the truth about her own (that is, the female) condition would wish to adopt too cheerful (still less ostentatious) a mode of dress. Rather, she would go about in humble clothing, with a downcast air, walking like Eve in mourning and penitence.” [1] Or, as Thomas Aquinas, whose teachings have been likened to that of the angels, wrote, “As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition.” [2]
Theologians like these, whose treasured writings have shaped the faith that has been passed down to us, remind us just how much even faithful people instinctively prefer the bowed-down bondage of others when that bondage reinforces their own important status. If we hear the story of Jesus’ liberation of this daughter of Abraham on the sabbath day and do not recognize within it God’s will that all whose oppression has been enabled or supported by Mother Church throughout the centuries be set free, we are not hearing God’s Word faithfully. And, if we do not recognize and repent of the damage we have done to individuals and families by disparaging their gender, their marital status, their ability, their poverty, their illness, or their mental state, we are guilty of siding with Satan.
Jesus shows us that God’s saving love transcends and ultimately destroys all our attempts to constrain it, even and especially when those attempts are masked by a self-proclaimed desire for faithfulness. In his willingness to take upon himself the very brokenness of humanity, Jesus eliminates any distance we would create between us and those who embody our failures. When we accept the salvation that he brings, we must, therefore, abandon our preference for that distance—that separation which allows us the illusion of superiority. We can no longer categorize someone else as “other” because, in Christ, we are all one. Whenever someone who has been bent down under the weight of satanic oppression is set free from their burden and allowed to assume their full, God-given stature, all of us share in that victory, for their liberation is our liberation, and their triumph is God’s triumph in us.