The Bent Over Woman
The Bent Over Woman
Luke 13:10-17
It’s hard to really look at the bent over woman. On the one hand, there is that part of us that can’t help but look. We’ve seen people with bad posture but we’ve never seen anyone bent over quite like her. She’s doubled over at the waist. It’s the same part of us that can’t help but look as we are driving past a traffic accident “Whoa…how did that happen?” On the other hand, it is hard to look because we can’t help but feel for her. We can’t stop ourselves from imagining what it would be like to be her. We can barely stop ourselves from asking ourselves, “What if I was her?”
If you dare, let’s put ourselves in her skin. We learn in the text that she has been bent over for 18 years. However, I’m pretty sure that she wasn’t bent over all at once. Anyone who has lived with chronic pain knows the daily grind, the hope in the morning—before you get out of bed—that the pain is somehow gone. Then, in the instant her feet hit the floor, the pain is there again. She finds that if she just adjusts to the pain—bends over just a hair more—the pain is a little less through the day. With each adjustment, her spine ratchets just a notch or two further down. Honestly, she was just doing the best that she could to cope. We see that now.
Luke tells us something that most of us struggle to understand. He tells us that a spirit had crippled her over these 18 years. Rather than skip over that, we should wrestle with it. The most obvious thing that this means that we so often miss is that being bent over wasn’t her fault. Something happened to her that left her this way. Now, in other places Luke tells stories of demons that possess people which are cast out by Jesus. This is not one of those exorcism stories. This is not a failure on the woman’s part. Over time, this just happened. Through no fault of her own, her life has been decimated, an inch at a time.
Now, there are all sorts of connections which we might make to this woman’s plight. One doesn’t have to be in physical pain to be bent over double. The spirit of depression or despair can overwhelm us and leave us making the daily adjustments to this “occupation” of our inner selves until we are a contorted mess. Addiction can enter our lives in the insidious daily accommodations that we make, at first to dampen what we feel and then to protect our secret at all costs. That’s the thing…this woman was bent over double in the most obvious way for everyone to see. A lot of the other things that twist the rest of us into pretzels over time aren’t nearly as obvious or visible. These other things that can twist us are also easier to overlook when we take a hard look at ourselves.
Whether the pain is physical or emotional, we hurt. The pain runs deep. We spend our days trying to escape the pain or ignore the pain or both. Over time, through no fault of our own, we not only resign ourselves to this life, we can’t even remember what life was like before the pain arrived and began to grow. With bone-on-bone arthritis in my knee, at some pre-verbal, non-rational level, I was pretty sure that I still walked the same way that I had always walked. Meanwhile, I limped my through open lands, known by all my fellow walkers from a mile away by my limp.
You miss a lot of life when you’re in pain. Back in my days of knee pain, I kept my eyes mostly on the ground. When you don’t lift your feet very much because that hurts, you’re always in danger of tripping on a root. Then, there’s just more pain when you fall. All I have to do is look at the pictures that I took then—most often photos of the little things I noticed on the path like feathers or leaves or an interesting stone. You don’t shoot a lot of cloud formations or sunsets when you don’t feel safe looking up.
That’s what we need to consider with the bent over woman. I’m sure that she had given up hoping for relief from that pain long ago. She had abandoned any hope for change. This was just the way things were. As a result, her whole field of vision and experience of life changed. When would you ever make eye contact with another human being if your eyes were fixed on the ground? Would anyone meet your glance as you looked out of the corner of your eye? If you did catch their eye, how fast would they look away—too afraid of your pain to keep looking, afraid at some level that they might catch whatever it was that had caught you and swallowed you whole. Did the bent over woman ever look up?
At another level, after 18 years, you have to wonder if the crowd at the synagogue ever looked at her at all. The novelty surely would have worn off years before, except for each year’s new crop of children who could gawk and be cruel in the way that children can some times be. The daily discipline that people who really just wanted to be kind had practiced to not stare at her would have turned, over the years, into people who seemingly never noticed her. The best of them might feel pity for a moment or two. Then, their attention would move back to their own lives.
She’s just the bent over woman. Luke, apparently, didn’t know her name. You wonder, did anyone in the synagogue? You know you’re in trouble when you’re identified by what makes you different than everyone else: “He’s the guy with the stutter;” “She’s the lady who limps:” Back when we still went to the gym, it was, “He’s the sweaty guy.” People know who they’re talking about but they are definitely not talking about a full-blown, fellow human being.
Now, before we move on, I’d like to have all of us pause and consider how one year—not eighteen, thank God!—of living through the pandemic has bent us all over. There has been so much pain. We miss hugging our friends and family or even just being in the same space, together. If we haven’t been sick ourselves then we’ve discovered how profoundly affected we have been not just by our neighbors who have been sick but by watching doctors and nurses weep over the pain that they have seen or by watching the pain of people we will never meet as they grieve the loss of loved ones they will not see again. The pain mounts.
However, what we’ve learned, I think, is that the daily, bite-sized sources of pain may be what ratchets us down the most. We finally see a friend and feel genuine joy but we realize that, somehow, we haven’t practiced making small talk for so long that now it’s exhausting. Or, we realize that we have to go all the way to Vernon Hills on an errand and it feels like we’re driving to Florida because our world has grown so small. Or, we take off our mask when we return home from our errand and we look in the mirror and somehow our face looks like the mask is still on. We flex those facial muscles to make sure that they still work after all.
We’ve been under stress and missing some people and some activities for a year. We have been challenged to live with hope and courage on a daily basis. A half million of our fellow citizens have died. Somehow, it feels like any sense of normal has died with them. And yet, we adjust. We learn to get used to the view. We maintain our routines and put one foot—carefully and cautiously—in front of the other. Still, it’s almost as hard to look at ourselves as it is to look at the bent over woman.
So, on this particular day in the synagogue, she’s just hobbling along, cain in hand, making her way to the back where all the women were seated, then sitting in the very back of all those rows of women, because, at some level, she just knew that was where a bent over woman belonged. When you’re in pain—physical or emotional or pandemic pain— things like seating arrangements don’t seem to matter nearly as much. Honestly, no one notices that she’s even there…
No one notices, that is, except Jesus, the man whom everyone else was watching. He was there to teach. Everyone assumed that meant he would read from the Scriptures and then sit down and regale them with some wisdom. Instead Jesus offers them a very different lesson. Against all the odds and all the expectations, he sees the bent over woman. Now, remember—in lots of other healing stories, the burden is on the person who is ailing to approach Jesus. They call out to him. Or, in the case of one woman, she approaches Jesus and, without saying a word, touches his robe and is healed. These people show a little initiative. They take the risk. This day, Jesus sees her and heals her without her ever saying a thing. Jesus just calls out to her: “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”
Do you hear the upshot of those words? This is not so much of a healing as it is an act of liberation. She hasn’t been made well, so much as she has been set free. Then, Jesus puts his hands on her shoulders and she straightens up. Immediately, she begins to praise God. Whatever the weight was that had bent her over double that weight is now gone—back straight, shoulders back, chin up, eyes looking skyward, mouth open and praising God. Maybe like me, you are amazed at the sounds your joints can make when you stand and stretch. Can you imagine the “snap, crackle and pop” that must have filled the synagogue as her joints came back to life?
We are uniquely in a place to imagine this moment of joy for the formerly bent over woman. Have you seen the joy on the face of people when they are given the vaccine? They can hug people again! And the presence of three vaccines that work amazingly well ought to be the promise of a miracle for us all! We won’t be bent over forever! Things may never go back to completely the way they were before and in some cases that might be a good thing. However, so much of what is good in life can now be even better because we are going to be able to begin to fully live again. There will be a day when we are not looking over the top of a mask, when we’re not afraid to shake hands and hug one another, when we will feel safe to sing together. That weight being lifted, that stress being taken away, well, that changes everything.
At the heart of this story is Jesus acting unilaterally to restore a person to the fullness of life. This poor woman’s life did not allow for the possibility of joy and love and all the other good things that God built into life. That is unacceptable. Therefore, Jesus acts to break the bonds of her pain and remove the blinders that her pain placed on her vision. Jesus stands in opposition to anything that would stand between one of God’s children and the chance to be everything that God had hoped that they would be. All anyone else could see in this woman was her bent back. Jesus declares that she is a daughter of Abraham which might just have been enough to convince even her that she was a real human being after all.
Of course, there are naysayers. There always are. In this case, it is the leader of the synagogue who, having watched a bent over woman being liberated from pain, declares that this healing took place on the wrong day. May God help us all to not be that kind of religious person, right? Still, though, as that argument unfolded, I wonder if anyone noticed that the formerly bent over woman was dancing her way out of that space and into a whole new life. Boy, could she dance!
God will liberate us from our pain, too. How long? Not long from now, I promise. So…let’s go find our dancing shoes…