11th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17C, August 21, 2022; The Rev. Dr. John D. Golenski
Luke 13:12. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”
In our Gospel portion today, the authors of Luke describe an encounter between a woman living with long-term consequences of something like Guillain–Barré Syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, or tuberculosis of the spine. As so often happens in the Gospel stories, when a diseased, wounded, or psychically-damaged person encounters Jesus, a profound healing results. These accounts of Jesus’s cures, however, are not selectively recounted in the Gospel just to convince us that Jesus is divine. Usually, there is a message or lesson embedded in the account of the healing.
What is happening in our portion today? What special lesson is offered to us from Luke’s so-called Traveling Chapters, accounts of incidents and sayings from Jesus’ trip up to Jerusalem to take up his cross? Enfolded in the travel narrative is this Gospel gem, a bit of Good News for persons who suffer from any of the multitude of chronic diseases or conditions so characteristic of the human condition. We are told that Jesus is teaching in the local synagogues, which implies that he has settled into the region. As he is teaching one sabbath, an infirm woman appears in the assembly. In the text, a very common transition word is used, rendered in our translation as the phrase “Just then there appeared a woman”. A more familiar translation for us would be: “Behold, a woman appeared”. In the Greek of the New Testament it has a more abrupt quality and carries almost an admonition: See! Look! Pay attention! Her condition is described. She has a permanent contraction of the spine. She is completely bent over and has been so-crippled for eighteen years. Whether the specificity of time has a metaphoric significance is lost to us. Suffice it to say, she has been suffering for a long time from a disease that cripples her.
The text goes on to note, “When Jesus had seen her (again, a resonance of the initial entrance admonition), he called her over to him”. He announced that her bonds were untied. He uses the same word for manumission, freeing the bonds of slavery. Jesus releases her from the bondage of illness and frees her to reenter her life. The text describes Jesus laying his hands upon her to effect the healing. The language is the same as used when describing the ministrations of physicians. He heals with his voice and his touch. She immediately is restored to a healthy state and praises God: so far, a typical New Testament healing story.
The authors of Luke have a specific agenda, a particular lesson for those of us hearing their account of Jesus’s life, ministry, and death. In the narrative, the leader of the synagogue loudly criticizes the newly-healed woman and Jesus for healing her, for working on the sabbath. He reasonably notes that there are six other days in the week for working and healing. Sabbath is reserved for worship in God’s presence, acknowledging the centrality of the Creator in the community’s life. Any distraction, even to do good, to heal the sick, to raise the dead, is unacceptable. Here the text takes another sudden turn when the authors quote Jesus’s retort. Having referred through the story, indeed through most of the Traveling Chapters of Luke, to Jesus by name, here suddenly (behold, Emmanuelites!) he is called The Lord (Kyrios). As Lord, Jesus calls out the leader’s hypocrisy. With God’s voice, he notes that everyone ignores the sabbath rules in order to bring their domestic animals to water. The basic needs of life and the demands of compassion transcend the strictures of the Law.
In describing the leaders’ hypocrisy, Jesus relates what everyone knows: the necessity to lead the ox and the ass from their manger to the source of water every day, even on the sabbath. If we look back at what is actually in this story, we see Jesus suddenly revealed as Lord and, as always the case when Jesus is judging, he calls out for sanction not the rule breaking but invokes a shame price for a leader who clearly misunderstands his position and his mission. Any knucklehead can understand the necessity to bring your work animals to water every day, whatever the Law may say. Any human, open to God’s Spirit, can see and understand the need for healing and compassion when our neighbors are suffering. Somehow, the leader of this assembly could not see the real situation.
The woman with the evil spirit in this story likely had some kind of movement disorder or auto-immune condition. In my years of clinical work, I have seen many such conditions and diseases, and now in my senior years, I have a few myself. This Lucan passage reminds me of two persons I have known who suffered from one such condition, Guillain–Barré Syndrome (GBS). I particularly recall one patient from my very first year working at Oakland Children’s Hospital. She was five years old and was admitted to our intensive-care unit from the emergency room, where she had been tentatively diagnosed with GBS. Tiffany was brought to hospital because of sudden-onset paralysis impairing her ability to breathe. Surprisingly, because it is relatively rare, I had a close friend who was diagnosed with GBS while he was in high school. Allen had born four episodes of extreme paralysis. GBS dramatically changed his life, but, given his prominent, well-resourced-family background, he was able to adapt and live a remarkably productive life into his seventies. Allen adapted to living in a wheelchair. He went to college, studied law, and eventually became managing partner of the largest law firm in the U.S. He was able to marry, have four sons, and travel extensively in his career of building the first truly-international law firm. He was extensively philanthropic, both in terms of funding service organizations, but also in taking a life-changing interest in individuals. Allen transformed his disability, deploying the significant resources of his family background to show forth God’s compassion in his life.
Our five-year-old patient, however, had no such resources. One of several children in a single-parent family, Tiffany was a withdrawn child with developmental delays noted by her pre-school teachers. She was in crisis when she came to us, needing external ventilation and hyperalimentation, feeding through a tube. Our medical/nursing team was able to get her through this first crisis and wean her from the ventilator. Gradually, she was able to breathe on her own, take nutrition the way nature intended, and recovered enough to take note of her surroundings. Our nurses and physical and occupational therapists as well as our child psychologists helped Tiffany to learn how to manage her daily life with some of the deficits caused by this first severe paralysis. Not all of her function returned, so she would need to marshal her internal resources to adapt to her new world. I vividly recall the day of Tiffany’s discharge to home. We all prayed for the best for her, but we feared for her especially when she faced the next episode of paralysis.
I have spent five decades working in the American health-care system. A number of periods, both early in my career and more recently, I have been privileged to serve in a clinical setting in a children’s hospital and in two children’s hospices that I directed. I also have worked at the health-system and health-plan level, and later with governmental agencies, especially Medicaid programs in multiple states. In Washington I worked with Congress and administrations of both parties to improve access to excellent care for all. I wish I could say that my international experience in Europe and the Middle East convinced me of the comparative quality of the American system.
Vast racial and social-class disparities in health-care outcomes and availability of even basic resources characterize our system. In particular, people with severe chronic diseases, like the woman in the Gospel and Tiffany in Oakland, can’t obtain the support they need to manage life with such a limiting condition. Surely, we are called to see the circumstances and need of our neighbors, and to hear the Divine voice calling us to compassion and care. This, I believe, is the message of the Gospel of Luke, the physician, to us here and now. To see, and to hear; to behold and to heal.