By Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene
Sermon on the Gospel according to Luke 13:10-17.
Eighteen years and an eternity engraved on a human spine. This constitutes the measure of the anguish, the parameter of the time that the earth registers, when the gaze is unable to face the heaven. The woman bent double of the Gospel passage, a shadow within the crowd, enters the synagogue dragging her existence, instead of walking. Her body has been prematurely transformed into a tomb of her soul, while the chronic ankylosis seems like a rusty key in the lock of time, which stubbornly refuses to turn.
Understandably, the question is raised: how much, truly, do the sorrow and the sin of the world weigh? Possibly, it is equal to the weight that compels her to gaze constantly at the earth. All around, the Synagogue seemed alien that day, almost hostile, as the observance of the Sabbath had degenerated into a petrified, formal religiosity, heavier than the disease itself. Amidst the assembled people, the living image of God is crushed…
This is a tragic irony, the religion is transformed into a noose instead of functioning as a wing. The woman stands there, amongst them, as a silent testimony both to the fall, and to the urgent need for redemption. No one paid attention to her, because everyone had grown accustomed to her presence, and the accustoming to the pain of the other constitutes the most hideous form of hard-heartedness. That day, however, the atmosphere had acquired another density, because the Teacher was present: «And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath» (Luke 13:10).
His presence changes the frequency of the space. His gaze penetrates the shell of the deformity and reads her story. For eighteen years Satan was weaving a net of invisible bone around her body, holding her captive. The Lord does not await the request for help, but her need sounds silently, the very posture of her body constitutes a supplication. «Woman, you are released from your infirmity» (Luke 13:12). A creative word, a word that shatters the bonds. The action follows, the touch. The hands that heal restore her lost vitality. And instantaneously, the woman stands upright.
The healing functions as a sudden fragmenting of the mirror where her despair was reflected. Now, she faces people, she sees light, she recognises the Benefactor. And her first reaction is the thanksgiving, which constitutes the precise ethos of salvation. The joy, despite everything, proves annoying to some. The chief ruler of the synagogue, guardian of the Law, is indignant. His reaction is due to the loss of control, as the Grace functioned outside of his watertight compartments. «There are six days for you to work…», he proclaims to the crowd, timidly avoiding to look at Jesus. He addresses the mob in order to strike the Christ. Hypocrisy always seeks allies, as it is unable to withstand the truth alone.
The chief ruler of the synagogue baptises the healing as «work». This is a deeply distorted perception. Here the word of the Lord falls as a catapult: «You hypocrite, does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it away to water it?» (Luke 13:15).[1]
His logic is crushing, they care for their animals, but they forbid God to care for His very own creature. The Christ violently overturns this morbid prioritisation. The phrase that changes history follows, as He calls her «daughter of Abraham». He restores her identity, which surpasses the identity of the woman and the invalid, and re-integrates her into the community. He returns the dignity to her which the eighteen-year-long silence had snatched away from her.[2]
The woman, doubly marginalised, is placed at the centre of the divine providence. Perhaps the eighteen years symbolise the threshold of adulthood, the woman was suffering precisely because she was trapped in a spiritual immaturity, and her healing signals her maturation into the freedom of God. Conversely, the chief ruler of the synagogue, although elderly, remains spiritually an infant. We live amidst such «synagogues», in spaces where the regulations become more important than the human existence. The crucial question returns to us: What do we do? Are we the keepers of the Sabbath or the disciples of Jesus?
The Sabbath was created for the man. Every time we help a fellow man to lift his head, to face the heaven, we are performing a divine liturgy. The reaction of the crowd comes as a final vindication: «…and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him» (Luke 13:17). The people possess a sense, they perceive when the Truth speaks. Let us imagine the woman returning to her home. Her body perhaps aches due to the sudden change, but her soul flies. She gazes at the trees, the roofs, the faces, lost in a sweet contemplation. This story constitutes the permanent present of the Church. Because the Christ came to unbind. I fear, however, that some of us, through our ritualism or our indifference, become collaborators of Satan in the «binding» of our brothers.
It would be better if we were hands that reach out and not fingers that point. The mirror of despair must be shattered. And it is shattered only with the presence of the Person, of Christ. The One who sees, calls and touches. Without preconditions. Only with mercy.
[1] Theophylact of Bulgaria, “Ta Heuriskomena Panta” [The Complete Findings], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 123 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1864), 916.
[2] Dorothy Kelley Patterson and Rhonda Harrington Kelley (eds.), The Woman’s Study Bible (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2017), 1544.
