Luke 13:10-17
This story tells us that Jesus had enough standing as a teacher to be invited to teach in a synagogue. More than once we hear that he was reading scripture and talking about what it meant. It also tells us that his teaching irritated the official teachers – the rabbis. It was too radical for their comfort zone.
What is it that was so radical about Jesus’ teaching? Mostly that people were more important than rules. In this story a woman bent in pain comes to him. This is already a rules infraction because women didn’t attend service in the synagogues. Instead of reminding her to wait outside Jesus healed her. The leaders point out that he has done work on the sabbath, another violation. Jesus insists that helping God’s creatures is more important than following the rules. Even though the commandment to rest on the sabbath comes out of the people’s understanding of God, the strict enforcement of this and many other rules based on the law was making it hard for people to live. Those at the bottom of the economic ladder simply couldn’t keep all the commandments and so thought they were estranged from God. The rules were a barrier to experiencing God’s love and participating in God’s community. Jesus says when there’s a conflict between human need and rules, the rules are secondary.
I wonder where that happens in our world. This week I talked with a woman in need of housing assistance so she’s not evicted. We’re going to help her pay back rent and her landlord is going to roll her deposit toward a less expensive apartment. I asked if she had contacted agencies in our communities who help with housing. She had been turned down because her young adult daughter lives with her. This daughter has medical issues which make it difficult for her to work right now. Because the woman is caring for her daughter, she couldn’t get help with her financial situation. She had made good decisions about how to live within her income, but she couldn’t implement those decisions because she was keeping her family obligations. The rules prevented her moving forward.
Decades ago in our country we declared war on drugs. We needed to do something to address addiction and drug use that was damaging our people. Unfortunately what we did was impose strict punishment which has been unevenly enforced. Minority folks have spent disproportionate time in jail, destroying the futures of so many and breaking communities. We spend much more money on incarceration than on treatments that have been proven to work. We tried to fix a problem with rules rather than with compassion. As a result the problem is bigger and many folks have been harmed.
We pride ourselves on being a nation of laws and many of those laws serve us very well. We are all safer because of speed limits and vaccinations and social security. The laws that serve us best are those which help people live better lives. The laws which don’t serve us well impose the beliefs of some people on all people or try to punish folks into healthy living. By his actions Jesus gives us a way to evaluate our rules by the way they relieve suffering and encourages us to make adjustments when the rule has become more important than the people we are called to help.
I’m also intrigued by this woman’s illness which caused her to bend in pain for 18 years but could be cured in an instant. Our Tuesday study group is reading a book by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams about hope. A story in this week’s reading seems very similar to this scripture and I want to share it with you:
[Douglas] told Jane about Ashlee Cunsolo, who works with Inuit communities in Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada, who have been impacted by climate change. She was interviewing the communities about all they were losing – the ice that was breaking up; the temperatures that were rising; the plants and animals that were changing; and in many ways, an entire way of life that was disappearing.
“Cunsolo was hearing all these stories of despair and trying to write them up in her dissertation when she began experiencing radiating nerve pain in her arms and hands. The pain was so severe that she couldn’t type or work.
“She went to all the medical specialists, but they could not find anything wrong with her nerves. Finally, she went to one of the Inuit elders and he told her, ‘You’re not letting go of our grief. Your body is stopping you from typing because you’re intellectualizing it, not feeling it. Until you get it out of your body, your body won’t function.’ He told her she had to make space for her grief and speak it. And she also had to find awe and joy every day.”
“What did she do?” Jane asked.
“She went into the forests. She immersed her hands in an ice-cold river and asked the water to take away the pain. She apologized to the land for the harm that she and others were doing. It was a reckoning.
“Cunsolo told me that she had been able to find awe and joy in the forest, “I continued. “She said there’s always beauty, even when there’s pain and suffering. She learned not to hide from the darkness, just not to get lost in it.”
“Did it help?” Jane asked.
“After two weeks of crying and letting the grief flow out of her body, the nerve pain was gone.”
(The Book of Hope, Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams with Gail Hudson, p. 75)
This is a remarkable story. It reminds me of times when stress has lodged itself in my body and brought pain. That may be true for you as well. It also brings to mind the folks who are telling us that the pain of our history is lodged in our DNA. That as a people we can’t just ignore past trauma and move on like nothing has happened. Until we acknowledge that there is pain in our past, we can’t build a good future.
We aren’t directly responsible for terrible things that have happened in history: for genocide and brutality that took the land we live on away from the first peoples; for slavery that still shows in racism and inequality in today’s society; for abuse and exploitation of women and children under the guise of male privilege or of people of color because of white privilege or of LGBTQIA folks because of heteronormative culture. These atrocities are things that we personally would not do and certainly not something we condone. But we stand at a moment when there’s a movement to deny that they happened rather than to face them. We do have a voice to ensure that doesn’t happen. When folks want to make rules that rewrite history or ban books or censor teachers we can stand up for justice. It may make us uncomfortable, just like Jesus made the leaders of his day uncomfortable. But healing comes from acknowledging grief and facing trauma so that we can choose to live a different way. Healing comes when ALL people are more important than our comfort or the status quo. Healing comes when we follow Jesus’ example and extend a hand.