20040822FreeatLast - page 1 of 3

There are some things I love to see because they make me feel good. I loved seeing American

athletes competing in the Olympics, especially when they win. It made me feel good, like I was part of

the success. I loved seeing my family when I went to Oregon. It made me feel good to know they love

me and care about me.

Other things I don’t like seeing very much. There are the obvious ones like war and hunger and

hatred and violence and drivers who drive under the influence of alcohol or cell phones or makeup or

distraction or road rage. I feel fine about not liking those. Some, however, hit closer to home and make

me feel—well, I suppose “uncomfortable” is the word we tend to use, but I think it’s more like guilty

of something I don’t really understand and/or powerless to help something a lot bigger than I am.

Whatever it is, there are times I would rather not have to look. The Immokalee workers in Florida;

Dasani water. (The man in the Society Hill dumpster last Saturday afternoon rummaging though the

garbage—my community would prefer to put up a wall to keep people like that out of here. Is it

because they remind us that they too are part of the community and that I am part of the problem if I’m

not part of the solution?)

Jesus didn’t have that problem. He had really good eyes, not necessarily 20-20 vision, but he

had a way of seeing everything: seeing people; seeing possibilities; seeing through people’s excuses

for not seeing. In other words, he had God’s eyes. Today’s story about Jesus and the bent-over woman

and the synagogue leader and the congregation gathered on that Sabbath is all about that. Let’s go there

now and see what we can see and learn about our own vision—maybe we could use some corrective

lenses.

It’s a Sabbath morning and the congregation has gathered to hear this young prophet from

Nazareth teach. What was he teaching? Luke doesn’t tell us, but if the previous chapter is any

indication, it was probably about discipleship in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus is on a mission, the one he laid out in his sermon at his home church—to bring good news

to the poor and recovery of sight to the blind and to set the prisoners free. And so maybe the topic is:

repentance—not hellfire and damnation, but life, real life, in God’s Kingdom; or maybe it’s all about

how everyone is invited into the Kingdom—but they must pass through that narrow door, the one gate

into the city that’s open day and night but you have to lay aside the stuff you’re carrying and kind of

bend over in order to enter.

But what Jesus is saying turns out not to matter all that much because this congregation is about

to see a live demonstration of the Kingdom as this woman with a spirit that had crippled her for 18

years appears.

We have a lot of questions: Who is she? Where did she come from? Such a woman, one with

that physical condition would have been considered a sinful and anything but a child of God in that

culture. She might physically be there but functionally invisible. No one would see her—at least not as

a real person. And they would look the other way to avoid looking into her eyes.

We also don’t know what the spirit was that crippled her—interesting that Luke calls it a spirit

and not an illness—and that 18 years was a long time to have been out there on the edges, excluded

from the community, a long time to wonder where was God and God’s mercy and favor in all of this.

Things happened pretty quickly. She appears, and Jesus, with his good eyes, sees her wherever

it is that she is—most likely way in the back of this room full of men, drawn out of the shadows by this

preacher who has come to announce freedom to captives and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.