Luke 13- Jesus heals on the Sabbath
Luke 13:10-17 In our Gospel reading Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath. In the congregation there was a woman who had been crippled for eighteen years. She is described as having a spirit of weakness or infirmity. She is bent over and unable to stand up straight. St. Augustine asks us to see ourselves as this woman. She is the whole human race, bent over by the infection of sin. [1] She has been robbed of her original beauty and dignity. The human race has similarly been robbed of the dignity we were created with. We have been disfigured by the weight of sin, by enslavement to a false reality. We are crippled by our anxieties, our fears, our doubts, our despair. Our vision is constrained to the ground around our feet. Our lives become small and cramped. We are unable to raise our heads to the sky- unable to see the horizon. The response of Christ to seeing this poor woman is to immediately heal her. He doesn’t wait until after the synagogue service is done. He does...
