Isaiah 58:9b–14
Psalm 103:1–8
Hebrews 12:18–29
Luke 13:10–17

We love a good victory.  This summer’s Olympics we have cheered on a good many victories: women who seem to effortlessly leap and twist through the air and land on firm ground; three of our American women crossing the finish line first in the 110 meter hurdles; an American from Wisconsin winning the gold for the first time in the women’s triathlon; medal after medal, story after story of athletes overcoming challenges and succeeding at the highest level of competition for their sport.  Victory for our team, victory for all of us who cheered them on.

In our gospel reading today, we have familiar Luke territory, and a big win for Jesus. It is the Sabbath and Jesus is teaching.  He meets a stranger who is suffering and heals her.  He is then confronted by the leaders for healing on the sabbath.  Jesus counters them — “You guys take care of your livestock on the sabbath, no?  Here I’m taking care of a God-fearing woman.  How could you chose your animals over one of your sisters?” The opponents are defeated and the crowd cheers another Jesus victory.  We have seen Jesus in this pattern before. We’ve seen it so much that we wonder why the leaders cannot figure out what is going on.  They keep missing what Jesus is doing.  In the end, we are left in the company of the crowds, cheering on our Jesus, because we get it!  We understand the point, what is the big deal about healing on the sabbath?

But a closer look at the passage in the setting of our other scripture readings today, point not to the victor of the argument and we who cheer Jesus on, but to how God is revealed in the person in the shadow of the victory, the suffering and healed woman.

“Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.” A woman enters turned in on herself, hunched over, and has been in pain for nearly 2 decades.  Her posture likely made her easily recognized.  Perhaps she was a fixture at the synagogue, coming in for possible healing day after day, year after year, whether it was a sabbath resting day or a Tuesday.

But today was different.  Someone saw her, someone looked at this disfigured woman and noticed.  That someone was Jesus.  He made three simple connections with her:  he asked her to come near, he touched her and he spoke to her.  Three connections set Jesus apart from everyone else gathered there and from what most of us gathered here might do.  But what set him apart from all of us ultimately was that his word was the word of God, the same one who created the world in 6 wonder-filled and mysterious days, but rested on the seventh.

She stands straight up.  Before this moment her sight line was the ground, people’s dirty feet and ankles.  For 18 years she could see the rocks and dirt, but not the faces of her neighbors. But now, seeing the world upright for the first time in decades, she knows to whom to address her joy: only God has the power to heal.

But the woman’s praise of God is interrupted by the leaders of the synagogue. They are “indignant,” Luke tells us, because Jesus healed on the sabbath.  They repeat their classic argument about the hours of operation:  “Six days work ought to be done.  If you are sick, come back on any of those days! We’re closed today!”  

The Pharisees were not only interrupted, Jesus undermined their authority. Their religious practices have little power in light of Jesus’ healing.  But unlike the woman, who receives Jesus’ healing and begins to praise God, the Pharisees see what he’s done and begin to argue.  They pull out their defenses and go to work.

They get it all wrong.  Honoring the sabbath is less a matter of doing no work, and more a matter of remembering why and for whom we work in the first place.  The sabbath marks the day God rested from creating and the day God instructed his first two humans to rest from their work.  There is a parallel between God’s work and our work; God’s rest and our rest.

But there is also a realignment that takes place on the sabbath between God and creation. There is a U-turn. In the Isaiah passage, God calls his people to pause from the constant pursuit of their own interests.  Instead, offer food to the hungry, satisfy the needs of the afflicted, and honor the sabbath. God will guide them, satisfy their needs and make them strong.  Out of gratefulness to God for these gifts, humans are called to rest.  

The words “rest” and “be still” are often used to translate a Hebrew word that is more complicated than what we think of with rest.  I imagine rest to mean quiet hours of morning or evening before the rush of the day begins or after the stillness of the evening has set in. But these Hebrew words are more dramatic than that.  What we often translate, “be still” is a military term. When we hear the call to rest, imagine holding tightly to a sword and hearing God say, “Drop your weapons!”  Open your fist and let go.  Surrender to God whatever you use to protect yourself.  Let go of your defenses, rest your case, stop arguing! That is to honor the sabbath.

As important as the sabbath is, the argument between Jesus and the pharisees distracts us from what happens after the woman is healed.  Her response to what Jesus did for her reveals the enormity of what is taking place: God is present in Jesus.  God the source of life is living among the very people God created. It is the great interruption!

Of course we don’t know what she said or did.  But I imagine her praise may have echoed our psalm today.  The psalmist makes a dramatic turn towards God with with her entire being.  It mirrors what took place for the woman when she was able to stand upright again.  We hear in the psalm, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me” but literally the psalmist imagines her soul as turned outside of her body towards God.  We hear “Bless the Lord, O my soul” a second time, but the word soul in this case refers to her liver and kidneys and organs, the source of emotional, physical and spiritual life in the Hebrew language.  Her entire being is engaged in praising God: the one who forgives where she falls short; who heals disease and redeems life out of death, the one who treats humans as if they were holy, crowning them with love and mercy and satisfying them with good.

If we could have heard the praises of the woman Jesus healed, we may have heard as in the psalm that “The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed,” not just six days a week, but at all times and in all places.  For it is this character that was present in Jesus, in his palms with all their finger prints, as he called the stranger towards him, touched her, and spoke to her.  It is the presence of the Lord, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, who is sitting there in the synagogue.  

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases.”   

We love a good victory, we love to cheer on our team.  But in an age like ours when a disgraced athlete values a weak defense over a confession; when political leaders argue instead of work hard to compromise; when it is much easier to give up on the good and become cynical; in an age like ours what we need to hear is the woman in the shadow.  Today’s gospel points us away from winning the argument with the pharisees and towards the once-suffering woman, to join her praise of God, to let go of our defenses in a true sabbath rest.