Isaiah 58:9b-10; 13-14 (NRSV Updated Edition)
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
...
If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Luke 13:10-17 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.
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Exegetical notes (by Paul Neuchterlein, from the Girardian Lectionary page for this week - link in comments below):
1. “Eighteen,” the number of years the woman has been afflicted, mentioned twice, by Luke in vs. 11 and by Jesus in vs. 16. Numbers often provide background clues in ancient texts. In the James Alison essay “Inhabiting Texts and Being Discovered,” in Jesus the Forgiving Victim, he suggests a link to a story that would have been well-known to Jesus’ Jewish listeners: the story in Judges 3:12-25 of Ehud liberating the people of Israel from an eighteen year servitude under the Moabite king Eglon.
2. “Hypocrites” (hypocritēs in Greek, from the Greek words for “under” and “crisis”). This word is actually quite rare in Scripture, appearing only in the Synoptic Gospels (a favorite word especially of Mathew’s Jesus) and two places in the Book of Job. Once again, James Alison calls attention to the Joban texts as a likely background for Jesus’ use of the word. Particularly impressive in this context is the fact that the Job 36:5-12 passage talks about being bound in fetters and afflicted, much like Jesus sees this woman. Elihu is addressing Job about a God who answers the righteous who are afflicted, those who are “bound in fetters and caught in the cords of the afflicted.” But there are those who don’t hearken to God’s help that the Septuagint translates as the “godless (hypocritēs) in heart,” who hold onto their anger, and “they do not cry for help when he binds them.”
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Another exegetical point is the connection between the Isaiah reading, "If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil" (58:9b), and v16 of the Luke passage: "a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years." Satan, or more correctly The Satan, is the accuser (the literal translation of "the satan", the inspiration of all who point the finger and speak evil of others.
Tom Truby highlights this dimension of the story:
"Could satan be a stand-in for the accusing community who says “You are just a woman. You were born to carry this burden. Don’t try to escape it.” Does this story have applications for any person or group of people our culture unfairly asks to carry our culture’s burdens: to be the ones in whom we store our resentment and who absorb our dysfunction?
"In this story from Luke Jesus comes along and sees a woman bent by her culture. He decides to set her free. Jesus has asked us to model ourselves after him. When we see someone bent, or perhaps a whole population bent, shaped by the weight they carry, even though it is not their burden, what should we do? Should we feel their plight and call out to them in identification? How can we place our hands on them so they can stand up and praise God?
"Jesus must have said all of this in such a clear way that all of them saw the connections. With things suddenly clarified, the opponents of Jesus felt ashamed—as they should. But they too are forgiven. Even as all of this happens, Jesus is on his way to the cross to make human forgiveness explicit. In exposing the mechanism by which their little village works they have been given a great gift; for though their leaders may not know it, they too are in bondage. They are in bondage to their need to keep their sister bent and to hide that from themselves. It keeps them from claiming their humanity as a forgiven people able to praise God."
- Thomas L. Truby, from sermon delivered on August 25, 2019 (https://girardianlectionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Truby-Proper16-2019-The-Dark-Cloud-of-Human-Ignorance-and-Self-deceit-Cleared-for-a-Moment.pdf)
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James Alison's essay “Inhabiting Texts and Being Discovered,” is specifically on this passage. With the two passages from the Hebrew Scriptures mentioned in the Exegetical Notes above in mind, Alison concludes:
"[Jesus] comes into the synagogue, which is supposed to be the gathering of Israel, and what does he find? Israel bound down in affliction, symbolized by this woman here with her eighteen years of suffering. But unlike the Israel of old, is anybody crying out to the Lord for delivery? Not a bit of it! In fact the synagogue leader is behaving much more like Eglon than like Ehud. Both he and those present have become godless in heart, hypocrites, since rather than cry out and actually long for help, they would rather sit complacently gnawing over their own affliction.
"But this is not what the real Israel is about at all! The real Israel cried out to YHWH for delivery, and in the absence of that, well then, YHWH comes into their midst to give the afflicted their right. “If they are bound in fetters, and caught in the cords of affliction, he declares to them their work … that they are behaving arrogantly.” [Job 36:8-9] So please notice that Jesus is even now enacting in their midst what YHWH does, rebuking them for their arrogance and their weddedness to resentment which leads them to fail to cry out. But he is also delivering the afflicted by her affliction, and opening the ears of all of them through her adversity. […]
"The overall dynamic is then of YHWH visiting his people in the midst of a synagogue meeting, so as to bring out what real Israel is really all about, as full of power and excitement as the sagas of old, showing them in three dimensions what it really is to be a child of Abraham. You can begin to get a sense then of how a synagogue full of people suddenly found itself hoicked out of its ordinary routine. All of its participants find themselves occupying different places within the stories, brought, if they could accept being urged to cry out more, to a real sense of what all the glories of Israel were really all about.
"These people were undergoing a visitation from YHWH, so no wonder they rejoiced “at all the glorious things that were done by him.” On the other hand, those for whom synagogue has become a Moabite cult, in which, as it says in the Book of Job, resentful people go down to their graves in shame because they don’t cry out, then, well, “his adversaries were put to shame.”"
- James Alison, "Jesus the Forgiving Victim", pp. 369-71
[Source of exegetical notes by Paul Neuchterlein, link to Thomas Truby sermon and quote from James Alison's Jesus the Forgiving Victim, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper16c/]
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