Made Straight

For eighteen years she had seen mostly feet. A woman comes into the synagogue on the Sabbath, and Luke, the beloved physician, gives us a posture, not a diagnosis: a spirit of weakness, a body folded toward the floor, unable to straighten itself (Luke 13:11).

She asks nothing; she says not a word. Jesus breaks the quiet: "Woman, you are freed from your disability" (Luke 13:12). He laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God.

The room does not erupt with her. The ruler of the synagogue is "indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath" (Luke 13:14), and lectures the crowd: come back on a working day. He is not inventing the rule — six days you shall labor, and the seventh is a Sabbath to the LORD your God — and he has it by heart. It is easy to call him hard-hearted, but I think he is guarding the day as something he administers: the hours set, the mercies scheduled.

“You hypocrites,” Jesus answers, and adds a fact from every barnyard: they all untie an ox on the Sabbath and lead it to water. “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16).

For her, Daughter is a name she never earned and cannot lose — an heir of the promise while still bent toward the ground. And the Seed of the woman is here, loosing what the old serpent bound.

For him, Administrator is a job he can never put down. The loosing Jesus announced over her — apolyō over the woman, lyō over the ox, one root of untying — is on offer to him too, and he misses it. He is bent in on himself: a Sabbath Jesus can untie people on needs no administrator, and he would rather be needed than loosed.

Her bending was never a verdict on her soul. His was. And so is ours: we are bent in on ourselves, and cannot straighten by trying harder. The ruler bent one way, gripping the day as a thing to administer; we bend the other, dropping it as a chain — and found we had thrown away a gift, not won a freedom. Both are the same crookedness: a life that cannot stop, because nothing has been finished on its behalf. Then Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, let himself be bound — in a garden, on a cross — so that the bound could go free. "It is finished," he said, and the work of our rescue was done.

So his invitation elsewhere — “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29) — is the same mercy this woman felt in her spine. We can be still, not to be straightened but because he has already straightened us.

Eighteen years of Sabbaths she came in bent and went home bent. This day she walked home with her eyes level. We will all stand straight eventually — raised as he was raised, into the Sabbath rest that remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9). Until then the one who loosed her has not gone quiet: he "always lives to make intercession" for us (Hebrews 7:25). *Eventually* has a date, and an empty tomb behind it.