Praise the Lord for
this Friday. Sunday is coming. We all will get to gather in the House of the
Lord with His people to worship and celebrate. We will get to join the church
of Jesus Christ our Lord around the corner and around the globe declaring
that Jesus Reigns. Last Wednesday in our Bible study we were sharing about how
our Lord is in the business of healing. Luke chapter 13 contains one of many
such healing story. We have read and heard these stories of Jesus healing
people many times. In some ways, they're all alike — a person with a physical
or mental or spiritual defect comes to Jesus, and Jesus heals the person. There
was blind, man, whom Jesus gave back his sight. In Luke 13 there was a little
boy who had a terrible fever; his father thought he was going to die, but Jesus
healed him. There was also the man whose mind was so darkened that he used to
run around unclothed, cutting himself with stones. Look at how Jesus cured
him, made him whole, and gave him back his life. Our Lord is amazing and
wonderful.
Stories of
Jesus healing people are wonderful stories, each one so similar, and yet each
one also unique, one of a kind. Luke 13 records the story of Jesus healing a
woman who was bent over, for instance. While Jesus was teaching He noticed
a woman,
bent over. We are told that she had been suffering from this infirmity for
eighteen years and that an "evil spirit" was responsible. Jesus saw the woman, but then
did something most of us would not do. He focused his attention on her. It is
quite the opposite for most of us. If we see somebody who is obviously
handicapped, we look away because we don't want to be impolite and stare
since it is rude to keep staring at somebody who looks
different. Right in the middle of his teaching, when he saw
the bent-over woman, he interrupted his lesson and called her over to him. He
not only saw her, but focused his attention on her, right there in front of
everyone. He called her to him, and said to her, "Woman, you
are set free from your ailment." He placed his hands on her, and she stood up
straight and began praising God.
The leaders of the synagogue were clearly
unhappy about the incident, about how inappropriate it is that this healing
should take place on the Sabbath. Our Lord, however, had no patience with
those who are more concerned about legal niceties than they are about relieving
human suffering. "You hypocrites!" he said. "You give water to your work
animals on the Sabbath. 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?"
Jesus called her "a daughter of Abraham." She
is the only person in the whole Bible to be called by that name. Abraham, of
course, was the great father of faith. He was the one who, many years before,
received God's promise that a great nation would be created out of his
descendants, a people through whom all the nations of the earth would be
blessed. This woman, according to Jesus, was a daughter of Abraham, and nothing
less. He did not see her as the crippled woman, a nobody. As a beloved child
of Abraham, she was not to be shoved aside, given a label to keep her in her
place. No, she was a beloved child of Abraham, part of God's great plan of
salvation and blessing for the whole world.
Love just
poured out of Jesus, and He reached out to heal here without even being
asked. He saw her, seeing not just the obvious
thing, that she could not stand up straight. He saw whatever spirit has been
keeping her life bent. He saw the totality of her suffering: the humiliation of
her ailment, the way it has set her apart into a prison of loneliness. He saw
how other people looked away when she came into their line of vision. He saw
the emotional as well as the physical pain she suffered. He saw the whole
picture, including the fact that she was too timid or too afraid or too hopeless
to ask for healing.
Just as He
saw straight to the heart and mind of the woman, He sees the same things about
each of us. He sees our deepest need, which we at times cannot even see
ourselves. He sees and knows that our anger at other people is so often really
anger at ourselves, and that we're often afraid to look inside ourselves because
we know there's a lot of garbage there that we'd rather not deal with. He sees
that the good front we sometimes put on when we're out in public is often a
cover-up for the hurts we have suffered over the years — the rejections, the
disappointments, the betrayals, the failures, the losses, the fears. He sees
the ugliness inside us — things others have done to us, that we have done to
ourselves, that we have done to others, and that were nobody's fault, but just
happened.
He sees it
all and, just as He did to the bent-over woman, He calls us over to Himself, and
says to us, "Come here to me. Let me put my hands on you and heal you. Let me
take all that is bent and crooked in your life and make it straight and strong.
Let me wipe away all the ugliness inside you." We are sons
and daughters of Abraham, through Jesus our Lord. We are loved without limit,
without reservation, and without condition.
In His grace
and love,
Brown
