On a
Sabbath day, Jesus sets free a woman who was crippled for eighteen years by
Satan (Luke 13:10-11, 16). On a Sabbath day, Jesus says to her, "Woman,
you are loosed" (Luke 13:12). You are free. You are enslaved to your
infirmity no longer. Jesus unties the knots in her back so she again can stand
up straight in his presence. He sets her free from bondage. And He sets us free from bondage.
This is
what Jesus does. He sets his people free (John 8:36). The truth will set you
free and Jesus is the truth – the
way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). He is the word incarnate, truth
himself. And the truth is, it is Jesus that sets us free. It is sin and death,
passions and suffering, addictions and illnesses, powers and principalities
that enslave us. It is Jesus that sets us free.
He does
not come into the world to condemn the world but to save the world (John 3:17).
As we prepare for his coming into the world at Christmas, remember what Gabriel
says to Mary: “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall
call his name Jesus,” for he will save his people from their sins (Luke 1:31;
Matt 1:21). The name Jesus means “the Lord saves” and it’s related to the Hebrew
for “deliverance.”
But some
mischaracterize Jesus as the one who binds us – as an enslaver rather than a
liberator. They say this because Christians try to follow moral laws and keep
the commandments of him whom we love. And they say this because they do not
know what freedom is.
Some think
of freedom as the license to do what they want. They regard the very idea of
sin as judgmentalism. But the truth is that we who are sinners are enslaved to
sin. We quickly discover this when we try and fail by our own power to live
sinlessly. It is possible only by the
grace of God to live sinlessly. Of course, if we don't try at all, we might
think we're free because we're doing just as we like. But we're really only
free if we can make the choice to sin no more. And that is only possible in
Jesus Christ.
This
fasting that we’re doing until Christmas is meant to help free us from our enslavement
to sin. Fasting is a good measure of our freedom from our enslaving passions. Firstly,
it reveals to us how impassioned we really are. Once we start to practice self-control
we quickly learn how out of control we are – how badly we need to rely on the
Lord for strength. Do not fast without prayer. Whatever it is we have freely
chosen to fast from will doubtlessly allure us at some point during our fast,
unless we are fasting from something we don’t want anyway, (in which case, we
should add to our fast something we do want, because fasting should train us to
resist temptation). “By training the
Christian to abstain from sin, [fasting] leads to interior freedom and true joy.”[i] But
how quickly and easily we often find ways to justify breaking our fast. How
clear it is at times that we are enslaved to our desires. We seek freedom from
this enslavement and we find it only in Christ.
There are different kinds of freedom. For example, there is bodily freedom and there is spiritual freedom. And there are two figures in today's gospel who illustrate these two kinds of freedom: the bent over woman and the ruler of the synagogue.
Behold
the woman (Luke 13:11). She is enslaved in body until Christ frees her. But
even though a spirit of infirmity afflicts her body, it does not afflict her
spirit. Behold how she freely attends synagogue on the Sabbath (Luke 13:10-11).
How faithful she is, despite having suffered for so long – for eighteen long
years. This has not crushed her spirit. Her body is bowed down, but even so she
can bow down to the Lord. How frustrating she must be to Satan. He crushes the
bones of her back thinking he can thereby crush her spirit. But no. She has a
freedom he cannot touch, even as he afflicts her body. And her freedom to be
faithful to God, to go anyway to synagogue, despite the pain it obviously
causes her, results in her being in the presence of Jesus, which results in her
healing, and her freedom even in body. Jesus takes away even the little power
that Satan had over her. He frees her totally. He restores totally her true and
free nature.
Because
really we are made for freedom in both body and
spirit. Our nature as God creates it is like God. He made us like himself: free
and holy and immortal – unique, relational, and free, as Fr. Sid Sidor liked to
point out – but by our sins we have clouded this likeness. When we sin, we surrender
our freedom.
And what
likeness to God we have lost through sin, suffering, and death, Christ comes to
restore through his incarnation. Just as
Jesus restores the bent over woman to her true nature, so he is restoring us.
In the
meantime, the bent over woman in the synagogue teaches us that suffering does
not actually keep us from the freedom to which God calls us.
But then
there is the ruler of the synagogue. He is free in body, free to speak to all
those gathered there, and in a position to remonstrate with them loftily. But
he is enslaved in spirit. His bondage is worse than hers. The crippling of her
body did not shackle her mind or heart, but he, whose body is well, is
unlovingly indignant about the Lord’s deliverance of the woman (Luke 13:14).[ii] His passionate regard for the letter of the
law only distracts him from the true spirit of the law, as he criticizes the
people there for seeking healings on the Sabbath. He has forgotten what the
Sabbath really is and what it is for. He has made it more like a rope around
the neck than a hand untying that rope. The Sabbath rest is not meant to burden
God’s people. The Sabbath is a day of freedom – freedom from the drudgery and
toil to which we’ve been enslaved by sin since Adam. It was made to be a day of
rest – “that is, a time of liberation.”[iii] Rest
from extortion and from enslaving others. As Ambrose says, “The Sabbath is… a
day of rest from evil deeds.”[iv] It’s
not a day of rest from mercy or from love. Nor are we to rest from giving drink to the
thirsty or from delivering the afflicted children of God. More than once, Jesus
heals on the Sabbath for this reason. That is what the Sabbath is all about.
Remember
the Jubilee year, the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the year after seven sets of seven
years when all debts were forgiven and all slaves were freed (Leviticus 25).
This is what Jesus is doing on the Sabbath. He is freeing slaves. Those
enslaved to illnesses and infirmities of body he heals. Those enslaved to demons
he delivers. He is our healer, our deliverer, our liberator.
And he
is come to free us today – here and now. True freedom is really available to us
in the present moment – in the here and the now. Though we often think it is
only possible in the future, or even in the hereafter, we have it all wrong.
The bent over woman was already free in the most important way, even though she
and we have to wait for the coming of the Lord for our total liberation, there
was a consoling measure of freedom available to her even in the midst of her
enslavement – a freedom of mind and heart, that all of us can share.
The Lord grants access to this freedom if we will open ourselves to his presence in our lives as through repentance, prayer, fasting, and giving to all.
A version of this article appears on Catholic Exchange.
[i] Christ, Our
Pascha: Catechism of the Ukrainian Catholic Church (Kyiv: Synod of the
Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, 2016), 220.
[ii] Commentary by
Warren Wiersbe
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