H. Michael Brewer
Crescent Springs Presbyterian Church
4 March 2007
THE STOOPED WOMAN
Luke 13:10-17
The healing of the stooped woman is a simple story on the face of it. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue
one Sabbath and a woman comes in who has been crippled in a bent-over posture for eighteen years. Jesus
calls her over, makes her well, and she stands up straight. When the leader of the synagogue objects that
Jesus shouldn’t be healing on the Sabbath, Jesus replies that since the law allows us to unbind our animals
on the Sabbath so that they may not suffer from thirst, surely it is right on the Sabbath to unbind this poor
woman from her years of suffering.
And what a terrible suffering it was: to be bent over, perpetually stooped, unable to stand up straight,
unable to lift her eyes from the ground, unable to meet other people face to face. Luke says that she had a
“spirit of infirmity” and that “Satan had bound her” for eighteen years. Given the thinking of those days, she
may have been afflicted with crippling arthritis or spinal curvature or even some kind of psychological disorder.
It hardly matters. There are so many things that weigh us down, leave us bent and stooped over. The
burdens that oppress you may be entirely different from the worries that weigh me down, but my burdens are
just as real to me as yours are to you.
Could be family turmoil. Money problems. Maybe it’s poor health. Or a job that demands sixty hours of
work in a forty hour week. Or maybe you wish you had just any job at all. Sometimes what breaks our backs is
unfairness: the kind of unfairness that says to a capable young woman, “Sorry, but you’re not going any further
in this company.” Maybe you’re bent double from carrying around a load of resentment and anger, or guilt, or
grief. Could be almost anything.
I’ll bet you can see something of yourself in the bent woman. At least some of the time I’ll bet you know
how it feels to be so beaten down and crushed that you can’t even stand up straight any more. What this story
says to me is that whatever you’ve got on your back, Christ can help. Start there. Begin with the conviction that
Christ hates human suffering, that Christ wants you to be able to stand up straight, that Christ is calling you to
draw near so that he can make a difference.
Help is available for you and a strength that is sufficient for your needs. How will Christ help us? Who
knows? Sometimes there is a change in the circumstances that have oppressed us. Money arrives
unexpectedly or someone gets well contrary to all medical expectations. In such moments the eyes of faith
may discern the hand of God.
But not every problem is going to go away. Sometimes the help of Christ comes inwardly, not to lift our
burdens, but to strengthen us to stand up straight even beneath our burdens.
Usually, it’s not our problems that weigh us down; it’s our reaction to those problems. That’s what gets us
down. I’m not trying to feed you pop psychology in the guise of the gospel. Rather I’m trying to put in 20th
century words what I believe is a Biblical teaching. Namely, that inward, intangible things like faith and hope
and trust in God, and a reliance upon the Holy Spirit, can make a profound difference in how we experience
life.
Did you notice that Jesus lays his hands on the woman in order to heal her? Jesus didn’t have to do that.
He often healed people with a mere word. I think he touches the woman in order to help her believe that she’s
about to get well. Faith plays a part in the healings of Jesus. Christ invites us into a partnership of healing and
growing. Our faith or despair makes a difference in our lives.
In one of his books Father John Powell tells a story about the day his car broke down while he was driving
to work on a busy interstate. No one would stop. He felt utterly helpless, frustrated, angry. He took his life in
his hands and sprinted across the highway, had to climb a fence and scale a muddy slope, in order to reach
a service station. By the time he got to work he was a basket case, his nerves were shot, his day was ruined.
He walked into his office and before he could say a word about his harrowing experience, his secretary
said, “You’ll never guess what happened to me this morning. On the way to work my car stopped. And do you
know what I did? I dodged cars and crossed the expressway on foot. I climbed over a fence in a skirt. I hiked
through a field with weeds over my head. And I found a phone booth and I called a tow truck. And I feel so alive
this morning! That was such an invigorating experience. I think I can handle anything that comes along today!”
Powell says he decided not to tell his secretary about his car trouble.
What is it that makes the difference? What is it that determines whether a broken down car is a nerve
jangling catastrophe or an invigorating adventure? I’ve done a bit of studying about how people react to a
personal disaster. Basically it seems that people fall into two groups: victims and survivors. Victims
concentrate all their thinking and their feelings on what they’ve lost, what they can’t change, what they can’t do.
Survivors concentrate on what they have left, what they can change, what they can still do. Whatever it is that
makes that difference between a victim and a survivor, it comes from in here.
The other day at a stop sign a woman cut in front of me. I was waiting for this big tractor trailer to ease
through the intersection before I pulled out, but this woman behind the truck just followed him through and
ignored me sitting over there. That’s the sort of thing that doubles my blood pressure in about five seconds.
I follow the woman and I’m plotting my revenge. As soon as there’s an opening, I’m going to swing around
this woman, cut in front of her, and get my place back. Within 100 yards the woman turns into a gas station,
and there I am back in my rightful place behind the truck which is chugging along about eight miles an hour.
In fact, it made absolutely no difference that this woman took my turn at the stop sign. I wasn’t in a hurry. I
didn’t arrive anywhere late. And it’s not such an honor to breathe diesel fumes behind a crawling truck. So why
did I get all bent over this trivial episode?
You’d have to say it was my choice, wouldn’t you? We decide how we’re going to look at the world, how we’
re going to act and react. We make choices, we cultivate habits, we grow attitudes, and often it is our own
choices, habits, and attitudes that weigh us down.
I’ll be the first to admit that losing your temper at a stop sign is a trivial example, but I’ve seen the same
principle at work in situations that were anything but trivial. I’ve seen people decide how they’re going to
handle big things: blindness, chronic pain, being alone for good... And what I have seen is that some people
react to tragedy in such a way that they end up bent and broken for life, and other people by the grace of God,
with the help of Christ, choose to stand up straight and go on living.
I don’t say that’s easy. We need God’s help, we need the touch of Christ, whether inwardly or outwardly,
precisely because it’s not easy to unburden ourselves, to stand up straight when it feels like the weight of the
world is on your shoulders. No, it’s not easy, but with God nothing is impossible.
Once there was this poor woman, all bent over and stooped. She’d been like that for eighteen years. Had
she given up? Well, she was in the synagogue, so it seems she hadn’t given up on God. Had she come
seeking help from Jesus? We cannot know. But when Jesus beckoned, she came, she trusted, and she
stood up straight. We know that much. The Lord didn’t erase all of her problems, but she did stand up straight
from day on.
This all happened once upon a time to a bent woman, and it still happens to bent people, crushed
people, over-burdened people who encounter the living Christ. It could even happen to you or me.
Soli Deo Gloria!