Read Luke 13:10-17
ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“No, O people, the LORD has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8, NLT)
When we think of God’s people, we tend to think one of two things. We might think of the Israelites who were God’s “chosen people”, or we might think of specific characters in the Bible. Either way, we tend to idealize the people we are thinking about. For instance, we may think that God’s people are super faithful, holy, perform miracles and live wholly devout and righteous lives. Unfortunately, this idealism enables us to distance ourselves from being God’s people, because we feel that we fall short of those ideals. As such, I have decided to write a devotion series on specific characters in the Bible in order to show you how much these Biblical people are truly like us, and how much we are truly called to be God’s people.
Part 216: Daughter of Abraham. I love this account because it reveals a couple of important things to us about God’s people. First it reveals to us something from the woman who was possessed by a crippling spirit. Second, it reveals something to us about the people who opposed Jesus healing her on the Sabbath. As is the case throughout the Gospels, we see the good, the desperate and the bad reflected to us in all of “God’s people”, and how God responds to each of them.
Let us look at the woman disabled by a “crippling spirit”. She was clearly a woman who would have been shunned. If you can picture her, she was no doubt doubled over in pain. We’ve all seen such people in our communities who are hunched over, twisted and can barely move from place to place. People with severe arthritis and other progressive, disabling diseases. In Jesus time, they had no way of knowing the cause of such a thing, so they assumed that whoever had such diseases must be under God’s curse for one reason or another.
Thus, such a person was seen as being possessed by evil spirits, which are the antithesis of God. What’s more, they were labeled and outcasted as such. In other words, this woman was shunned because she was being defined by her crippling illness. Society around her could not see beyond her illness to the person underneath. All they saw and focused on was the illness. Not so with Jesus, who saw the person whom the illness was afflicting. He saw her for what she was, a daughter of Abraham, one of God’s people. She didn’t even ask him to heal her; rather, he had compassion on her and called out to her and told her that she was healed.
On the flip-side, there was the leader of the synagogue who was indignant at the fact that Jesus healed this woman on the sabbath. He was so focused with the rules, regulations, and laws that he was ignoring the needy people right in front of him. He even began to scold the people coming for help, “’There are six days of the week for working,’ he said to the crowd. ‘Come on those days to be healed, not on the Sabbath’” (Luke 13:14, NLT).
Jesus scolded this man and called him and the other leaders hypocrites because these same men would untie their oxen and donkeys and lead them to the water so they can drink on the Sabbath, but they won’t do so for other human beings who are also made in the image of God and should be treated with compassion, justice, mercy, dignity and respect.
Friends, both of the people are people of God. The religious leader and the the woman disabled from a crippling disease. As such, we can learn from Jesus response to both of them. First, we are not defined by our sins, our diseases, or anything else that we have been afflicted and labeled by; rather, we are defined by Jesus Christ who loves us and has bought us our right to be called Children of God through this suffering, death and resurrection.
Second, people matter to God and, therefore, people ought to matter to us as well. We should never put shun people just because they’re presence is inconvenient or because we see them through the lens of the labels we attribute to them. Today’s challenge is for us to stop labeling others, including ourselves, and to stop allowing our circumstances, diseases, and/or other people from labeling us. The only label we have that is accurate is “child of God.” Christ loves us and calls us to accept that love and to share it with others.
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
“My feeling is that labels are for canned food… I am what I am – and I know what I am.” – Michael StipePRAYER
Lord, help me to see past the labels into who people actually are. Amen.