Curved In

Scripture: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 21), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I love the imagery in this morning’s Gospel reading. Jesus is teaching at one of the synagogues on the sabbath day, when He sees a woman permanently stooped over, unable to stand up straight for 18 long years. He calls her over, proclaims her liberated from this chronic ailment, and lays His hands upon her. Immediately she straightens up to her full height and praises God with joy.

A call, a promise, a touch—and she is made whole. She is made strong, made new, made herself again, unfurling like a flower reaching up to the sun. You can almost hear her spine crack luxuriously all the way from hip to head, the vertebrae clicking one-by-one back into their rightful places, a rush of relief and ecstasy that can only be expressed in spontaneous adoration of her Creator and Redeemer. It flows up her back and out of her in laughter and in tears.

This is what Jesus does. He straightens us out. He raises us to our full height. He makes us whole again, not transforming us into something alien to ourselves but returning to us our true nature, our intended glory in God. He makes us what we were always meant to be: healthy, whole, immersed in praise. The early Church described the state of sin as being incurvatus in se, “curved in on oneself.” It reminds me of when my children leave plastic bins upturned in the fields around our house. I pick them up when I mow, only to find that the grass underneath has become sickly and pale, curved back in on itself, growing in aimless circles, unable to find the sun.

That’s what we are like in our sin. Surrounded by God, surrounded by the superabundance of Goodness and Truth and Beauty, we have nowhere we can go to escape the Light other than back within ourselves, curving inward, bending in. We’re like flowers trying to escape the sun. And so are the demons, by the way. Poor things. They are but shadows now, fleeing before the Light. And where can they go, where can they escape the omnipresent glare of God’s repellent Goodness and Truth? Why, nowhere. The devils have no shelter, no place at all to rest—save perhaps in us. In our twisted-inward heads.

Jesus is what we were meant to be. He is the perfect fusion of God and Man, indivisible and unconfused, doing the will of His Father in Heaven not because He must but because the will of the Father is everlasting life and love and joy for all of us. Jesus is the perfect human being, the New Adam. He has come not to turn us into something different but to renew within us something very old: the harmony, the purity, the ecstasy of being fully human. We were built to be the stewards of God’s Creation, a living bridge between the spiritual and physical realms.

We have forgotten that. We’ve forgotten who we truly are. Jesus comes to open us back up, to straighten us to our own full height. A call, a promise, a touch is all it takes to crack open our shell, to let in just a little Light, that we start to unfurl, that we begin to remember who we are, and return our voices to their rightful chorus within the music of all Creation. What made Eden a paradise is that Man walked with God in the Garden: God, Man, World, all together, all as one. Human beings participated in the primordial rhythms of Creation, pouring out the life and love of God into the world, lifting up the praise and adoration of all Creation back to the Creator.

The first sin was to reject our proper selves. Not satisfied with being freely and fully human, we tried to become our own gods. We curved in on ourselves. And with that bridge undone, with that harmony jarringly disrupted, we broke ourselves. We broke the world. And we have continued to do so every day since. But in Christ, God has come to heal the chasm torn open by sin. He has come to restore us to our rightful place, restore Creation to its original beauty. He has poured out His life for us on the Cross, that we might be reborn as children of God, reclaiming our inheritance, reclaiming who we truly are in Christ Jesus.

We are all like the woman in today’s Gospel text, bent over, curved in. Which is not to say that she has somehow earned her brokenness or brought this suffering upon herself! A wicked spirit afflicts her, it says, a spirit opposed to the will of God. Jesus calls her, promises her, touches her. But before all that He sees her: sees a bent over woman who cannot lift her head above the crowd; sees the sort of person whom the rest of us have trained ourselves not to see. And He says, “You hypocrites! Satan has bound this woman for 18 years! The sabbath proclaims her liberation!”

Interesting that He blames her oppression on Satan, is it not? We, with our advanced medical knowledge, might blame her stoop on osteoporosis or other natural causes. But Jesus doesn’t say that she is merely wounded by Satan or crippled by Satan; He says that she is oppressed by Satan. And Satan, mind you, is the Adversary, the Accuser. He is the spirit of pride, of selfishness, of arrogance and lies. He whispers ever in our ears, “What about me? What’s in it for me?” What oppresses this woman is not simply her twisted back. What oppresses this woman is the way that all the rest of us treat her because of her twisted back.

We ignore her. We do not see her. We are too curved in upon ourselves to notice or to care. Think about it. If she suffered from a physical ailment, that would be bad enough. But imagine people respectfully deferring to her. Imagine them moving her to the front of the crowd, giving her a place of honor in the synagogue. Imagine everyone caring for this woman in a manner not patronizing but respectful, showing to her a love not self-aggrandizing but self-giving. How much more bearable would her sufferings then be, if in the midst of her difficulties she were adored rather than ignored, supported rather than isolated, uplifted rather than forgotten!

Imagine how much healthier, how whole she would be, if we would only see her. As Jesus sees her.

So, yes, Jesus returns to her freedom and health and dignity. I daresay there is no ecstasy greater than the return to natural function after a long ailment. But in straightening out her spine, Jesus also straightens out the souls of all those around her. He makes them see her, truly see her, as He first saw her lost in the crowd. He reveals just how stooped over, how curved in upon ourselves, we all are. And in so doing, He offers to everyone in that synagogue, and to everyone hearing this text, a ray of true Light, a ray of Beauty and Truth and Goodness that reveals just how sad and sickly our darkness is. Roused from our slumber we begin now to turn toward that Light, and so to straighten ourselves out, to stand up tall, reaching upward, reaching outward, rather than curving back within.

Recall the words of the prophet Isaiah this morning: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach.”

He sees us; He calls to us; He promises us; and He lays His hands upon us. He comes to us in the Holy Scriptures, which ever point beyond themselves to God. He comes to us in the Sacraments of the Church, which renew and remake us, drowning us in our sin and raising us to new life in Christ. And He comes to us in our neighbor, in the needs of our communities, in the poor and oppressed weighed down more by our indifference than by their own pains. And He whispers in our ear a tune we used to know, a memory long forgotten, a glory left far behind.

And He says to each and every one of us on this sabbath day, “My daughter, today you are set free.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.