Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath. And a woman
was there who for eighteen years had been crippled by a spirit; she was bent
over, completely incapable of standing erect. When Jesus saw her, he called to
her and said, "Woman, you are set free of your infirmity." He laid
his hands on her, and she at once stood up straight and glorified God. But the
leader of the synagogue, indignant that Jesus had cured on the sabbath, said to
the crowd in reply, "There are six days when work should be done. Come on
those days to be cured, not on the sabbath day." The Lord said to him in
reply, "Hypocrites! Does not each one of you on the sabbath untie his ox
or his ass from the manger and lead it out for watering? This daughter of
Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now, ought she not to have
been set free on the sabbath day from this bondage?" When he said this,
all his adversaries were humiliated; and the whole crowd rejoiced at all the
splendid deeds done by him. (Luke 13:10-17)
Introductory Prayer: Lord, I believe in you with a faith that never seeks to test
you. I trust in you, hoping to learn to accept and follow your will, even when
it does not make sense to the way that I see things. May my love for you and
those around me be similar to the love you have shown to me.
Petition: Lord, protect me
from spiritual old age.
1. Jesus Is Showing
his Messiah Credentials Again: Jesus’ opponents were desperate. They didn’t
want to believe that he was the Messiah, and they especially didn’t want anyone
else to think he was the Messiah. But there was the pesky problem of his
miracles. They knew that when God sent someone to speak for him, he usually
performed signs through the person so that people would believe in him. The
sign was proof that the person (Jesus in this case) was sent by God. Jesus was
doing plenty of miracles, which most people were taking as the sign that he was
sent by God. What could Jesus’ opponents do? They could only try to discredit
the miracles any way possible.
2. You Can Do a Lot
More than You Think on the Sabbath: This miracle was done on the Sabbath.
The head of the synagogue had a problem with that. Didn’t God himself rest on
the sixth day? Oughtn’t we to do the same? How does this Jesus heal on the
Sabbath if he is truly from God? In fact, there were many exceptions to the
rules about the Sabbath. In another place, Jesus himself says that the Sabbath
is made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). Certainly, the observance
of the Sabbath was always subject to the practice of charity, that it was
always permissible to break the Sabbath rest in the case when needed to do some
necessary act of charity for another. Jesus mentions situations when for
practical reasons (necessary farm chores, like watering animals) work can be
done without breaking the Sabbath rest.
3. Lord, Please Let
me Keep my Mediocrity: And so, there is really nothing to the objection.
The head of the synagogue does not want to believe because what Jesus says and
does seems threatening to him. If Jesus is the Messiah, he foresees having to
change his life, and he does not want to do that. He may not even realize that
this is his real objection, but it is. We can be this way, too. We don’t want
to accept something Jesus teaches us through his Church because it would mean
that we have to change our lives, and we don’t want to. We are comfortable the
way we are. If we had to do what Jesus asks, it would take us out of our
comfort zone. Sometimes it is mere fear of something different. Jesus always is
offering us something different, but we don’t want it. We want to stay in our
rut. We have surrounded ourselves with limited horizons and are afraid to
stretch them.
Conversation with Christ:
Dear Jesus, help me to accept you fully. If I
am rejecting you or your teaching without realizing it, show me. Help me to
overcome my attempt to construct my own little universe in which I am God. If I
have grown old spiritually, renew my youth and help me break through my
restricted, shrunken horizons that exclude you.
Resolution: Where in my life have I settled into spiritual routine and old
age? Do I habitually skip some prayer I should be saying, telling myself it
isn’t that important? I will make an extra effort to pray it today. Is there
some other aspect of my spiritual or moral life that I have removed to make
life “more comfortable” for me? Time to start doing it again!
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