Nelson Mandela has been back in the news lately. The world has held its breath, waiting to hear whether this is the time for him to die or to survive a little longer as a symbol of human freedom from oppression. Inevitably, we have heard again the famous words with which he concluded his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom:
Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me. It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed … I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity … For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
A recollection of those words recharged my interest in today’s Gospel reading from Luke chapter 13. The story had seemed on the surface to be one more presentation of Jesus the healer – suitable for a Sunday School hour but hardly an engaging sermon theme. And then the undercurrents of the account gripped me. In the instant of re-reading Mandela’s inspired words I realised that the Gospel story was an encounter between Jesus, the woman and the synagogue leader about freedom.
Like Mandela, they each lived in a world where oppressed and oppressor alike were robbed of their humanity. Luke’s urgency for his first-century readers was that freedom is not merely casting off one’s chains, but living in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. ‘Liberty to the captives … and letting the oppressed go free’ was his theme summary of Jesus’ teaching. This drives the contrasts of woman and synagogue leader to the centre of a story about reaching beyond limiting social and religious controls.
Work often places us in such an environment of struggle for role and respect. A University of Florida study highlights ‘conflicting needs, conflicting styles, conflicting perceptions, conflicting goals, conflicting pressures, conflicting roles, different personal values and unpredictable policies’ that mark all too many workplaces. In that situation, the contending feel robbed of their humanity. I recall such situations as our team tried to create ‘an arena for creative conflict … protected by the compassionate fabric of human caring.’ And that is essentially Mandela’s challenge about living and working in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Every day the media presents us with conflicting decisions about oppressed and oppressor – prisoner and legal system, societal changes over marriage laws, refugee advocacy, gender and sexuality debates. We live in a rapidly changing religious and secular landscape. Too often we are faced with ‘a judgement based on a stereotype and style differences’. Given time we need to ‘build … trusting relationship where each generation brings ahead their potentials and works towards the common goal’.
All this is evident in the New Testament accounts of first century living. Luke wrote to a first century Christian movement already living in crisis with Roman law and with traditions that many found unacceptable in their new faith environment. So, Paul, Luke’s mission companion, needed to remind these same communities about law and grace – that to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The teaching focuses on a communal generosity that is ‘patient and kind, does not dishonour others, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs, always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres’ (1 Corinthians 13: 4-7). It respects and enhances the freedom of others.
To read Luke’s story accurately we need to be serious about the traditional role of the synagogue leader. He stood for every substantial value in ancient Jewish society. He was the politician that stood by his party’s traditional values: he understood the social norms that balanced personal freedom with civic restriction: he could relate the legal framework based on tradition and common law to everyday morals and behaviour. The synagogue leader reminded the community of its traditions and its history. He held it to account when it was forgetful of battles fought and won at great cost. His concerns were grounded in legendary conflict with lives sacrificed to achieve nationhood.
Every Sabbath he led the congregational celebration of Israel’s long and lonely years in the struggle against Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman oppression. His prayers reflected a hunger for the freedom of [his] own people. There were days when he and the wider community remembered the sons of the Maccabees who had rebelled against their Greek oppressors only to be massacred on a Sabbath day as martyrs for national freedom.
Today, as we read Psalm 80, we joined with ancient Israel in the refrain: Restore us, O Lord of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved. We linked voices across two and a half thousand years to praise the author of our common life (‘enthroned upon the cherubim’). In the terrifying years that scarred a nation’s memory, Sabbath observance was a mark of solidarity with Israel’s past, with ‘freedom’ the note of every song and prayer.
And then you enter the story. Like the woman of this account, we are not nameless intruders. Even if sometimes we had stumbled into a Christian community, we were there as she was, daughters and sons of Abraham (verse 16). Jew and Gentile, slave and free, woman and man, gay and straight are held in the embrace of one greater than all our differences. The Sabbath then was the promise of acceptance and inheritance – and none are excluded. The Sabbath was the woman’s sign of her inclusion.
I need to press this point with you and could find no more urgent way than from these words of a contemporary rabbi on the way his autistic son had offered him the gift of Sabbath understanding:
Our worth is not what we do; it is that we are. What is precious is simply that being ourselves, we bring something precious into the world. We don’t have to earn God’s love, and we don’t have to earn each other’s. Each of us is infinitely precious being ourselves and we need to acknowledge that – a gift from my son. The Talmud teaches us … God wants only the heart. And if we have heart, we have everything and if we don’t have heart, no degree, no income, no wealth and fame can compensate for its lack.
This is something our children teach us. They challenge our prejudices and question our traditions; they make us change our minds over the most fundamental of life’s questions. Their difference can teach us more about love and acceptance.
The woman in the Gospel story had for eighteen years lived with arthritis or osteoporosis. This had so weakened her bones that she could do no more than watch the sandaled feet pass her by. The pain of looking up or around her would have been immense and so coming to synagogue or going to market would have been associated with huge pain. In her world, her disease was seen as the mark of Satan and so she every day she would have experienced acute depression and isolation from others (compare Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Report).
The woman in the story had not come to synagogue expecting miracles – she simply hoped to be accepted for who she was. Despite the way we often read this text, the miracle that took place was within her. You and I today read the traditional prayers and sing the expected songs. All of us are probably doing our best to face this hour together with honesty and maybe an expectation that the day or the week ahead will be a little less stressed. Miracles are our least expectation.
Jesus noticed the woman and said to her ‘you have been loosed from what is weakening you’. Jesus said nothing to her about healing: that definition came from the lips of the synagogue leader. Even if the body had responded, Jesus’ interest was that within she was ‘spirit driven’. The woman though bound by her disability had within her the capacity to be loosed from her inner bondage.
Jesus, the rabbi and the woman each brought their own difference to this Sabbath celebration, linked only by the historic theme of freedom from oppression. The conversation between them was that to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
At this point you realise that Luke has not been writing a biography of Jesus. Instead the event had a present meaning Christians struggling with the limitations of law and grace: where does one end and the other begin? Does grace free us from the confines of rule and regulation? On what basis do we accept Roman civil authority and pay taxes. These were their questions.
We face those to some extent still. But there are fresh issues that engage our energies. Is there a place among us for acceptance of gay marriage and gay people? How do we manage to shape ethical considerations around the rapidly changing discoveries of science? On this day of Sabbath reflection, the very centre of our Anglican Christian tradition, demands that we become open to a freedom that is indivisible. How, at this moment, can we pledge ourselves to embrace what we fear most: the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.
I want to belong to a church able to embrace difference and hold as its central truth the words ‘you are accepted’. I need a church that will encourage me to hold hands across ethnic, cultural and gender difference and where being ‘gay or straight’ is not critical to acceptance. I need a liturgy shaped by an ethic that I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me … For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
A Meditation Homily based on the Gospel reading for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Luke 13: 10-17.
24 August 2013