August 24, 2025
Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
The context of the story we read today from Luke 13, about the woman healed on the Sabbath, is that Jesus is on his journey to Jerusalem. This began with Luke 9:51. “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
As he travels with his disciples, he teaches and tells many parables, he heals people and casts out demons, he visits Martha and Mary, he denounces the Pharisees and lawyers. The crowd of people following him grows to thousands.
And we, too, are following Jesus on his journey, through the Sunday gospel readings this summer. We’ve heard some of these stories over the past several weeks.
Chapter 13 highlights the mounting opposition to Jesus, even as he warns of Jerusalem’s future desolation. The first verses of this chapter refer to two tragic events.
First: Apparently, soldiers of Pontius Pilate had killed a number of Galilean Jews – they might have been Zealots, who were active and sometimes violent resisters of the Roman rule, and therefore could have been targeted. They were killed in the Temple, while worshiping and offering a sacrifice. That would be an animal sacrifice, and at the beginning of Chapter 13 Jesus is told that Pilate had mixed the blood of the victims with the blood of their sacrifice.This massacre would be an unthinkably gross form of blasphemy, and it was the kind of incident that inflamed the Jews’ hatred of Rome, finally leading to rebellion and the destruction of the Temple in the year 70.
The second event, recounted by Jesus in Luke 13:4, was the collapse of a tower at the well-known pool of Siloam, an area at the south end of the lower city of Jerusalem. Eighteen people were killed when the tower fell.
The question Jesus answers is unspoken, but I’m guessing it’s on the minds of mainly the Pharisees. The question is, What is the relationship between calamity and sin? Were these people who died worse sinners than others? I hear a deeper question underneath: Awful things are happening. Our land is occupied by an evil regime. What are we do?
Can you relate? I certainly can. When we come together on Sundays for worship, and in our mission groups and other ministries, we pray and lament the daily news, which comes in wave after wave, too strong and unrelenting to stand, like an endless tsunami. Everything is challenging, everything is exhausting.
And it isn’t only the events in this nation and throughout the world. Things hves been changing at such a fast pace over the past several years, and we’re feeling the impact – personally and collectively, in our families and homes and neighborhoods, the places where we work and volunteer, and in the community of Seekers Church.
What we feel is that we are losing our path, that what we’re moving toward is crumbling in front of us. And our conscious mind is not understanding this, is frustrated and maybe angry. Our ego wants to hold on, thinks that things should work – why do they no longer work?
In Jesus’ time, the Pharisees were a prominent religious and political group within Judaism. They were known for their strict adherence to Jewish law and tradition, both written and oral. They were mostly middle-class businessmen and leaders of the synagogues. Some of the early Christians were Pharisees, as we read in Acts 15:5. And in Acts 26:5, the apostle Paul, defending his Jewish credentials, says, “I have belonged to the strictest sect of our religion and lived as a Pharisee.”
So it’s not hard to imagine that the Pharisees, who are supposed to be in charge of things, would be reeling from the situation in Judea, feeling helpless and hopeless, and reacting with determination to control whatever they can.
They are the rule-keepers; the path they are on, and desperately want to shore up and preserve, is the Jewish law and tradition.
What is our reaction when we are confused and think that everything, including ourselves, is falling apart? There is no security, so our nervous system is freaking out. Some of us, like the Pharisees – and I’m speaking for myself – try to control things, mostly ourselves, because we think we can. We try to do all the right things, to follow strictlly the path we know, to be perfect, at least in some area of our life.
My inner Pharisee is very energetic and loud. Whenever I’m feeling anxious – that is, most of the time – she doubles down on rules enforcement. Many of my personal rules involve prayer, especially intercessory prayers for others – individuals, groups of people, several pets, and other creatures, and trees and other life forms, when I remember. I pray for certain persons and group at set times of the day and week. Don’t worry, you’re included. I know that my prayers are much more about my obsessive-compulsive disorder than any sense of connection or communication with the divine. The prayers are my way of keeping my mind focused on the good – I do truly wish others well – instead of pulling me down into my brattiest teenage self.
Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, has had some encounters with Parisees. He has broken laws, or at least customs, such as not washing his hands before dinner at a Pharisee’s house. And he has been direct and strong in his criticism: “Woe to you Pharisees!” he says in Luke 11. Jesus is not well liked by the Pharisees, with good reason.
Now, Jesus is in a town or village on the Sabbath day, teaching in the synagogue. It’s interesting that, in this story of healing, the woman in need doesn’t approach him. Jesus sees her and calls her over, and simply announces her healing: “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” Then he lays his hands on her and she stands up straight and begins to praise God. The Greek verb is in the imperfect tense, meaning that she keeps on glorifying God; she doesn’t stop.
The woman praises and celebrates, maybe singing Psalms like the 103rd: “Bless the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise God’s holy name.” While she is singing for all to hear, the Pharisee in charge of the synagogue shouts – not at Jesus, the target of his anger – but at the woman who received this amazing gift, and at the other people there, who no doubt would want the same gift if they had such a need. The Pharisee indignantly tells them to come for their healing on a workday, for goodness’ sake.
Then Jesus speaks directly to him and others like him: “You hypocrites! Every one of you would set your ox or donkey free to get a drink of water on the Sabbath. Shouldn’t this woman, a daughter of Abraham and Sarah, be freed from bondage?” At the end of the story we’re told that “all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things he was doing.”
The woman bent over, imprisoned by her body, for eighteen years, who could not raise her head – she wasn’t looking for healing that day. She probably wasn’t thinking of herself at all. She just kept going, doing the next right thing for her, showing up at the synagogue to worship her God.
I see this as an example of trust, and trust as being open and free – not trust that something will happen, but trust in. Trust in ourselves, and in something bigger than ourselves. Trust in the presence of the Holy One, in the Way of Jesus, in the movement of the Holy Spirit.
When we feel we are losing our path, maybe it’s so that we can find the path that is true now. Maybe we are invited to let go, to release what is actually no longer in alignment with who we are now, as individuals and as members of the Body of Christ. This challenge can come with big feelings – a sense of loss, grief, and confusion.
Our invitation is to trust in whatever we are meant to be going toward now. Trust in our deeper knowing, our soul, who already understands and knows what we need to release. Sometimes we need to fall apart so that we can come into a new version of ourselves that is more more resonant with our true self. Not that we try to do it perfectly and control it, but rather that we dig a little deeper: what is actually serving, and what is no longer serving?
What do I need to release, or to work through? Where do I need to set better boundaries around giving, receiving, sharing? And what brings me clarity within all of this confusion?
I leave you with a blessing written by Kate Bowler, from her book The Lives We Actually Have.
for when you need to hold on or let go
God, sometimes it feels like a better person wouldn’t be like this:
tethered to so many hopes,
and fears, and expectations.
Blessed are we pulled between wanting to let go
–sometimes needing to let go–and also needing to hold on.
. . .
Blessed are we when we are unable to say,
“I’m letting it go.”
Because we feel like we will be washed away into an ocean of nothingness.
Teach us to cling to the truths that enlivfen our spirits,
and loosen our grip on the painful untruths:
like the one that says we are alone, or unlovable.
Or that desire itself is the enemy.
Teach us to hunger for what is good, and be filled.
There will be no easy addition and subtraction.
We will lose and we will gain,
and almost none of it will make much sense at the time,
and it will force our hands open.
In the ebb and flow of wins and losses, comings and goings,
may we look for the divine in the mystery of it all,
the stubbornness of flowers that still smile at us in the grocery store,
and the need for endless small reminders
that the pain of it all, the comedy of it all,
will point us back to love.
The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days, by Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie (New York: Convergent Books, 2023), pp. 178-9.