Anthony: Let’s move on to our next passage, which is Luke 13:10 – 17. It is the Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 16 in Ordinary Time, which is August 21.

Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. ¹¹ And there was a woman who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a Spirit; and she was bent over double, and could not straighten up at all. ¹² When Jesus saw her, He called her over and said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your sickness.” ¹³ And He laid His hands on her; and immediately she stood up straight again, and began glorifying God. ¹⁴ But the synagogue leader, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, began saying to the crowd in response, “There are six days during which work should be done; so come during them and get healed, and not on the Sabbath day.” ¹⁵ But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites, does each of you on the Sabbath not untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it away to water it? ¹⁶ And this woman, a daughter of Abraham as she is, whom Satan has bound for eighteen long years, should she not have been released from this restraint on the Sabbath day?” ¹⁷ And as He said this, all His opponents were being humiliated; and the entire crowd was rejoicing over all the glorious things being done by Him.

In his effort to be right, lawfully, it seems—it doesn’t just seem—the synagogue leader is getting it all wrong, Chris.

So, my question for you is this, is there something for us to think about? Any parallels to maybe how believers are acting today? How might we, in an effort to be right, be getting it wrong?

Chris: This is only an hour-long podcast.

Anthony: Loaded question, sir.

Chris: Reading this, I thought about a poem by a Jewish poet. Yehuda Amichai wrote a poem called, “The Place Where We Are Right.” He says, “From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring. The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.”

And so, I just love that poem, and I love that poem how it sparks off of this passage, because in your question you ask how they are trying to be right.

And in some ways, that’s really commendable to try to be right. I think Pharisees, synagogue leaders, the people who often directly encounter and serve as foils to Jesus, I think most church people have way more in common with them than Jesus in our impulses and practices.

So first off, maybe that’s one thing we should get used to being in that role of the story and being encountered by Jesus in a way that reminds us that we’re not just not always right, but often not right.

But I love that poem because it reminds us that where we are right, where we circle the wagons, where we just stay in one place, we trample the ground so much that nothing can ever grow—no flowers in the spring. That is hard and trampled like a yard instead of churned up and verdant like a garden.

I think that this is our camel / needle for American Christians—to be that sort of people, that it’s really hard for us to be, not just right, but righteous, to be just, to be true.

Whenever I read to be right, I think of the etymology of righteousness in the Bible, dikaiosunē in the Greek. I think to get a fuller picture, or a more rounded version of what that means, it’s not just like some sort of static rightness, but it is this really dynamic deliverance.

When God is righteous, it is fundamentally liberative. This is Paul’s, “You are now free to be free.” Like, you are free for freedom. You are righteous for the sake of something. And so, in this passage, they have good concerns about being righteous and being right about the Sabbath. Sabbath is so important. Ceasing to be with God is really important. It’s one of the things that constitutes a whole people.

But in their ceasing, they’ve lost an imagination for how that they can still take up and embrace. They can cease and embrace all in the same space and at the same time. Their righteousness and our righteousness have to be more concerned and bound up with God’s liberative work than our rightness. We need to find freedom in that.

Anthony: Yeah, I’ve heard you use the word imagination three or four times. And in thinking about this pericope and sacred prophetic imagination, I think one of the things that stunts our imagination is dualism, where it’s just either/or. It’s this or that. And you see it all over American society right now.

You’re either on this side or that side, and it doesn’t give us the space to humbly learn and to move more rightly into liberation by the Spirit. I just think in asking that question, how we may we be right, but all wrong—boy, you’re right! We could spend days talking through that, don’t you think?

Chris: Yeah. And to go back to the poem and he says, “But doubts and loves, dig up the world, like a mole, a plow.” The doubts and loves.

So, something that finds us that we don’t necessarily welcome, like doubt, and something so basic to us, like our loves or desires, the way that we are oriented to the world, dig up the world, like a mole, or like a plow, like a pest, or like something that we set our hands to and intend.

And the way out of this sort of hardness of heart, (I think of like Pharaoh or name your local politician, right?) that an antidote to that is, doubts and loves that dig up the world, like a mole, a plow.

Anthony: So, this woman that has been identified had been living with an infliction for 18 years, and Jesus spoke words of life.

He was the embodiment of life. He touched her with a healing embrace that ultimately would change her life. I’m curious, in what ways can we actively participate in that healing ministry of Jesus by the Spirit?

Chris: I mentioned how, when we started the church, how we embraced and were named by the Isaiah’s 61 text, and to put some handles and watch words around that, we came up with [and] we extracted: hope, healing, and hospitality in Christ. And those seemed to sum up some of the prophetic vision of Isaiah and in the words of Jesus.

And I think the middle one—healing—was the most kind of uncanny thing for us to try to get our heads around, because what do you mean you are a healing church? Not that kind of church, right? But over the years (and this hasn’t happened automatically and sometimes it happens in spite of us), but we live in a really transient area that a lot of people come here for a little time for grad school and then leave.

And you’ll touch base with people, or they’ll send you an email, or around church homecomings and anniversaries, you make contact with people you hadn’t heard from in a while or who have some distance from you. And we’re getting a lot of people saying, being at Oak Church was really healing for me, and people using that language.

And it’s been interesting that has happened and is happening. And we’re trying to figure out how God is doing that. And so, I think part of that is making space and being responsive, and trying to cultivate a church culture where things can be different.

Like this lady comes to Jesus, probably not with a whole lot of an imagination, maybe just a little spark of an imagination for how an 18-year-old sickness can be changed. She had enough of an imagination to come to Jesus, but I’m not even sure she knew how her life could be different. If something has been happening in your life for 18 years, that is like deeply woven into who you are.

And so having a little bit of an imagination, even if it’s a really open-ended imagination for how God is going to work and then having a patience and an urgency to bring about that newness.

In the passage, I think it’s significant that Jesus spoke freedom to her, and then he touched her. There was a word and a deed happening there, and it brought about her worship and her health.

You have word and flesh; there’s a declaration and there’s a follow-through. And it happens in a mode of direct presence and intimacy. I think our encounters with Jesus still happen this way, through an encounter with the word and through really regular hands and feet—that we recognize sometimes they’re even our own hands and feet for others.

Anthony: Yeah. Proximity begets compassion. Doesn’t it? There’s something about seeing the need and being present to witness it that is so powerful. And I really appreciated your insight about her imagination and probably it not being vivid to what could happen.

And isn’t that the way it is? It’s like music. I have heard somebody say, it’s the one thing that can get to your heart without your permission. It just does.

Chris: We don’t have ear lids; we have eyelids, but we don’t have ear lids.

Anthony: Yeah. And I think healing can show up in surprising ways like that. And we know he is Jehovah-Rapha; he’s the healer. Yet we don’t dehumanize ourselves to think that we can’t participate in some very tangible way.

I think it was Bart talked about how theology should always lead to doxology. In other words, if we’re doing the good work of theology and we don’t end up praising God, we’re doing something wrong.

I’m struck by the church people of the day missing the miracle if they’re not praising God in their desire to be right. Maybe I’m reworking the same question, but is there anything else you want to touch on and what this can teach us?

Chris: Yeah, I think awareness of God’s work comes via testimony, and I think that’s a hard thing for sophisticated modern people like us to learn how to do—to talk about unwieldy and mysterious things of God with passion and gratefulness without sounding like lunatics, and sometimes you can’t help it.

But I’ve learned a lot about this with my kids in the last decade—swimming against this disenchanting tide in order to re-enchant the world. Not that we’re doing anything, but rather we’re learning to notice and expect and narrate what God is already doing. I want them to have a vivid imagination for how God is working without leaning on tired religious speech that’s empty. I’ve been trying to really discipline myself with a certain way of talking, with a certain expectation. So, when they come to me with a paper cut, we talk about how God will heal them; we ask God to heal them.

Less we forget in our forgetfulness that that healing is somehow natural or that it’s not a gift from God, no matter how minute or how normal it seems. How can we expect God to arrive, to act, to intervene in big ways (God forbid, if we want someone to be healed of cancer or after a car accident), if God hasn’t been the healer all along of rug burns and paper cuts and scrapes and bruises from learning how to ride our bikes and from self-imposed, damage we’ve done to ourselves? That’s one thing is re-enchanting our normal speech to create an expectation.

In terms of the passages, that “humiliated opponents,” I don’t know, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It feels bad, in the midst of it when you are being brought down, humbled, subverted, surprised, but what if that is actually a gift? I think about the rich young ruler who came to Jesus, and it says that he went away sad because he had so much, but it leaves it really open-ended. He still might have embraced that as a gift and a calling and just did an accurate accounting of his life.

What if instead of when we find out we’re wrong or when we find out we actually missed out on what God has been doing all along, what if instead of doubling down or powering up or circling wagons or defending, what if there was an expectation that God was also working in us being wrong? And then there’s time and space to change our minds. There’s not a whole lot of value in that. It’ll be interesting if Elon Musk gives Twitter an edit button because we’re so used to our whole lives becoming un-editable hot takes that we can’t take back. So, we just double down and trench.

I don’t know. What if that is also a gift from God, proving us wrong and not in a vicious way, but in a gracious way? It’s not like divine gas lighting, but a way that can make us people able to ask forgiveness because we realize that we are often wrong.

Anthony: Well, it seems to me it ties back into being ready, right? As the Spirit woos us into greater maturity into the head, Jesus, it looks like that. And humiliation is painful, but it’s like our mutual friend, Jeff McSwain—I’ve heard him say often, “Life is just ongoing repentance.” Every day, it’s oh, I got that wrong! But we have one who knows what it looks like to condescend. And thanks be to God for that.