10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.
– Luke 13:10-17 (NRSVUE)
A decade ago, few people outside of the social sciences seemed to have heard of the term “confirmation bias.” Today, it’s a buzz phrase that I hear regularly, even among my teens. The idea, however, that human beings regularly seek out, recall, and interpret information according to our preconceived biases, is nothing new. Applied to the gospels, a ready example of this is the assumption, when we encounter an individual with a perceived physical impairment, that Jesus will heal them and that this will be a good thing.
However, in Luke 13:10-17, the synagogue goers initially disagree. They have come to synagogue to learn and worship and, moreover, they have come to keep the Sabbath. Sabbath keeping involves abstaining from unnecessary work which, at least some of these synagogue goers reason, includes curing a woman who has experienced a non-life-threatening spine curvature for many years. The preconceived bias of this group, as Luke describes them, seems to be that synagogue on the Sabbath is a place of learning and worship and that Jesus should follow suit.
But before contemporary readers are too critical of this first-century synagogue crowd, it would behoove us to check our own biases as well. If Jesus’s fellow Jews are guilty of assuming that the purpose of Jesus’s presence in the synagogue that day ought to have been learning and teaching alone, contemporary readers are often guilty of assuming the opposite.
Indeed, the average reader or preacher of Luke’s passage often seems unaware of what Jesus’s main activity was in the synagogue that day. I’ll give you a hint: it had little to do with cures or spirits. In fact, the assumption of those first-century synagogue goers was likely closer to the point. Luke tells us what Jesus is doing in the synagogue at the very start: “Now he was teaching [Greek: didaskōn] in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath” (Luke 13:10). Jesus was giving a sermon. According to Luke, Jesus has been preaching in houses and synagogues regularly since he returned from the wilderness (cf. Luke 4:14-15).
Now, often, in the gospel accounts, Jesus’s teaching is accompanied by some element of the miraculous, which, in turn, draws the reader’s attention and, as Luke narrates, is sometimes questioned and sometimes praised. As such, it’s not an unreasonable assumption, when Luke tells us that a woman who has been bent over enters the assembly, for readers to expect Jesus to heal her. However, nor is it an unreasonable assumption when Jesus himself enters the assembly for the synagogue goers to expect him to teach or preach.
Both assumptions, as it were, stem from a sort of confirmation bias. A desire to box Jesus into the kind of ministry that we expect or would like to see from him. Jesus, however, and indeed, the divine, cannot be so readily contained.
As it happens, miracles are rarely, if ever, the point of Jesus’s message. To focus solely on Jesus’s deeds of power misses Jesus’s message just as much as assuming that his teaching ought to be separated from deeds of might. For, indeed, in Luke’s gospel account, Jesus’s miracles certainly serve as an embodiment of his message.
But while Jesus’s miracles may be more attention catching than his preaching, especially for some twenty-first century audiences, at the end of the day, these deeds of power, however, whenever, wherever, or for whoever they are performed, are only part of Jesus’s ministry and not the main part at that. To focus on miraculous healings to the exclusion of Jesus’s message leads to missing the message.
What, then, was Jesus’s message? Luke narrates it in the very first preaching scene he describes (Luke 4:16-30), when Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,*
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”* (Luke 4:18-19)
Jesus’s message is one of reversal, release, and liberation.
In antiquity, some people missed Jesus’s world-changing message because they were concerned with maintaining their perceived proper order of things, like what days or places were appropriate for curing ailments. Others were concerned with privileging certain types of embodiments over others and demanding that Jesus ‘cure’ those whose bodies were different from the perceived norm. New Testament scholar Jimmy Hoke explains this latter point, writing on cure and agency, by noting the simple truth that frequently in the gospels no one bothers to ask the individual who is “healed” whether they desire such action.
Today, readers can fall prey to similar temptations. Anytime Christians like myself read a text like this one and assume that the purpose is to critique Jewish Sabbath practice, elevating instead the more “humane” Christian order of things, we are missing the message. And, indeed, dangerously so, as such assumptions have led to misunderstanding of our Jewish neighbors, and supersessionist words and actions that have had catastrophic effects across the centuries.
Nor are supersessionist readings the only harmful assumptions that can be layered on Luke’s narrative. Industrial and technological revolutions have led to the sorting of people in the contemporary world under the constructed notions of disability and non-disability that privilege normative embodiments labeled “abled”. For example, most people are taller now than they were even one-hundred years ago. As a result, door frames and cabinets are built higher and someone like myself who barely tops five-feet in height must use a stool to adapt to the presumed norm. More insidiously, buildings are constructed with staircases instead of level entry or inclined entries, jobs requiring computer technology skills and the concentration to sit in a small cubicle for 8-hour stretches have replaced many well-paying manual labor jobs, and so forth. The result is an assumed binary between disabled and non-disabled where no such rigidity truly exists. As such, there is a growing trend among disability advocates to refer not to disability and non-disability, but rather, dis/ability, recognizing the fluid nature of such concepts related to the human body.
With relation to the woman who is “bent over” in Luke’s gospel text, many readers who identify more with the non-disabled side of this binary, such as myself, have read this text and others like it assuming that Jesus is healing a disability. Often it is further assumed that the woman in question desires to be able to “stand up straight.” However, the text never states this desire or, even, that the woman directly approaches Jesus. Finally, and most dangerously, readers, and even the Lukan author himself, attribute the woman’s bent embodiment to Satan (Luke 13:16). However, the “spirit” [Greek: pneuma, the same word used of God’s Holy Spirit] that Luke initially describes as bending the woman’s body does not need to be assumed to be evil or demonic. In ancient medicine (Greek and Jewish), most physical symptoms were attributed to the transcendent realm. To say a spirit had bent her over was, in first-century parlance, not significantly different than for someone today to say that the woman was bent over. The narrator is simply naming her reality.
As such, when Christian interpreters of the text, particularly those who identify as able-bodied, focus on what makes the woman and her synagogue neighbors different from us–whether it is their shared Jewishness or her particular bent-overness–we are missing the message. Again, dangerously so, as such readings have led to ableist assumptions, demeaning and degrading dis/abled individuals with dangerous effects across the centuries. Indeed, it should not be forgotten that individuals deemed disabled, whose embodiments did not fit the state imposed norm, were targeted alongside their Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.
Such assumptions made from a state of privilege serve to reinforce, not overturn, the destructive systems of power in the present world. In other words, by focusing on how an imaginary homogenous “we” know better or would do better than an imaginary homogenous “other” in Jesus’s world, Christians often inadvertently (though, sometimes, quite intentionally) reinforce the power systems that crush and corrupt rather than resist and release their holds on us, as Jesus’s message so clearly sought to do.
Luke’s gospel account was written at a time and place in which the followers of Jesus were far from the center of world politics and power systems. It was written to a group of people, Jews and gentiles alike, who dared to resist the institutions and power systems of their day and to dream of release from these death-dealing systems. As Luke wrote, Jesus preached an alternative kingdom. The Roman Empire functioned through a series of top-down hierarchies in a system that is frequently described as patriarchy. However, feminist scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has observed that this adjective is not sufficient to capture the extent of these hierarchies, which not only privilege men, but also adults, freeborn citizens, able-bodied persons, and so forth. She proposes, instead, the term kyriarchy, based upon the Greek word kyrios, which can be translated as “master” or “lord.” In response to the Roman kyriarchy, however, Jesus (frequently called “Lord” [kyrios]) need not be read as reinstating a new kind of dominion with himself at the top.
The Greek term basilea, frequently translated as “Kingdom” or “Empire” can also be translated as “realm” or “reign,” and it need not reinstate the Roman institutions of imperialism and kyriarchy. This alternative kingdom was centered upon good news for the poor and those at the margins of economic and political power; freedom for all held captive, whether by the chains of death dealing ideologies like racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and so forth, or the literal chains of a prison or detainment cell; clarity of vision for all who could not see past the fictions of such ideologies, including healing of the whole self for all who sought it; and freedom from oppressions of every kind. This was Jesus’s message; this is what he taught.
Two millennia later, it is possible to see the limits, whether of the Lukan narrator, Jesus himself, or both, to fully embody God’s revolutionary message of release. We cannot know, historically, whether Jesus stopped to ask every person he healed whether they desired that change; we only know that Luke (and the other gospel authors) do not narrate such dialogue. It is possible, therefore, from a dis/ability lens, to critique the lack of agency and voice on the part of the woman in today’s gospel, at least as Luke narrates it. And when we see these limits, it is prudent to identify them, call them out, and preach against the text–to question the binaries that too often lead to division and harm rather than the liberating realm of God that Luke’s Jesus embraces as he reads the Isaiah text.
At the same time, it is a prudent caution not to fall prey to our own confirmation biases when reading Luke’s gospel. In today’s world of political distraction and power plays, Jesus’s central message of love and liberation is as necessary and life-giving as ever before. Let us take care not to miss the message. Let us, indeed, seek to dismantle harmful binaries and live into a new way of being that does not privilege power of any kind in a kyriarchical reign.
