August 21, 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time: Luke 13:10-17

Imagine the relief she must feel when, after 18 years stooped over and unable to stand tall, Jesus lifts her out of her illness. And consider how her perspective changes. For the first time in decades, she can look straight into a friend’s eye or gaze toward the sky to assess the weather. Her narrowness of vision is instantly broadened. The whole world is now in her line of sight. The unnamed woman’s healing in this week’s Gospel reading is a story of expansion, revelation, vision widened by grace—a glorious progression toward the life God intends for all of us.

There’s more to the story, however. Along with healing the woman, Jesus puts to shame those who rebuke him for healing on the sabbath. This is classic Jesus behavior: lifting up the lowly while knocking the mighty ones down from their thrones, matching a haughty rebuke with a direct and theologically grounded rebuke of his own, turning people’s expectations inside out. Grace wins; hypocrisy loses. This story’s reversal of fortunes is worthy of our joy, particularly because it allows the crowds in the story to experience God’s grace directly through the healing work of Christ. Those who earnestly seek the furthering of God’s desires for our broken world may rightly rejoice in the demotion of the haughty.

But such rejoicing can also be driven by schadenfreude, and it can harden into punitive judgment. “Yeah! You tell ’em, Jesus!” easily slips into “Yeah! Let’s see ’em suffer!” People we disagree with become enemies to be vanquished. Our vindication requires the punishment of those we deem to be wrong about God, or about how we worship, or about politics. If the elevation of the losers requires the demotion of the winners, we find ourselves on a constantly shifting seesaw of glory and shame. We seek always to be on the side that is rising, with our enemies relegated to the sinking side.