Jesus Couldn't Wait

 Luke 13:10-17 August 24, 2025 Rev. June Wilkins

 

Woman With An Infirmity of Eighteen Years
James Tissot

Jesus is in a synagogue, 

it’s basically just like a church like this.

They’re having a class discussion in there,

and a woman comes in who had been

bent over in pain for the last 18 years.

She couldn’t stand up straight at all.

Uncomfortable, painful,

not able to see in front of her.

 

Jesus meets her, lays his hands on her

and he tells her that she is set free from her ailment.

And just like that, she’s healed, she stands upright.

And she’s off praising God.

Seems like a good day at church, right?

 

Now, was the reaction from the congregation

and the church leaders wonder, disbelief, excitement?

No. The pastor is upset because Jesus

healed the woman on the Sabbath.

He said to the parishioners, “he had six other days to

do that kind of work, why would this man break the Sabbath?”

So Jesus did an amazing thing,

but they couldn’t see past him breaking a rule.

It’s kind of ridiculous of them.

 

But a good question is, “why did Jesus break this rule?”

Why did he break it and why did he break it where he did?

In front of all those leaders.

This woman had been sick for 18 years,

what would one more day have mattered?

He could have asked her to come back the next day.

Then everyone would have been happy.

 

Now I don’t think that Jesus was rejecting the Sabbath rule.

The Sabbath is and was a great gift especially in Jesus time.

Back then, most people worked seven days a week.

It was very unusual that people would take any day off.

But the God ordered them to take one day a week off.

The world told people that they were only as good

as what they produced, how they fed the economy.

But God told them that they were precious even

when they weren’t producing anything.

Sabbath was great gift that God had given

to the people for their and well being

and to help their relationship with God.

It was a gift, a discipline, and reminder of God.

We should probably take our Sabbath time more seriously today.

 

But, as often happens, the religious leaders took this gift

and turned it into a rigid law.

If anyone were to do any work on that day,

they were chastised and even brought up on charges.

 

And the Sabbath worked easily for those who were stable.

But for those who were poor,

for those living on the edge of poverty,

for those who had to beg or collect food for a living,

it could be a hardship.

In the gospels, Jesus and the disciples were

chastised for picking ears of corn to eat on the Sabbath –

when they were just getting themselves something to eat.

 

This, of course, not just true for the Jewish religion

or religious leaders. All religions often will take a good idea –

a gift from God and turn in it into a weapon of control.

A way to scrutinize other people. A litmus test.

They used it to catch other people “sinning”

They turned it into a way to make themselves

look better and have more power over people

and to make other people look bad.

They turned it into a method of bondage or imprisonment.

 

Rules can do that. They can be good gifts to help us be faithful.

And they can become bondage.

We end up serving the rules, instead of the rules serving us.

The rules can be used to hurt people

and shame them instead of setting them free.

 

These people couldn’t get past the rule that was

broken to see a miracle happen before them.

 

When the church focuses mostly on the rules,

then we run the danger of only seeing the world

for how people are breaking the rules.

God’s way can become a way of pain rather than joy.

 

How many times has the Christian Church been a place like that?

How many times have our churches placed bondage

on spirits rather than freeing them?

How many times have rules come before relationships?

How many times has dogma stood

in the way of the movement of the Spirit?

 

For many people outside of it, the church has been long

identified as the place of forbidding, restriction, bean counting, 

and finger wagging instead of freedom and restoration.

Worship? You needed to do that in the appointed time and the

right way or else you’re not a good Christian.

Communion? Only the right people get to eat at Jesus table.

Praying: Oh, you can’t recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary

correctly in front of the teacher at 6 years old. (that was me.)

Well, you’re not good at prayer are you?

Sex and sexuality? Forget about it, you’re doing everything wrong.

 

And even if we’re not chastising people for breaking the rules,

we’re mired in our own bureaucracy and unable to act 

when the need is there. we’re too slow, we’re far too careful, we over-think.

We’re pre-occupied by lawsuits.

Things get stuck in endless committees. Analysis paralysis.

God’s church has a reputation for being

quick to judge and slow to act.

God’s church has the reputation of being

the place of “no” instead of “yes".

 

So often Churches have the resources:

we have the people, we have the know-how,

we know high people in high places,

we even have the inspiration to do something,

But individually or as a group, we put it off,

tomorrow, later, maybe another day.

Rules before miracles.

 

Through the synod in Ohio,

I did some conflict work with a Lutheran congregation,

and at one point in their history, they basically opted to close down

their food pantry because someone found out that

the food pantry was cooperating with the local Mormon church.

 

They had been having this cooperation for years feeding people

together and working together once a month,

And then someone in this Lutheran church,

got a bug in their brain that Lutherans

shouldn’t be working with Mormons,

and the leadership of the church pushed them out.

But they didn’t know that even though it was housed

at the Lutheran Church, the Mormons were the biggest

contributors and supplied the most volunteers.

So when they pushed them out,

the food pantry quickly ended up closing

 

The fact is, often, the bondage we are in is often our own bondage

our own rules, our own processes, our own fear, our own baggage.

 

And that brings me back to my original question.

Why would Jesus break this rule? Right in front of

of all the religious leaders. This woman waited 18 years,

she could have waited one more day.

The reason that Jesus broke that rule on that Sabbath day

was because, as well as releasing the woman from her bondage,

he was releasing those religious leaders from their bondage too.

 

They surely didn’t realize they were in bondage.

They didn’t ask to be released, but Jesus could see

that they were being held back by their own prisons.

Jesus could see that they couldn’t see God’s work

because they were hung up on their rules.

 

A lot of times, his is the way that God’s kingdom

breaks into our world. First by breaking a rule

then by setting people free from their own constraints.

 

So, women were finally allowed to be ordained in our

predecessor bodies: the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church in 1970.

 

But the first woman to go to a Lutheran seminary was Ruth Harper,

She entered Pacific Lutheran Seminary in 1952.

One woman, entering a place that was made for and designed by men. 

There were rules that women couldn’t be ordained then.

But there actually weren’t any real rules about women attending seminary. 

But there were unwritten rules. Customs. Tradition. Precedents. So she was allowed in. 

She said most of the men didn’t like that, she faced doubt, resistance, and even harassment.

But she also found a lot of support and champions there too.

She said that one professor didn’t believe that women were smart enough to be in his biblical studies class so he wouldn’t let her take it, but the dean and other professors made sure she was admitted into it.  And she prevailed and finished her education in 1957 becoming a deaconess and a high school teacher, one of the only positions of leadership open to women at the time.

 Fifty years ago, our own predecessor Lutheran

church bodies didn’t realize the gift of women pastors,

20 years ago the ELCA couldn’t recognize the gift of

gay, lesbian and transgender people as pastors in the church.

Today our church still struggles with appreciating the gift of

people of color in leadership, but despite that,

we have now elected an African American presiding bishop

and an African American secretary.

 

God’s kingdom is still breaking through into our world

 

Jesus has not come here to reinforce rules,

or to heap on more burdens, Jesus isn’t here to uphold traditions,

or to help us hide behind our bureaucracy and systems.

Jesus has come to free us.

 

Jesus has, of course, come to free us from those

outside forces, illness, pain, injustice, addictions.

But Jesus has also come to free us from our own

self-imposed bondage, our own prisons,

our own fears, our own restrictions, our own apathy,

the prisons that we put ourselves and other people into

in the spirit of  “good order” or “following the rules”

Jesus means to free all of us from all of that.

 

That woman probably could have waited.

She had been waiting so long,

would a little more time have mattered?

 

But Jesus couldn’t wait.

Jesus couldn’t wait to set her free

and to set the rest of the people in that church free.

 

Christ is here to liberate us.

And it can’t wait until tomorrow, he needs to do it today.

 

Jesus gives us that healing touch to us

and Jesus has defied all the rules to do it.

 

So let us rejoice in the wonderful things that God has done.