Editor’s Note: In honor of International Women’s Day (March 8), Women’s History Month in the United States, and the Lenten season, we will be publishing devotions written by women about the women who Jesus ministered to during his time on earth. This series will be called, “The Women Jesus Loved.”
We hope you will return each week to see how Jesus loves all of us, including women. This is the sixth in the series. Read the other entries here.
“Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And behold, there was a woman who had had a disabling spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself.” (Luke 13:10-11)
For eighteen years, her world looked much different than anyone else’s. While those around her grew up, found their trades, perhaps started families, her view of life was not a bright blue sky of possibilities. It was one defined by dirt and stones. Her infirmity, hunched over for the last eighteen years, was more than just a physical affliction — it affected what she saw every day, her possibilities, her hope. She could only see the world that was in front of her.
We are in a time of great affliction. When I began studying this passage back in February, there were so many threads that stood out to me — the hard-hearted response of the religious leaders, Jesus humiliating his opponents, the specific timing of this healing. But now, almost two months and what feels like a lifetime later, what I can’t shake is this woman’s perspective.
This woman, whose life had been defined by her illness, could only see the world that it had created for her. While the text just describes her as “bent over,” I can only imagine with a lack of street sweeping, plumbing systems, and motorized vehicles the kind of things she would have seen every single day.
Her outlook of the future was defined by what she could see — and what she saw didn’t leave much room for hope.
Until that one day when she goes to the synagogue to hear a rabbi teach.
We don’t know if she ever sees Jesus before he heals her, or if she was just drawn to the voice of this man who brought hope and something different than every day before. But she is there in the crowd that day, and her life changes because of one very specific circumstance:
Jesus sees her.
Jesus sees this woman clear as day, though she is bent low and probably hidden behind the crowd. He sees her suffering — not just her physical afflictions, but all of them… the defeat, the shame, the lowliness, the loneliness, the pain.
He notices her and calls her forward to do what she didn’t dare hope: to heal her.
We are in the middle of a global pandemic. Actually, we are just guessing that it’s the middle. All we know is that each day feels like the last — a battle to hold onto hope and to fix our eyes on something better than what we can see in front of us.
And more than ever, our world is crying out for healing:
- For physical healing — for a vaccine to be created, protection for the vulnerable, for a flattened curve.
- For emotional healing — for our harried minds, the grief of those we’ve already lost, the fear of what we still stand to lose.
- For social healing — for a restored belief in a shared ability to be generous, patient, and resilient in the face of fear & scarcity, for a world that still functions when this all passes.
- And of course, spiritual healing — our need to be connected to a God who sees, understands, and is in control, especially in the midst of our pain and confusion.
Our sickness impairs our vision — and sometimes we can only see what is in front of us.
Perhaps you’ve found each day a struggle to hold onto hope. Perhaps, like me, you’ve also felt like it’s a losing battle as you receive a text about someone in your community, or read another news article, or look at another graph.
But it isn’t about what we can see. It’s about a much different vantage point.
Jesus saw this woman in the depths of her despair, and it was what he saw that led to great healing. His compassion brought about a miracle that no one saw coming. And in this healing, a hint of another healing that was yet to come:
“From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani*”?” (Matthew 27:45-46)
* which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
On that day, a great darkness overtook the land — sight was obscured and hope was lost.
Who would have guessed the ending? Who would have known healing was on its way?