August 24th, 2025
The Reverend Jack Brownfield, Curate
Luke 13:10-17
Woman, you are set free from your ailment.
A few years ago, I worked for a summer at UPMC-Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh as a chaplain intern. Each of us student chaplains had two floors, or units, of the hospital, and we were responsible for visiting patients on our units. My units were orthopedics- knee and hip replacements, mostly- and oncology. Patients with cancer would usually cycle through for a few days at a time to receive chemo or other treatments, then go back home for a couple weeks. Then I’d see their names on my intake sheet again and go around to see how they were getting on.
The strange thing about these patients, and a lot of patients in a hospital, is that they lived in a curious tension. On the one hand, they didn’t have much to do except lie in bed. In fact, they had so little to do that they were usually bored out of their minds; they had watched all the TV and read all the books they could stomach, and still they just had to keep lying there. If you have ever spent more than a few hours in the hospital, you probably know this pleasant feeling.
But while these patients didn’t have anything to do, that didn’t mean they could rest. A busy hospital is not a good place to rest. They had pain, of course, which kept them from sleeping or even lying comfortably. They had anxieties and fears about their conditions. They had machines that beep. They had nurses, doctors, therapists, orderlies, and even chaplain interns barging into their rooms every few minutes. They had nothing to do but no way to rest.
I bring this up because I think it helps us understand the meaning of the Sabbath, and the meaning of our Gospel reading today. To keep the Sabbath day is, as we can see, one of the Ten Commandments. Jews in Jesus’s day and our own keep the Sabbath on Saturday; Christians on Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection. But whichever day we pick, it is the day of rest. We read in Genesis that “God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation” (Gen 2:3). Like God, we are meant to rest, to pause, on this holy day. The commandment runs like this: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work” (Ex 20:8-10).
The Sabbath is a chance to recover from the week of work and anxiety and prepare for the days ahead; it is a chance to come together to worship God, to hear his Word, and receive his sacraments. It takes faith to keep the Sabbath day, faith that we don’t need to get every last thing done, faith that God will do better than our efforts. It’s a day simply to enjoy God, to give thanks to him. In the words of our psalm, it’s a day to sing “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy Name” (Ps 103:1). The Sabbath means contentment, freedom, and joy; in a deep sense, it means to relax in God and his great mercy. The Sabbath is a gift from God.
But resting is not as easy as doing nothing. That is what patients in the hospital discover, when pain, anxiety, irritation, and noise keep them from resting. And that, I think, is what the poor woman in our Gospel must have known, too. As we read, she had been crippled, “bent over and quite unable to stand up straight” for 18 long years. In all that time, how often do you think she experienced rest, real contentment and freedom? When she came to the synagogue, week after week, could she really rest in God and enjoy his precious gift of the Sabbath? Of course, she could refrain from working. But could she truly rest, could she enjoy the full life God created her to share? Or was the pain too much? The pitying or judgmental stares too much? The unfulfilled hope and prayer- Lord, give me healing or at least relief!- too much?
And then, all at once, everything changes. Jesus is in the synagogue that morning. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment,” he says, laying his hand on her. And she stands up straight and begins praising God. “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” she might have cried out. At last, the Sabbath has dawned. At last, she can rest in God, and thank him, and praise him. For the first time, perhaps, in 18 years, she feels the rest of the Lord’s day, a gift from the Lord’s own hand. Like a good night’s sleep after sleepless nights, the Sabbath comes as God’s refreshing touch.
The leader of the synagogue doesn’t understand. “There are six days on which work ought to be done.” Can’t you wait one day to healed? To this misguided leader, the Sabbath is just a rule, just the command not to work. To him, rest just means not doing anything else. He doesn’t see that true rest, the Lord’s rest, is not something we do at all but simply the Lord’s gift to us. It is a precious pearl. This poor woman, bent over and suffering, hadn’t had that precious rest for years, just as patients in the hospital couldn’t have their true rest despite lying in bed.
So Jesus isn’t breaking the Sabbath when he heals this woman, not really. He is fulfilling the Sabbath by bringing its grace, its abundant life, to her. Now, this woman is joyful and free. Now, she can stand up and praise God, the Lord of the Sabbath. Now, she can trust in him and live as his child, not just this one day but for the whole week. It’s only when the Lord comes and sets us free, bears our burdens, lightens our load, that we experience the true Sabbath of the Lord; that our hearts and voices ring out “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy Name.”
I wonder if a reason many of us so often feel anxious and tired is because we’ve forgotten how to keep the Sabbath as the gift it is. We spend it working like any other day, or else we lazily lie around, not doing much of anything and then wondering why we don’t feel refreshed. We’ve forgotten that doing nothing is not the same thing as the rest which comes from God.
My sisters and brothers, that is why we are here today, on this Sabbath of the Lord. We are here because we need the gift of rest- of true rest- that only he can give. We need the contentment, joy, and freedom that come when we can lay everything aside and rest in him. When we can pray and sing to him with our fellow Christians. When we can hear his Word and take comfort in it. When we can come up and receive the most precious gift of his Son, his Body and the Blood. These are all, simply, God’s gifts to us on this Sabbath day. They need nothing except us to receive them, to enjoy them, and to give thanks for them.
We do still have cares, anxieties, pains, and fears. There are things beyond earthly healing, or at least, beyond our power to heal. We have not yet reached that final, full, and perfect Sabbath rest, where “he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying not pain anymore” (Rev 21:4). But on the Sabbath day, on this Sabbath day, may the Lord give us a little of his rest, a little contentment, joy, and freedom to meet the days ahead, as he did for that woman in the synagogue long ago. May he help us trust and praise him. Lord, give us your rest. Amen.
