What would it have been like to be that unnamed woman in the Luke passage? As she came to worship on that Sabbath day, the others in her local community synagogue had surely known her most of her life. They had been aware of her spinal growth that had caused her to be more and more hunched over as she aged. For at least eighteen years, it had been visibly noticeable and she had probably felt the discomfort and pain even longer than that. Personal relationships depend heavily on facial expression and eye-to-eye contact but in her condition other people rarely saw her face unless they bent down to acknowledge her and to meet her gaze. During all those years, we don’t know what her neighbors thought or what she thought was the cause for her condition. Did she think it was God’s will? Did she suspect that it was deserved punishment because of something that she or one of her family members had done? Did people think the Devil made it happen? Or did she just consider it a fact of her life?

That Sabbath day, she didn’t come to the synagogue asking to be healed. She merely appeared in worship as Jesus was teaching. Then suddenly he noticed her and singled her out in a way that had never happened to her before. In the midst of his teaching, Jesus saw her, truly saw her and empathetically understood how the disability affected her. He stopped teaching. He called her over to him in front of all the other people in the synagogue. He looked at her and spoke directly to her. Then, he touched her and in that brief exchange he freed her from the condition that had crippled her for much of her life. She began dancing and thanking God in all the ways her body knew how. She could hardly control herself with happiness. She had never known such compassion and freedom.

But the synagogue leader knew God’s teachings through Moses, that the Sabbath day was holy, it was for rest and not for the work of healing. Why did Jesus heal her on that day? Why did he challenge God’s law? What difference would one more day make to that poor woman who had suffered for eighteen years already? Though they were both Jewish men who were raised in the sacred traditions and men of deep faith, Jesus lashed out at the leader whose interpretation and understanding of the Scripture was so different from his own.

There was something much greater going on in the synagogue that day, something beyond the life and healing of this unnamed woman. In Jesus’ time, a time of Roman occupation, questions were being debated among religious leaders and people of faith. They were asking themselves, "Who is God and how does God ask us to live?" There were rules that distinguished the Israelites; that defined who they were through history when they lived among the Canaanites, the Assyrians, and Babylonians. The Laws was recorded in the Torah Scripture. They were included the teachings of God through Moses and the Levitical interpretations with over 600 rules that guided their lives together. It was the responsibility of the priests and the synagogue leaders to teach and enforce this tradition. Otherwise, they risked loosing their heritage and being absorbed into another culture. It was clearly documented how they should behave: what was clean and what was unclean, what could be eaten and what must not be consumed, who one could have sexual relations with and who one could not, what bodily hair could be cut and what could not, who one could share a meal with and who one could not. These rules, known as the purity code, shaped social boundaries and helped people know who they were and where they belonged. In a way, living by a set of rules was comforting then much as it is today under certain cultural or religious traditions. It understood the primary identity of God as one who accepted and rewarded those who lived pure lives, lives by the laws, and rejected those, ostracized those, who did not or could not. Physical wholeness was associated with purity and lack of wholeness, as the woman that Sabbath morning, with impurity.

However, Jesus and others experienced and understood God’s primary identity differently. From the Scriptural stories of hope and promise in the lives of Sarah and Abraham, of liberation from slavery in Egypt, of God’s words through the Prophets condemning oppression and preaching concern for the poor and the outcast, of release from exile in Babylon, Jesus knew God’s identity, God’s primary characteristics, as compassionate and loving and liberating to all humanity.

This difference was really a matter of how one read and interpreted Scripture and one understood their own personal experience of God in relation to Scripture. For Jesus, the synagogue and the Sabbath were important but not God’s highest priority. He knew God in Miriam as she danced across the Red Sea out of bondage. He knew God with the Hebrew people as God rained down manna when they were hungry and provided water for their thirst. He knew God as the Psalmist did, as one who knew him in the womb, cherished him as a loving mother and protected him as a caring father. This image of God put Jesus in direct conflict with those whose personal identity was dependent upon their role of enforcing what they understood as God’s laws and the purity codes that had develop in the faith tradition. Both perspectives had their source in the sacred Scripture but one divides and the other shatters those divisions and reaches across boundaries to heal.

And what about you? How do you experience and understand God? As a faith community here and as a broader culture, we wrestle with these two perspectives even today. Most of us think of ourselves as enlightened human beings, intelligent, thoughtful and not controlled by a list of laws that we haven’t thought through carefully and yet…how would we feel if someone interrupted our worship this morning, someone who hasn’t showered or eaten as recently as we have, someone who arrived by foot and doesn’t have a place to wash their clothes. Would we hope that they would not make us aware of their needs until our worship is over or would we stop our routine, speak to them and welcome them eye-to-eye looking for a way to be compassionate? How would we embody God’s love?

Sometimes we find it hard to believe that God will be compassionate to us personally. Has there ever been a time in your life when you have been in deep quilt or pain but just couldn’t admit it to anyone, even to God, because of what God might think of you? It is a very, very lonely place to be. I have known of people in abusive relationships who can’t ask God’s help and leave the relationship because on some level they think they deserve what they are getting, or that God doesn’t really want anything better for them. They are sure that they must have done wrong and if they could just figure out the list of rules and live by them, then both God and the abuser would forgive them and life would improve. It would be so easy if the world were that simple, if we could discover that code of behavior that would guarantee love and acceptance from our fellow human beings, that would heal our hearts. The truth is that the God of Compassion wants to unbind us from those painful places, the places where we are enslaved. It could mean a big change in our lives, one we may be afraid to make but Jesus calls us to come forward and offers to lay his hands on us as we are set free.

When a terrible tragedy has happened, a serious illness, the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one, I have heard people say, "Nothing happens without a reason. God must have wanted this to be." I usually find it hard to believe. Jesus did not respond that way to the woman who had been crippled for eighteen years. He was obviously touched by her condition. In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus didn’t say that the Samaritan walked on by the victim as the priest and the Levite did. The Samaritan didn’t tell the injured man that he was beaten and robbed because God wanted it to happen and now he must remain injured and bloody. No, the Samaritan wasn’t bound by that understanding of God or by the purity rules of cleanliness but was moved by compassion. He cleaned and bandaged the wounds and paid for him to have rest and care. Compassion for a son or daughter of Abraham is more important than the purity codes, even more important than traditional Sabbath observance.

As a culture, most of us don’t believe that we are tied to a God of regulations and division. However, as we closely examine our response to some of today’s crises, I wonder if we aren’t still debating the issues that Jesus and his contemporaries challenged in his day. Is literal interpretation of Scripture or a compassionate response to human need God’s highest priority for us? We see this conflict played out in the effort for legalization of gay marriages. I suspect it is an important factor in the way we long ignored the growing the AIDS crisis. I wonder if it is an aspect of our response to the stem cell issue or the work Illinois governor is doing to make prescription drugs available from other countries or our difficulty to create a health care program available for all citizens.

Advocating compassion continues to be an invitation and a challenge in our society and to the church in our day. Hopefully, we can do just two important things. First, and most important, is for us each to allow ourselves to truly believe that God’s compassion and love are offered to each of us every day of the week whatever our life situation. Jesus looks up from teaching, sees us across the sanctuary and calls us to him. Then, secondly, the stories of Jesus’ ministry are clear that God’s compassion is not only individual but also a social paradigm, the way God asks us to live together. Boundary shattering bridge building can be upsetting to some who are more comfortable knowing where the lines of division are. However, if helping a stooped woman on a Sabbath morning creates a crisis, then crisis it has to be. Wouldn’t we do as much for our ox or our donkey?