What does it mean that she is bent over?
Gospel Reading: Luke 13:10-17
For Sunday, August 22, 2010: Year C - Ordinary 21
What does it mean that, “She was bent over?” Does the phrase describe some long-ago developed deformity? Is it a metaphor for how she has been treated? (A word of caution before you Google, “She was bent over”: biblical interpretation and application seem to be the last thing on people's minds.) But have things changed all that much?
Jesus heals three times on the Sabbath in Luke, always in front of the religious leaders and always while in dialogue with them. In the first and third healings (Luke 6:6-11 and 14:1-6) the men who are healed seem more like props for Jesus’ lesson on the oppression that strict interpretation of the law can lead to. They don’t speak, they don’t react to being healed, they are identified only by their infirmity, and then they just disappear. But this middle Sabbath healing is different.
The Presence of Women
The presence of a woman could be seen as inconsequential—Jesus heals two men and one woman on the Sabbath. Gender isn’t the point, it is the healing and the schooling Jesus is giving the religious leaders that matters. But I think to overlook the particular and peculiar plight of this "daughter of Abraham" is to join with those who have bent her over.
The relative absence of women from the entirety of the Biblical narrative is striking. Contemporary Torah scholar Avivah Gotlieb Zornberg notes in her masterpiece, The Particulars of Rapture, that after the women give birth to the Abrahamic dynasty in Genesis, they almost completely disappear. She claims, however, that the Midrash keeps their presence alive in the biblical unconscious:
“Women’s story can be seen, then, at least at certain critical junctures, as the repressed narrative of the biblical text. Midrash retains the traces of their narrative and brings it to consciousness, with marked effects on the manifest level of meaning.”
What is being repressed in this narrative of the healing of the daughter of Abraham on the Sabbath?
“Bent Over”
Midrash Tanhuma, links the phrase "bent over" with Leah, the wife of Jacob, who was forced by her father to trick Jacob in to having sex with her. Jacob wanted her sister Rachel and was not pleased with being manipulated, but imagine how Leah felt. Rabbi Tanhum says,
"When God sees a person bent over in dejection, He gives him a hand and raises him up, as it is said: 'The Lord supports all who stumble, and makes all who are bent stand straight'(Ps. 145:14). When God saw that Leah was unloved, He said: 'How shall I make her beloved of her husband? Now, I give her children first, so that her husband will love her, and thus I make her stand straight.'"
But what’s the back-story of this "daughter of Abraham" who Jesus makes to stand straight? It seems that it could be significant, because when the two men are healed they disappear from the narrative, but the narrative’s author has her immediately stand up straight and begin praising God.
Then when Jesus suggests that the men in power should maybe treat her, at least as well as they treat their donkeys, these men are shamed and the “entire crowd” roars with approval at what he has said and done. Were these men known to the "daughter of Abraham"? Does the crowd read more into this story than we typically do? Are we missing something important here?
The Hardest Question
What is being repressed in this story? What does it mean that she is bent over? But most importantly, what does the crowd understand Jesus to be doing when he raises her up to stand straight?
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Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
