A Strategic Lukan Diptych:

Two Political Bodies Symbolizing the Disease of Disparity in the Body Politic

Lk 13:10-17, 14:1-6 – 11^th Sunday after Pentecost

I take some liberty with the lectionary when it is crucial that we read Luke’s narrative in a more wholistic fashion. There are three main problems with how church folk have been socialized to encounter scripture:

• We handle texts as fragments, rarely grasping the narrative whole and flow;
• Our habits of “fast food Bible study” allow only limited time and attention to “get to the point,” which fosters either overdependence upon an authority figure to tell us what the text means, and/or a settling for vast simplifications;
• The focus of interpretation is almost always “personal application,” quite apart from social and historical context (ours and the text’s)—treating the Bible as an “answer book” or doctrinal rulebook.

The problem is, ancient storytelling was not simplistic, but a sophisticated art form using a variety of techniques to educate, preserve culture, and explore the human experience.
Traditional oral and written narratives demonstrate complex plotlines and structures, multifaceted characters, and extended exploration of themes. Ancient storytellers masterfully utilized symbolism and allegory to give their narratives with deeper meaning and explore complex ideas. Characters often served as archetypes, embodying universal traits or representing broader concepts. So it’s time for our churches to stop infantilizing the Bible by treating it as a how-to handbook or looking for magical soundbytes

As we approach the story of a bent over woman, it is important to recognize how our modern worldview assumes that gospel healing stories relate “supernatural” cures of medical disorders. But there is much more to this episode. The ancient Mediterranean world, like many other non-modern cultures, was not bio-medical in its approach to illness, but symbolic. To be sure, traditional medicine was practiced to address physiological symptoms. But many serious or chronic illness were perceived primarily symbolically, representing a “socially disvalued state,” a defective condition that was perceived as a threat to communal integrity. The job of the healer was first and foremost to restore the subject back to the community, re-valuing them by identifying how their aberrant somatic status had its origins in the body politic. 

politic treats the political bodies of people of color. Civil Rights and anti-racism movements are healing medicine in the work of changing the systems and culture of dehumanization. Similarly, feminism critiqued ho power is regulated according to gender in a patriarchal systems, and those with physical disabilities re-locate their marginalization not in their own bodies, but in social architecture that pathologies or excludes them. I think it helps to understand these dynamics in terms of how political bodies are treated within a body politic, in order to understand that marginalized people cannot be restored to full membership without the transformation of systems.

and undernourished. It is helpful to keep this image in mind when we turn to characters from a very different historical and cultural literary context, yet which deploy some of the very same conventions to make a similar socio-political point.

The set-up for this Sunday’s tale demonstrates a rich narrative texture:

• Setting: A synagogue on the Sabbath represents both sacred time and space. Luke began narrative of Jesus’ ministry in such a space (4:15–44), but starting at 6:7 the synagogue becomes an increasingly contested place, and in 12:11 a zone of outright hostility.
• Plot:  The phrase “just then” a beat-down woman “appears” (13:11). Does this mean she was disrupting space in which she as an oppressed human was not welcome? Does her body unmask the dysfunctional spirit of that supposedly sacred space? Or both?
• Character: She is described as having labored under a “spirit of infirmity” (Gk astheneia, literally “lack of strength”). For Luke this condition is common among the poor to whom Jesus ministers (see 5:15; 8:2; see Acts 28:9). Perhaps the effects of malnutrition cause her to become “bent over” (Gk sugkuptō). What does this character symbolize?

Since every detail in storytelling is there for a reason, we might reflect on the 18 year duration of her condition. Since Luke was highly literate in the Hebrew Bible, this is likely an allusion to how “Eglon the Moabite king and the Philistines oppressed the Israelites for 18 years” (Judges 3:12-14; see Jd 10:7-8). This oppression was economic: they were bent over by hard labor and displacement. This describes this woman’s political body under the domineering body politic of a different empire: Roman occupation in collusion with Judean elites. The result of this social disease was an inability to stand up straight.
Jesus summons her over, (the same verb as the call of disciples), conspicuously before engaging the synagogue leader (Lk13:12), again defying gender conventions. He declares her “set free” (Gk apoluo, 13:13), suggesting that the issue is not physical disease but bondage. Thissame verb is, as we shall see momentarily, also used in dropsy story! Only then does Jesus lay hands on her, “making her erect again” (13:14). The synagogue leader now speaks, objecting to Jesus doing work on the Sabbath, and seeks to make an object lesson out of him to the audience (13:14). This elite male represents all those in our religious communities who think it’s never the right time for liberation—especially regarding women. Jesus rebuffs such theatrics, calling him a hypocrite—a term borrowed from Greco-Roman theater, as we saw in last week’s gospel reading, which connotes “playing a role.” He then cites Deuteronomy 5:12–15, which enjoins Sabbath rest for the whole household, including domestic animals.
N.T. scholar Richard Lowery, in his book Sabbath and Jubilee, has studied the correlation between debt and poverty in these stories. “By the very nature of her debilitating ailment, the woman is a living embodiment of the standard metaphor for indebtedness and oppression” he writes. “The image of untying and releasing the ox and the donkey also connects the story of the woman’s healing with Sabbath-year release… Indebtedness, servitude, and oppression are often described as bearing a yoke. The root meaning of shemittah in the Sabbath-year passage refers to loosening a yoke and letting it drop from the shoulders. With shoulders now unbound, the one released can stand completely erect.”

If animals are to be released, Jesus reasons, how much more deserving is a “daughter of Abraham” (Lk 13:16). This phrase is unique in the New Testament, but anticipates its counterpart in the later story of Zaccheaus, who is called a “son of Abraham” after he redistribute his wealth (19:9). Her “bonds” allude to prison chains (as in all but one of twenty appearances of desmos in the N.T.), since indebtedness in antiquity led either to servitude or prison. Based upon Deuteronomy 5, Jesus believes the true Sabbath obligation is not what we refrain from doing, but the work of liberation. Jesus “puts his opponents to shame,” while the crowd “rejoices at the glorious things Jesus was doing” (13:17). Joy is restored to the very space from which Jesus was expelled earlier.  Still, this is the last time Jesus visits a synagogue in Luke’s narrative. This woman’s liberation fulfills the promise he made in his inaugural synagogue drash to realize Isaiah’s vision of “loosing bonds” (4:18 = Isa 58:6).

This is a compelling text—but it is even more powerful when read as a diptych with 14:1-6. In the twinned Sabbath story, the bloated man also functions as a social type—even a political cartoon. In both cases, these characters have neither name nor backstory, both suddenly appearing in the scene); are not described as sick or disabled; and never speak. The synoptic view of these two stories (right) shows no less than a half dozen parallelisms (see pp 140-41 in HARP). So even though these two episodes do not appear consecutively in Luke’s story, they clearly should be treated as a diptych.

The man with dropsy is the leading episode in “great banquet” sequence of Lk 14. In the same way that her political body problematized the integrity of the synagogue community, so his pathology haunts this banquet room—on the Sabbath. He is the first person Jesus sees; his political body represents the condition of the body politic of this room. And the room is watching to see what Jesus will do.

Michael Gilleland has researched how dropsy was understood in classical antiquity: “The view was prevalent in ancient medicine that dropsy sufferers were insatiably thirsty… This led to a comparison between avarice (a disease of the soul) and dropsy (a disease of the body). He cites many examples of ancient writers making precisely this correlation, such as Diogenes, who likened greedy men to those suffering from dropsy, or Polybius, who compared dropsy to the impossibility of satiating the greed for gain. Ovid too ties dropsy and lust for wealth together:

Luke portrays this man’s dropsy as the spirit of affluenza lurking in this banquet room of elites. Jesus heals (exorcizes?) this crippling dis-ease as the prolegomenon to his serial challenges to those at the gathering that immediately follow—suggesting that healing will require the harsh medicine of confronting privilege.
This time, Jesus preempts his opponents by posing their objection as a question: “Is it lawful to heal people (Gk therapeuō) on the Sabbath, or not?” (14:3). In so doing, he is returning to the scene of his first “crime,” in which his synagogue healing on the Sabbath launched a conspiracy against him (back in 6:11). There Luke (following Mark) shaped Jesus’s query as a Deuteronomic ultimatum: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” (6:9 = Mk 3:4). That carefully choreographed political theatre invokes the memory of Moses on the mountain, overlooking the Promised Land, urging his people to “choose life” (Dt 30:15–19). Here in 14:3, Jesus again presses the question: What exactly are we about as a people?
As he did in Luke 13:14–16, Jesus interrogates the purpose of Sabbath: prohibition or liberation? His opponents “keep silent” (14:4a)—a classic “no comment.” Such studied avoidance is the refuge of political figures who imagine they are too powerful to be held accountable. Or of plutocrats who deem their institutions too big to fail. Or of the silence of most churches around issues of economic disparity.
    Jesus answers his own question by taking action. In three dramatic gestures, he takes ahold of the man, heals him, and releases him (14:4b). This last verb is the Jubilee “release” (Gk apoluō), used by Luke for releasing someone from sin (6:37), forgiving debt (as in 13:12), or setting a prisoner free (23:16–25). Jesus then turns back to the silent spectators with another cutting rhetorical question, linking this episode firmly to the bent-over woman: “If any of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a Sabbath day?” (14:5). His adversaries would be well aware that Torah enjoins aid to a neighbor’s ox or ass if it strays, concluding: “So you shall do with any lost thing of your brother’s” (Dt 22:3). The man with dropsy, “too big because of too much,” has clearly fallen into a hole he cannot get out of—the plight of an addict. But Jesus came to seek and save such people as well (as intoned at the conclusion of the later Zacchaeus story, 19:10). But others in the room are similarly diseased, and thus unable to welcome this healing object lesson in Sabbath Economics.
In this dyptich, Jesus challenges conventional interpretations of prevailing law with actions  meant to animate moral imagination. This is precisely what the contemporary tradition of nonviolent direct action attempts to do through civil disobedience.

  The aim of Sabbath Economics is to heal both those who are bent over by oppression, and those who are addicted to affluenza. This is the consistent message of Luke’s Jesus. The genius of Luke’s symbolic storytelling empowers these gospel stories to do the heavy lifting in our congregations. It is up to us to engage this power.

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