Trinity 7 Evensong
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 6th July, 2008
Before I had my own dog, a few years ago I was asked to look after a friend’s dog for a weekend. He was a lovely black Labrador called Ramsey, named after the rather saintly archbishop of Canterbury. Dogs are the best date lines ever, people talk to you when you have a dog, and I quickly came to learn the etiquette of dog-walking. The other thing I quickly noticed is how the names of the dogs differed from place to place. When I took Ramsey over to Bethnal Green to visit another friend and took him for a walk, all the other dogs in the park were called Butch, Tiger, Rocky and, yes, I even met two bull terriers called Posh and Becks. Then, when I took Ramsey for a run up in Hampstead, he found himself galloping around with dogs called Wagner, Windsor, Euppy, which was short for Euripides and we even were introduced to two cats on leads called Fortnum and Mason.
Names are strange things and have a sort of magical power over us. And its not just dogs of course, I’m always intrigued to see what parents decide to call their children at baptism. My first baptism I ever did in St John’s Wood was of a girl called Vogue Coco Chanel. My Vicar gave me her I think because he was too embarrassed to do it himself – and he had baptised her sister the year before who was called Cartier! I wonder how they cope at school now? Because schools can be particularly cruel with names – I look back in absolute horror at the name some of my friends were jeered with at school – Fatso, Queerboy, Cripple and the boy who suffered such bad acne taunted each day as Pizza face. It was shameful, degrading and probably affected those boys well into adult life. Where, of course, we don’t stop. We love giving hurtful names and labels. The trendy cynical humour of today revels in them. They are such useful ways of getting people to look away from us.
In the gospel story today we hear of the bent woman. How would you like to be immortalised in the scriptures in that way? She was bent over, had been bent over, staring at the ground, unable to look people in the eye, back terribly contorted, damage being done to various organs of her body, for many years. The Greek says she had a pneuma astheneias, a “spirit of weakness”. She doesn’t seem to have a name in the town. When they see her creeping down the street they didn’t say “Here comes Mary” or “Look, its Rachel”. They said “Here comes the bent woman, the crippled woman”. That was her name and in her name was her life, her destiny, her whole sad fate. Its easy to snigger at so-called politically correct ways of speaking with people with such disabilities today, but it is an attempt but those who live with them not to be labelled and pigeonholed and given a name and life simply based on their difference. This woman doesn’t have an identity other than that of a victim. She doesn’t have a family it seems, no occupation, nothing but her deformity. She is the one who is bent, stooped, bearing upon her shoulders a heavier burden than people saw – the burden of not looking like everyone else and of not being able to do what everyone else does. She is the crooked woman. She is there in the gospel for everyone who is so named and whose soul is unseen – the drunk, the thicky, the nutter, the packie, the muslim, the jew, the poof, the commie, the old buffer, the silly old bat.
Now the “healing” (actually the man calls it that, Jesus says she is “set free”) that Jesus brings to this woman is extraordinary and lets not over look the radical things he does. He heals her on the Sabbath when he could have waited a couple of hours, after all she wasn’t dying, she’d been like this for 18 years, she could have waited another 2 hours and then the religious observers wouldn’t have had a problem. The man who took Jesus on was correct and brave…anyone in a position of authority struggles with appropriate limits and is tempted to be overly strict in enforcing standards. Where do you draw the line? What do you do when someone fails to meet those standards as a parent, teacher, employer, supervisor, soldier, bishop, friend or whatever? Jesus gives a clear lesson: don’t lose sight of the person in need. It is godly to help and sometimes godly to overlook conventions. By the way it wasn’t just the healing that was radical. he had also called attention to a woman during worship and touched her, risking ritual defilement. We follow a naughty Lord! The way Jesus behaves actually reveals that the person really bent over and crippled in spirit was the man who couldn’t celebrate another’s release and wholeness.
But back, finally, to names. After calling the onlookers and murmurers hypocrites, Jesus then tells everyone to look at the woman as he calls her a daughter of Abraham, only here is this expression found in all of the gospels. The bent woman is being called now a daughter of Abraham, a daughter of that great great granddad of Israel and of faith, the one to whom, one starry night, a promise was given, a promise that a great people would come through him, a nation that would be blessed. Jesus, heals her again, by naming her as a daughter of Abraham, an heir to the blessings of God and called, as we all, to be a blessing to this world. She is meant for more than superficial, cruel, limiting labelling. She is part of God’s world too and she stands up straight when this new name is given her. Its almost that even if her back hadn’t been healed, she could have stood tall as a daughter of God, and to be remembered as that, not as the bent woman. I wonder how her life began to grow into this new status, how she began to live into God’s dreams for her? Her God-given dignity named at last.
A radical Christ who heals on the Sabbath and touches women in worship, who knows that caring sometimes demands social upheaval. A healing Christ who exposes our cruelty and God’s acceptance of all his people. A Jesus who wants to name you a son and daughter of Abraham, who won’t let you lower yourself to names that the world will call you, but calls you to live up to the name God gives you instead, telling you that your life counts for something and has a place on stage in God’s drama of redemption and liberty. And to that Christ be all our praises, love and glory this day and for all the ages. Amen.
