Luke 13:10–17 — The Healing of the Woman Who Was Bent Over

 

“Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity.”

 

I did not spend Thanksgiving bent over the sink.

 

Anyone who knows me even casually can attest: I am in no danger of being mistaken for a domestic goddess. The meal itself was in more capable hands; my contribution was setting the table, locating the matches, and trying not to burn anything that wasn’t supposed to be crispy.

 

But at one point I found myself at the sink with a small stack of dishes, and when I glanced up, there she was in the dark kitchen window.  

 

Shoulders rounded.
Neck forward.
Eyes down.

 

And I thought, with a little inward wince:
Well. There she is. The woman who has forgotten how to look up.

 

This whole long weekend has felt a bit like that.

 

While the world rushed into Black Friday, and then into what I can only describe as Black Saturday, Black Sunday, Cyber Monday, and (inevitably) Cyber Tuesday, I quietly opted out. Not because I’m secretly Amish or especially noble, but because my eyes are tired.

 

Tired of screens.
Tired of ads.
Tired even of good, holy work that still keeps me staring into glowing rectangles.

 

Ever since that two-day, Wi-Fi-free Amtrak ride a few weeks ago, something in my soul has felt… vintage. I’m one click away from a rotary phone and calling it spiritual warfare.

 

This “cyber weekend,” I’ve been unplugging as much as possible. We’re eating prime rib leftovers. The sweet potatoes came in a box from a Midwestern farm co-op run by women I’ve never met but somehow love.

 

I’m reading cozy mysteries and book three from my self-appointed “Church Geek Reading Plan 2026,” which is really just me stalking the footnotes of a beloved Orthodox book and promising myself I’ll actually read them.

 

Also: it is cold.

 

Officially, medically, cold.

 

“Your heart is healthy,” the doctor said, “but your blood vessels are very thin. Do you feel cold all the time?”

 

Yes. Yes, I do.

 

I sat there on the crinkly paper, wrapped in a paper gown that did nothing to help the situation, and thought how strange it is that someone can look at a scan and see something I feel every day but can’t explain: this constant chill I’ve started to mistake for a personality trait.

 

My counter-offer to cardiovascular wisdom so far has been to haul every wool sweater I own upstairs and build fortresses of knitwear. We strung white lights inside our bedroom windows on a timer. They flash on at 6 a.m., like a tiny indoor Nativity scene meets Las Vegas marquee.

 

Do I leap out of bed and do morning exercises as prescribed? No. I unplug the lights and crawl back under the covers until the coffee is ready and the warm canine weight at my feet finally releases me to the day.

 

I am, as they say, “morning challenged.”

 

++

 

Into all this shivering, screen-sick, sweater-layered humanity, the Gospel brings us a woman bent over for eighteen years.

 

She does not burst into the story with a dramatic speech. She doesn’t claw through crowds or shout down the Pharisees. She just shows up to synagogue as she has done for nearly two decades, her spine curved, her field of vision reduced to dust and sandals.

 

Eighteen years of seeing only ground.
Eighteen years of hearing conversations, but never quite looking anyone in the eye.
Eighteen years of learning to live life at ankle-level.

 

Scripture says she “could in no way raise herself up.”

 

No way.
Not with better stretches.
Not with a new planner.
Not with “ten steps to a healthier you.”

 

Her bent-ness is beyond her ability to fix.

 

And yet—and this is the part that undoes me—

 

“When Jesus saw her…”

 

He saw her.

 

Not as a problem.
Not as a disruption.
Not as an object lesson.

 

He saw a person. A daughter of Abraham. A woman whose world had narrowed to the ground—and whose horizon He was about to restore.

 

This past Thursday, before the leftovers and the wool sweaters and the avoidance of Black Everything, we drove through the freezing Oregon fog to St. Anne for the Thanksgiving Akathist.

 

Inside was warm: candles flickering, icons watching, the faithful gathered in coats and scarves. We stood there, still half-asleep, as Father Stephen chanted words once prayed in the shadow of a prison camp:

 

“Glory to Thee for raising us from the sleep of each new day.”
“Glory to Thee for every happening.”

 

At one point, as he read, there was a line about thanking God even for the frailty of old age, for the nearness of death, for the mercy hidden in weakness. I thought of my dad, of his hip, of his new sunlit room and the long road that brought us there, and my eyes stung in that way where you suddenly need to study the floor a little too intently.

For a moment I was afraid that if I looked up, the gratitude and the grief would both arrive at once, and I wouldn’t be able to hold them.

 

I wanted so much to stand like a saint—shoulders back, heart open, ready to say with St. John Chrysostom, “Glory to God for all things,” and actually mean it.

 

Instead, part of me stayed bent:

 

Did I answer that email?
Will Dad’s situation stay stable?
Am I doing enough? Being enough? Praying enough?

 

My body was upright. My soul was hunched.

 

There, in that small church full of candles and thin Oregon light, I felt oddly close to her—the woman in the synagogue whose back would not obey her.

 

++

 

One of the most startling details in her story is that she never speaks.

 

Not once.

 

We don’t get a polished monologue of repentance. No tidy spiritual résumé. We don’t even know why she came that day. Habit? Hope? Sheer stubbornness?

 

All the text tells us is this:

 

“He saw her.”
“He called her to Him.”

 

He doesn’t wait for her to perform spiritual readiness. He doesn’t ask her to straighten a little first, to prove she’s trying. He doesn’t say, “Come back when you’re doing better.”

 

He calls her as she is: bent, tired, unable to lift herself.

“Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity,” He says.

 

Loosed. Untied. Released.

 

He lays His hands on her, and immediately she is made straight.

 

I like to imagine what she saw in that first second of standing upright:
Faces instead of feet.
Icons instead of floor cracks.

The way light falls differently when you are no longer staring at the ground.

 

The first thing she does with this new posture?
She glorifies God.

 

Of course, somebody has a problem with this.

 

Enter the synagogue ruler, stage right, wagging his well-meaning finger. Healing is fine, he insists—just not on the Sabbath. “There are six days on which men ought to work; therefore come and be healed on them, and not on the Sabbath day.”

 

He would rather protect his schedule than rejoice in a miracle.

 

Jesus answers with almost painful clarity: you untie your ox or donkey on the Sabbath and lead it to water, but you resent loosing this woman, a human being, from what has bound her for eighteen long years.

 

You are more gentle with your animals than with your sister.

 

I recognize that ruler somewhere inside me—the part that says God can heal, but preferably according to my timeline, my comfort, my sense of how things “should go”; the part that rationalizes my own bent-ness and quietly insists, This is just how I am. I’ll fix it later; the part that believes everyone else deserves compassion—but I should probably just soldier on.

 

++

 

It is the Monday after Thanksgiving.

 

My inbox is breathing down my neck. The Nativity Fast is here. The sky in Oregon has taken on that particular pewter color that quietly whispers, Good luck seeing the sun until April.

 

My doctor wants me to exercise first thing in the morning. I want to make peace with my sweaters and my internal hibernation schedule.

 

Part of me longs to march into this season with a flawless plan for prayer and fasting and almsgiving. Part of me would be grateful simply to arrive at Christmas morning still able to stand.

 

Here is the mercy of this Gospel:

 

Christ is not waiting for our perfect posture.

 

He walks into the synagogue while she is bent.
He calls her before she can straighten.
He touches her as she is.

 

He is doing the same for us now, in small, hidden ways we may not even recognize as miracles yet. It might be the strength to keep caring for a spouse or parent for one more day, or the quiet grace to finally tell the truth in confession.

 

It might be the courage to stay off the internet for a weekend so the soul can breathe, or simply the faint but stubborn desire to pray even when prayer feels impossibly thin.

 

On our kitchen table, amid the books and bills and the ever-present mug of something hot, the Gratitude Jar still waits. I wrote one simple thing on a scrap of paper and tucked it in:

 

Thank You for seeing the parts of me that can’t lift themselves.

 

Maybe that is where our healing begins this week—not with heroic spiritual effort, but with showing up to the synagogue of our lives as we actually are: a little hunched, a little cold, a little tired of screens, trying to believe that “Glory to God for all things” might somehow include us.

 

The bent-over woman didn’t heal herself.
Neither can we.

 

But we can let Him see us.
We can let Him call us closer.
We can let His hands, in His time, begin to uncurl what we have been carrying for far too long.

 

If you find yourself walking bent over this week—from caregiving, from worry, from grief, from the grayness of these short days—please know: you are not a failed Christian.

 

You are simply the kind of person Jesus notices first.

 

Bring your bent places to Him—in Liturgy, in a whispered “Lord, have mercy” under a wool sweater, in the small brave act of turning off the screen and lighting a candle instead.

 

Let His gaze find you.

 

And when something, however small, begins to lift—when some weight shifts off your heart, when some stiff place in your soul loosens just a bit—do what she did.

 

Glorify God.

 

Even if all you can manage is a quiet, hoarse, “Thank You.”

 

Amen.

Perpetua

 

Postscript: A Word from the Saints

 

“Do all in your power not to fall, for the strong athlete should not fall. But if you do fall, get up again at once and continue the contest Even if you fall a thousand times… rise up again each time.”