Summary of my sermon, based on Luke 13:10-17. Preached at Greenhills Christian Fellowship Toronto on January 25, 2026.
Amen. Last week I mentioned serving as a missionary in Japan and watching all those videos of mom-and-pop eateries. Often you see elderly obāsans with a pronounced forward curve—a dowager’s hump—age-related, painful, limiting. That image came to mind in our passage.
“Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And behold, there was a woman who had a disabling spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself… ‘Woman, you are freed from your disability.’ And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God” (Luke 13:10–13, ESV).
Luke—the physician—notes both a physical and a spiritual dimension: a “disabling spirit.” Not necessarily elderly, not merely slow, age-related change; crippling, painful, socially stigmatizing. In that world, visible deformity could be read as curse or consequence. Faces turn away. Doors close.
Scripture reminds us not to flatten reality to the merely material—or to sensationalize the spiritual. “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against… the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12, ESV). C. S. Lewis warned of two equal and opposite errors: to disbelieve devils entirely, or to cultivate an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. Here, Luke simply shows both dimensions were in play—and Jesus is Lord over them all.
Notice Jesus’ tenderness. He sees her, calls her, speaks freedom, touches her: “Woman, you are freed from your disability.” Immediately she is made straight and glorifies God. Psalm 103 gives us language: “Bless the LORD, O my soul… who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit” (Psalm 103:1–4, ESV).
Not everyone rejoices. “The ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people, ‘There are six days in which work ought to be done; come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath’” (Luke 13:14, ESV). Jesus answers by turning their own Sabbath casuistry on its head: “Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” (Luke 13:15–16, ESV).
They would untie an animal; Jesus looses a woman. Same idea, different object. Their rules could show pity to livestock; their hearts refused mercy to a daughter of Abraham. That’s the hypocrisy Jesus unmasks.
Rules and rhythms matter. Obedience is not a dirty word. “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar… whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:2–6, ESV). The danger comes when religion—our habits, guardrails, traditions—becomes a substitute for redemption, when hedges around the law eclipse the heart of the Lawgiver.
Jesus names the “weightier matters”: “justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matthew 23:23, ESV). James calls this “religion that is pure and undefiled before God”: “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27, ESV). In other words, yes—keep the Sabbath holy; and yes—let the Sabbath be a day when the bound are loosed, the bent stand straight, and the forgotten are seen.
Luke concludes: “As he said these things, all his adversaries were put to shame, and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him” (Luke 13:17, ESV). That’s the order we want: shame for hypocrisy, joy for mercy, glory to God. May our practices never muzzle compassion. May our boundaries never bar redemption. Bless the Lord, O my soul.
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