Qal va-homer (Jesus heals the "crippled woman")
When we hear a story about Jesus healing someone, often the story is both about a specific person and about the attitudes of the people who happen to be in the room at the same time. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus heals a woman “with a spirit that had crippled her for 18 years.” Because he heals her on the Sabbath, Jesus gets a lot of flack from the leaders of the synagogue. Jesus claps back, telling them that they are the ones who have failed to uphold the Sabbath, which is a day set aside to celebrate healing and liberation, namely the liberation of the sons and daughters of Abraham.
When we read about Jesus teaching in the synagogue, it helps to imagine what that might have looked like. It’s not quite a lecture hall, or a modern courtroom. Jesus isn’t a lawyer arguing his case against opposing counsel. When Jesus is teaching in the synagogue, he’s standing in a low-level pulpit amidst a congregation. The men in the congregation are seated around him on the floor, the women seated in a separate area in the balcony above. The men gathered around Jesus would have held a number of different positions in the community, some of them scribes, some of them rabbis. When Jesus stood up to offer a teaching, there was likely a scroll that had been read beforehand: a reading from the law of Moses or one of the prophets. Then, there would have been debate back and forth, back and forth.
On that particular Sabbath, when Jesus was teaching and this woman appears, Jesus and the leader of the synagogue were likely already engaged in a debate about what was unlawful to do on the Sabbath. Jesus likely saw this woman arriving and healed her right there and then in the middle of the synagogue to make a point. It was the obligation of law-abiding Jews to provide food, clothing, and shelter for the sick and disabled members of their synagogue. The synagogue was one such location where these services were provided, so it wasn’t unusual for someone to turn up asking for help. However, it was unusual for someone to turn up on the Sabbath.
This woman was likely, in my view, a Gentile (a Jew would have known healing was forbidden on the Sabbath). Jesus suspects this is the real reason the leader is opposing this healing. The sick and the disabled who were Gentiles were not counted as sons and daughters of Abraham, and therefore the members of the synagogue did not have the same obligation to care for them as they would one of their own. (This is why I believe Jesus’ teaching to love your neighbour as yourself to be such a radical teaching for a first century Jewish audience). Jesus responds, calling the woman “a daughter of Abraham”—meaning, by virtue of her needing healing, by virtue of her seeking liberation, she, too, is a daughter of Abraham.
Jesus goes on to talk about how the members of the synagogue are willing to release themselves from the obligations of the Sabbath to untie their livestock and get them water, but they are not willing to provide the same basic care for a human being. I learned this week that there’s a phrase for the kind of rhetoric Jesus is using here. In rabbinical teaching they call it qal va-homer: “the argument from the minor to the major.” It follows the logic that “if A is so then B must surely be so; if the ‘minor’ has this or that property then the ‘major’ must undoubtedly have it.” Rabbis—teachers—such as Jesus would have used this rhetoric to expand and elaborate on biblical teachings.
If it’s true that you’re willing to “corral” your oxen to get them water on the Sabbath, then surely you are able to “corral”—to put your heads together and find a way to care for this Gentile (Jesus releasing himself from the obligation of the Sabbath to “untie” this woman from her ailment is a deliberate critique of the Jewish authorities releasing themselves from the obligation of the Sabbath to “untie” and feed their livestock). If Jesus were to put this critique into the form of a question, he might have said: do you mean to say that your animals have greater freedom than this human being?
One scholar commenting on this passage writes: “In Jesus’ view, since the Sabbath law commemorates and celebrates Israel’s liberation, it ought to be a day for enacting — not inhibiting — … present-day liberation.” Indeed, there are examples even today of human beings using religion as an excuse to inhibit rather than enact liberation. Christians, Muslims, and Jews are working together around the world to address the very attitude within the state of Israel today that Jesus addressed when he stood up in that synagogue some 2000 years ago. It is not your bloodline or your religion that makes you a child of Abraham: it is your need for liberation. Among the reasons the state of Israel gives for their military siege on Gaza, is the claim that it is their inherent right as sons and daughters of Abraham to occupy the Holy Land. Today that land includes Palestinians who have lived there for thousands of years, Palestinians who are Gentiles in the eyes of the state. Gentiles, who are crying out for healing, seeking liberation, only to be given food and water that wouldn’t keep even an animal alive.
Ought not these Palestinians, by virtue of their need for healing, by virtue of their cries for liberation, to be counted as children of Abraham, too?