Progressive reflections on the lectionary #78

Monday 18th August 2025

Luke 13:10-17 - the subversive strategy of winning the argument

The passage this week is about a healing Jesus carries out in a Synagogue during the Sabbath. Sometimes known as ‘the cure of the bent woman’ it is similar to a slightly later story about the healing of a ‘dropsical man’. I’m interested in the setting of the story, and suggest that it indicates that it is an account based on a historical tradition which demonstrates Jesus’ interest in, and strategy of, changing customs and practises in first century Palestine.

Luke has a thing about the Pharisees - for the most part he likes to tell stories about Jesus arguing with Pharisees, it serves his purpose rather well. In this story, though, Luke has Jesus in a synagogue - having a legal dispute with a leader there. The synagogue was not the home of the Pharisee, instead the boss level player was the archisynagogos, the community leader.

Public synagogues in first century Palestine were public buildings, ‘local official institutions’ as one scholar puts it. Rather than ‘places of worship’ as many of us have come to think of them, they were the places where law was decided and enacted and where local practises could be worked out and decided.

The Torah was read there because there wasn’t the split that we now assume between sacred and secular, God’s law was ‘the law’. The book told people how to live, and this was a source of debate.

Discussion and speech within the synagogue was dominated by the local important folk, magistrates, rich folk and other community bigwigs. Ultimately, though, actual decisions were made by the collective view of the members of public who assembled there to listen to the speech making.

By being a convincing, or clever, speaker, you could win approval, prestige and ‘honour’ in the synagogue - more importantly though such speech making could lead to changing the way a community thought - and thus behaved. Different communities could take different views on how to interpret laws and ideas, the sense that there was ‘one view’ of something is erroneous.

The setting of this story in a synagogue, rather than in the street with the Pharisees, suggests that the story is one with some historical credibility, one that Luke has heard or read, and repeated in his narrative. That it is very similar to the story of the ‘dropsical man’ in Luke 14: 1-6 which does involve a more familiar set of opponents is striking. Luke’s not one for repeating things unnecessarily, the setting here is important.

I think that is because what it shows is what seems to have been part of Jesus’ overall strategy for spreading the message of a reforming, prophetic Judaism. He would go into the synagogues in the places he visited, and seek to win over the public to his way of thinking. Here the story is about what is legitimate to do on the sabbath, and Jesus takes the prophetic line that what God wants is justice, mercy, and so on rather than strict, legalistic, religious observance.

His skill in argument and debate is clearly advanced, despite not having the same sort of local recognition and prestige as the local civic leader, he gains honour and therefore shames the archisynagogos in this story. I mean, the more you think about it, the less of a surprise it is that these people came to hate him, really.

Looked at carefully, the gospel stories don’t seem to me to be about finding a new way to get to heaven, but to be about a new way of living in the world, or perhaps more precisely an old way of living - one that defies the demands of empire, but also denies the priority of legalism and the power of the institutions. The closer one looks at Jesus’ preaching ministry in Galilee, the more it looks as though he was on a mission to get people to think and behave differently, that he was building an upside down kingdom in the heart of the empire.

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