Eighteen years ago, my partner and I were in Kyiv, at something like the midpoint of our journey from London to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, as part of the 2007 Mongol Rally. We spent a couple of weeks there, enjoying the late summer season in that beautiful city, drinking Kvas at the roadsides, and repeatedly hiking up the hills around the eastern edge of the city, looking out over the river and contemplating the next steps in our journey East. Many of the roads and one great statue there have been renamed, in the midst of the brutal and ongoing conflict that has seen endless, chaotic, and inhumane attacks without ceasing. It is a place I think of often.
The Mongol Rally is a lighthearted, low-horsepower journey with the aim of supporting charity and experiencing something of an adventure. Though we were in no rush, we did not intend to linger long in Kyiv, only long enough to obtain our visas for Russia. All of this was being done at the last minute, and we were thoroughly unprepared.
Shortly before we began our trip, I began a new medication to deal with a chronic medical condition that I expected to need some support with on our journey across vast, remote areas. Several countries previous, our car had been broken into, and a backpack was stolen, which contained a Velveteen Rabbit, a thick pile of business cards from my favourite haunts in Honolulu as a teenager, and the bulk of my medication supply. Now here, in a beautiful and bustling city, it was time to solve this problem.
I was twenty-two years old, and easily intimidated by most things, and on top of that my withdrawal from that particular drug was disturbing my sleep, my mood, and just about everything else. Having failed to figure out how to navigate local pharmacies, I reached out to friends and family back home, who worked with my physician to obtain an adequate supply of medication for the rest of the trip, and sent it along with a messenger bag to replace the much-loved backpack that had been stolen, both as a gesture of comfort in a trying moment, and because customs looked more leniently on shipments of personal effects than of meds. I felt loved and taken care of in an otherwise precarious situation.
A friend of mine heard of all this, and wrote me a harsh rebuke. There were, he said, pharmacies aplenty in Kyiv, and certainly shops that would have sold me a new bag. It was a selfish, wasteful, and shocking act to enlist couriers to carry them around the world. Indeed, my actions were immoral and reprehensible. I should have toughened up, pushed forward, and used my money for something more worthy.
I would have liked to. I tried. I was at the end of my rope. I did what I could.
***
The leader of the Synagogue is right, of course, that there are lots of occasions on which the woman in our Gospel this morning could have been healed. There are six days a week on which work is permitted, and only one on which it is forbidden. In fact, she is not facing some acute injury, but a chronic condition which has plagued her for a long time. There is no apparent urgency, and if she hasn’t been healed in eighteen years, she could have waited one day more.
Except that in eighteen years, nobody had yet bothered to heal her. Maybe she wasn’t ready, or maybe nobody cared, but it is a very long time to suffer. In nearly a thousand weeks, there were six days on which she could have been healed, and one on which it would have been forbidden, and it does not seem that that had been enough. Those years must have been filled with agony, being in a society in which her ailment was entirely disabling, and likely would have made her an outcast. That is a heavy weight to carry. That is an agonizing way to live.
Jesus saw the urgency of her burden, her ailment, her pain. If this could be fixed at once, then it must be fixed at once. Maybe she was ready, maybe he was the healer she had been waiting for. I get stuck on the duration of her suffering, and I wonder about the depth of her despair. Eighteen years is a long time. I wonder if she was at the end of her rope. I wonder if this was the only way she was ever going to be helped, and so the opportunity had to be taken.
***
The prohibition on working on the Sabbath is no peripheral thing, it is among the first of the Ten Commandments, and stands as a cornerstone of the relational laws that constituted the Jewish moral thought.
We are so prone to exploitation, and it is so easy for us to get wrapped up in the extraction of value, the production of goods, all manner of labour and work. We are obsessional creatures, and we are capable of creating quite profound hierarchies in which some people’s lives are used to enrich others with no regard for their bodies, their minds, their spirits. If there are no limits, we will not limit ourselves.
So then there must be a Sabbath. There has to be some kind of notion of rest, of not picking every single piece of fruit, of not stripping resources from every last grid of land, of not cutting every last tree, of restraint.
Morals, religious teachings, and a great deal of medical advice are ultimately about trying to find some way to instil in us a spirit of restraint, so that we can actually live.
I think of the words credited to the Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, who said:
Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. (Ted Poole, “Conversations with North American Indians” in “Who is the Chairman of This Meeting? A Collection of Essays” edited by Ralph Osborne)
The leader of the Synagogue is not wrong. There is little that restrains us. We must respect the things that do, or we might destroy ourselves. The Sabbath is a sacred and essential thing.
***
Jesus gestures at urgency, how if an animal were entrusted to even the leader of the Synagogue, himself, and it was desperately thirsty on the Sabbath, it would be obvious to go and take it to water. In this woman who has been suffering, Jesus sees a creature who has been entrusted to him, and a life which perhaps hangs in the balance. Even if she could wait one more day, there is the sense in which justice delayed is justice denied: she would be made to suffer needlessly. To ignore the opportunity to heal her would be to take up the work of creating pain, if only for a day. Jesus would have no part in this.
I wonder, too, if she really could wait one more day. Even now, we tend to dismiss chronic concerns as non-urgent. Eighteen years is such a very long time to suffer. I am sure she was quite desperate for relief. Agony, alienation, and an inability to function are always, always acute.
***
The leader of the Synagogue knows the risk of acting, of blundering down that slippery slope towards the annihilation for which we are always primed. He is right about that risk, but it leaves him unable to even perceive the other risks, the depths of her suffering, and the urgency of her plight. He judges things by fear, and he knows a great deal about fear.
Jesus sees an opportunity, and he takes it, and this he judges by its fruits. The woman’s suffering is relieved, and Jesus is not exploited into being expected to heal and miracle-work at every hour of the day. Nobody is calling his cell phone at 3am to demand that he turn another barrel of water into wine. He knows his limits, but this is a risk he is willing to take. This is a creature he is willing to love, to attend to, to care for, and to heal. It does not go so very badly.
***
May you use the resources you have to respond to those in need, and know where your limits are, and where you need others to support you, too. May you admit when you are in need, and let yourself be healed even if you are afraid it might inconvenience someone. May you judge things by their fruits, and not your fears, and see that when there is an opportunity to share of our love, care, and presence, we always have enough to give.