God’s Law in Action!

Monday, October 27, 2025

Rom 8:12-17; Lk 13: 10-17

Today’s Gospel highlights God’s law in action in and through Jesus’ healing of the crippled woman. 

What is striking is that as Jesus is preaching, he notices a woman crippled by a spirit for eighteen years, bent over, and completely incapable of standing erect. 

Though this is the description available, what it leaves unsaid is that Jesus looks at the woman’s inner longing to be cured. He senses that the woman wants to stand erect like others. He also sees that she is a person forgotten by humanity. When we go over these minute details, we discover that Jesus always sees what others overlook. 

But the irony is that the leader of the synagogue reacts with indignation to Jesus’ healing. His rebuke of the congregation only betrays the distortion of God’s Law, the propagation of which he and his ilk carefully monitored, all in the name of God. What they presented to people was mere regulation that was stripped of God-intended compassion and mercy.

His rebuke also reveals something tragic. He could see that Jesus performed the healing on the Sabbath, but he could not see that the woman had been suffering for eighteen years. He could see the violation of a rule that they held on to and propagated as God’s law but not the restoration of it when Jesus performed the life-affirming miracle. In his blindness towards the law, he overlooked the very person for whose welfare, dignity, and flourishing God gave the Law.

On the contrary, by performing the healing on the Sabbath, Jesus demonstrates that the one who loves God’s Law cannot but put it into action, especially when it concerns human dignity. For Jesus, upholding God’s Law will never find a better occasion than the Sabbath, which was meant by God for humanity’s renewal and freedom. Moreover, by choosing the day of the Sabbath to perform the healing, Jesus wants to prove to the congregation that God’s Law will justify itself in actions that uplift others. 

Let us pray that we may grow into people who fearlessly put God’s law into action. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar