My Lenten devotional this day brought me to a scripture from Luke where Jesus heals the woman who had been “crippled for 18 years by a spirit.” My ableist alarm immediately began tripping and I read the scripture and then the commentary that followed. The story goes, that Jesus spotted this woman in the crowd and then called her to him…he makes a proclamation that she is “healed from her ailment” and then she stand upright and praises God. As the priests always do when Jesus heals, they become infuriated and chastise him for working on the sabbath day. This leads to Jesus calling the priests out for their hypocrisy and the crowd rejoices at the great work that Jesus has done.

What do we know of this woman? This human creature that was standing in the crowd that day. The gospel writer creates her narrative for us…but I wonder and find myself wanting to know more about her.

I imagine a woman during those biblical times. IF I give any creedance at all to the narrative that the gospel writer painted, then I discern that she was an unwed woman. The writer says that a “spirit” had caused her to not be able to stand straight. Interesting thought here…could that “spirit” simply be the heaviness of the weight she was carrying by being unwed in a time where women were only worth something because they were married to a man? Could that heaviness be that she had lost her husband eighteen years ago, he had no family or brothers to care for her (as was the custom) so she was forced to fend for herself in the wilderness to survive? Could that heaviness had been that she was unable to bear children (yet another value attribution in that time for women) and he husband divorced her? Perhaps she was born with the inability to stand straight…which meant (once again in “those” times) that her or her family had done something that God was punishing her for…excuse me while I vomit at the atrocity of this way of thinking. I don’t have answers to any of these wonderings…but I think that this woman is worth more than what the gospel writer used her for. We shouldn’t overlook her and only see the mystery of this healing that Jesus thrust upon her. She was used as an illustration of Jesus’ power to work miracles….inspiration porn, if you will. All too often in our own society we bear witness to similar stories of people overcoming things thought to be impossible…and in the midst of all of that, we lose sight of the person’s humanity. This woman deserves more than that couple of sentences written about her in the bible…she doesn’t even have a name. I imagine a name for her…a name for her that I believe fits into the way that Jesus saw her and interacted with her…a Hebrew name for ‘precious’: Yakira.

Indeed, Yakira was a precious child of God. I imagine her story to be one of isolation and one where she wasn’t shown any kindness or love from others. The weight of life weighed her down…causing her to bend a bit more with each passing day. Yakira would bend, but she would not break under the weight of the harshness of her life story. She wanders into the synagogue, or perhaps just peers inside from the doorway at the commotion that Jesus has brought around him at his teaching and presence. And Jesus sees her. He calls out to her and call her by her name, “Yakira, come to me.” She nervously make her way to him as the crowd parts to make her path clear to Jesus. Jesus does something here that no one has likely done…in eighteen years of more of her earthly life…Jesus touches her. He touches her with love, kindness and compassion. Human and Divine…placing hands upon her and loving her as no other she had ever experienced. Jesus touching her was, in my interpretation, more important than any words of “victory over her” that were proclaimed. Yakira’s own spirit, to be sure, sought love, kindness and connection. To be seen, to be valued, to be held as the precious child of God that she indeed was. Her spirit is lifted, her weight she no longer carries because of the love he has shown her…and she raises her head and body which is now free from its weight. Yakira rises and praises God.

Jesus broke tradition here…and we too are called to break tradition in seeking justice for others and, to be sure, for ourselves. We face many things in life that weigh us down and wear on our souls. Bending…breaking…pushing us down. Life tears at us and leaves us dangling, threadbare…clinging to whatever bit of hope we can grasp at in our times of wilderness and darkness. It is, however, within those times that we are better able to hear that still small voice of God…it can come as a whisper from some place deep within us…or perhaps, from a kind word or crinkled eyes peeking over a masked face. When someone SEES us…calls to us and speaks a life-giving word to us. THAT is a miracle we are all capable of and THAT is something that we should all embody towards others as beloved children of God. I wonder how much more life-giving this biblical narrative could be had this woman been given more humanity? I wonder often about those left unnamed and used to make a point. These wonderings are important and can bring much more commonality between our lives in this time next to those lives that walked upon this earth more than 2000 years ago. Will you wonder with me? What do you wonder about this beloved woman, Yakira?