Luke 13:10-17 2024/12/8 Osaka Church
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit
One day, Jesus placed his hands on the body of a woman who had been ill for 18 years and had been unable to straighten herself. Immediately, the woman straightened up and began praising God. This is today’s Gospel.
But what had this woman been looking at up until that day?
…the ground. The ground, which she could only look at with her bent back, symbolizes “this world.” She had been focusing on the ground half of her life, in which she had lived every day of sadness and lamentation, literally crawling on the ground.
This woman had been looking only at the ground, and the stains of tears dripping down on it. When she straightened her body, what did she see?
The sky, the endless blue sky that seemed to draw her in, and the woman saw God there. “Something that can only be called God” is invisible to our eyes that are fixed on the ground… on this world. No matter how far we reach out, no matter how hard we strain our eyes, it just keeps getting further away. But that person is certainly there, and He is calling us to come here…that is the mystery of Him.
In church, we are taught that the light of the candles we light in the church and offer on the candlestick represents Christ’s guidance and our faith in him.
The church is dim even during the day, and almost pitch black at night, and the eyes of those who enter the church gradually get used to the darkness. Then the small light of the candle we hold in our hands gradually illuminates the icons there and the people standing there. Yes, this light gives us the ability to see the mystery. Vision into mysteries is something that our eyes fixed on this world can never see, so we can call it vision into God.
And what this light reveals is the guidance of Christ and faith in Christ. Like the woman who was finally able to stretch out and look up to the sky, we too, as we gaze upon the world that Christ, the Light, shows us, and the abundance of grace it is filled with, exclaim:
Great are You, O Lord, and wondrous are Your works, and no word will suffice to hymn Your wonders.
The One who came to us and gently laid His hands on our souls wandering in the darkness, the One who surpassed our vision, the One who, though God, became a “man” that we could see, was light. He is the one who opens up for us the world in which we were meant to live, ignites our longing for that world, and guides us there. And when we respond to Christ’s call and jump into a life of faith in Christ, we are all illuminated by God’s light and begin to shine.
Christmas is just around the corner. Everyone, please come to church to “light the lamp.”