Stand and be seen

 

August 24, 2025, First Lutheran Church of Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

The woman in today’s scripture cannot stand erect. She is painfully bent over as if she had a millstone on her back. Her eyes are permanently cast down. She spends her days staring at litter and rubbish on the street. She cannot look into the eyes of the people who pass by her. The people who pass by glance at her and quickly turn away. She is invisible.

But she is a flesh and blood human being who cannot be seen because people refuse to see her.

Ralph Ellison, in his novel Invisible Man, depicts a flesh and blood human being who is invisible because he is black.

“I am an invisible man,” he writes. “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.”

Have you ever felt invisible?

I suspect we have all experienced invisibility at times. As a kid, I had little athletic ability and I felt invisible waiting to be chosen for games. In Little League I was a permanent fixture on the bench, convinced the coach could not see me. Watching A League of Their Own in 1992, I knew Tom Hanks was wrong when he declared, “There’s no crying in baseball.”

Sometimes invisibility is a plague of adolescence. Some are never asked to dance at the prom. Some can never get a date because everyone they ask will be “washing their hair” that night. Some never get “likes” on their Facebook posts. Some are “ghosted” on the internet and wither into cyber oblivion.

Of course invisibility requires people who choose not to see unpleasant things. We render people invisible when we divert our eyes from beggars on the street, when we pass by homeless people sleeping on heating grates, when we turn away from persons who do not look like us.

Invisibility can be ironically contradictory. Sometimes fate conspires to make a person so visible that the real human being inside cannot be seen.

So it was with Joseph Merrick, an ordinary English chap whose severe physical deformities caused people to call him the elephant man. Millions gawked at him in side shows and novelty exhibitions where he was billed as half man, half elephant. No one saw Joseph Merrick. He was invisible.

When I was a teenager I loved to attend the Madison County fair in Central New York. That was back when side shows were still a cultural phenomenon and barkers would stand outside the tent urging you to spend a quarter so you could go inside and see astounding sights.

My buddy John and I could never resist that kind of temptation and we’d drop two bits into the basket so we could see exotic marvels like a five-legged calf or Lydia the Tattooed Lady.

One of the exotic exhibits was a middle-aged man named Billy* who was born with a cleft palate so severe that he had a deep gash in his head from his upper lip to his hairline. A human eye had been crudely painted in the hollow of his forehead so it looked like he had three eyes. Billy was billed – paradoxically – as “Cyclops Man.”

As the crowd gathered around him, Billy began to speak with a deep southern accent.

“Thank you for coming,” he drawled. “I give thanks to my Lord Jesus Christ for my many blessings. If Jesus loves ugly me, he loves you, too. Believe on the Lord and you shall be saved.”

The crowd shuffled out of the tent in silence. We Central New Yorkers weren’t accustomed to public Christian witness but I never forgot Billy. He overcame his invisibility and became visible. 

The woman in Luke’s story today has been invisible for eighteen years. God knows how many hundreds of people passed by her but did not see her. How many people told themselves her affliction was God’s judgment for an unknown sin? How many patriarchal men turned away from her because women were of little worth and the woman’s suffering was of little consequence?

As Jesus was teaching in the synagogue that day, it seems likely the woman was hanging back, cloaked in her invisibility. It would have been unthinkable for a woman to enter the sanctuary of the synagogue, and inconceivable that a woman would approach a man for any purpose. So she stood apart, unseen and discounted by the people around her.

But Jesus saw her.

Jesus called her over, laid his hands on her, and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”

“Immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.” (Lk 13:13)

“Jesus sees this woman when no one else does,” writes Jared Alcántara, professor of preaching at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

“Throughout his ministry, Jesus had his eyes trained to see those who were forgotten, left out, and unnoticed by others.”

But Jesus does more than see her, Alcántara notes. 

“He acts to bring about the transformation she seeks. According to verse 12, he also ‘called her over.’ The God who sees us is the God who calls us. She had been outside the synagogue, and he invited her in; on the periphery, and he brought her to the center; invisible at one moment, and he called her the next.”

We are all challenged to see others as Jesus sees them. I was once in a small gathering of Baptist leaders who were reminiscing about Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, two luminaries who actually made Baptists look good. (I might add that if all Baptists were like Jimmy and Rosalyn, I might still be one.)

One of the Baptist leaders told the story of Rosalyn’s visit to New York City to investigate homelessness in order to recommend ways the federal government might help.

“This was in the late seventies when New York was, well, the pitts,” the leader said.

“Rosalyn found herself literally stepping over sleeping homeless men. She began weeping and couldn’t stop. New York was a traumatic experience for her. She didn’t see things like that it Plains.”

His implication, I think, was that New Yorkers were used to dodging homeless people and didn’t get emotionally involved.

But my observation would be that Rosalyn was not reacting out of Southern naivete but because she was seeing these human beings through the eyes of Jesus. Any time we are able to do that, it’s a gift from God.

And we know, too, that both Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter found ways to act on this insight through their years of active service to Habitat for Humanity where they worked on many projects to build houses for people who needed roofs over their heads.

Jesus saw the needs of the woman who was so painfully bent over and he acted.

It was a time for rejoicing and gratitude to God. Unless, of course, you were the leader of the synagogue.

“But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.’”

Jesus lets him have it with both barrels. 

“You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” (Lk 13:10-16)

“Jesus does not spare him or mince words,” writes Jared Alcántara “He unleashes a classical rabbinical argument: If one is willing to unbind an ox on a Sabbath day to give it water, how much more should you be willing to unbind a woman who was bound for 18 years? An animal, yes, but a person, no? One day? What about 18 years?”

Jesus is forcing the Synagogue leader to remember that the law of the Sabbath Day was given to the children of Israel at the very time God was liberating the people from Egyptian bondage.” In addition to being ironic, it is hypocritical to use the law to prevent liberating another child of Israel, a “daughter of Abraham,” from 18 years of bondage.

“For those who are religious or who like being religious about their religiosity,” Alcántara writes, “remember: When you do not see others, Jesus confronts you. The church is not meant to be a country club, a health spa, or a gated community but, rather, a place where those who are seen and freed by God are empowered to see others with eyes of faith.

Billy the Cyclops, exploited, disfigured, mocked gawked at, knew a great truth. God loved him categorically. And it was not his face that God loved but his beautiful, loving soul, created in the image of God.

For those who know what it is like to feel invisible or unnoticed in a world that struggles to pay attention, remember: When others do not see you, Jesus sees you. Those whom Jesus sees, Jesus frees. Like the woman in Luke 13, like Billy, you too can stand up straight and be seen.