Hebrews 12.18–29, Luke 13.10-17
The Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 24 August 2025, Austwick, Clapham
The eighteen-year-old girl makes her way through the Sunday shopping crowds, laden with designer carrier bags, looking somewhat bent and bowed-down beyond her years. The bags are weighing her down, for sure, full of new clothes, new shoes, new cosmetics. But what weighs heavier on her is her spirit. For she is caught in that familiar feeling of dissatisfaction, having spent a great deal of her time and credit on goods which she knows won’t satisfy her for long.
In the moments after she bought her new dress she saw someone wearing the same one who she thought looked far nicer in it; she knows that once she gets home and puts on her new make-up she will look in the mirror and still feel inferior to the models scrolling through her Tik-Tok.
Self-conscious in the Sunday shopping crowds she feels that everyone is looking at her, discussing her shortcomings, judging her inferior. She yearns to be perfect, like they are. It breaks her spirit and bends her low. She is eighteen, and it seems to her that it has always felt like this, and always will.
In a bedsit around the corner from the shopping centre, another eighteen-year-old girl sits alone, starving. Deliberately starving, that is, for she has decided that the way to deal with her sense of shame about her looks, the way to make sure that she fits into a society obsessed with thinness, is to avoid food altogether.
She is desperately hungry, but frightened of taking even a single bite, in case, having started, she should not be able to stop. Her bones are weak through not eating, her body is slowly bending out of shape. Possessed by the spirit of addiction to weight reduction which she has acquired from society at large, the girl in the bedsit has buried her normal instincts in pursuit of slenderness – and she is very ill.
She is eighteen, and this Sunday, as every day, she starves herself to become as skinny as the Olympic goddesses saved on her phone screen. [1]
These two Sunday girls are not unusual, although the spirit which oppresses them makes them feel isolated and alone. In a society where individualism is everything, where body image is crucial, we feel ourselves judged by others; we sense fingers pointing at us, our ears hear criticisms which come to us directly or which we soak up through the signals we get all the time from society.
It may be that the young are more deeply affected by this spirit of mimetic desire, but it touches us all at some level – otherwise there’d be no market for hair dye or anti-ageing cream. It is this spirit which drives our obsessions with food, fashion, and health.
And this applies whether we are ascetic or hedonistic; whether we buy ostentatious designer clothes or choose to conspicuously ‘dress-down’; whether we’re early-morning joggers or we’re contrarian couch potatoes – it is the same spirit at work, the spirit which causes us to always be looking at others and acting out of rivalrous desire. As René Girard puts it, “In the modern world, we compete as individuals, against all other individuals. The community is nothing and the individual is everything. We have identified the enemy and he is us.” [2]
Have you noticed how today’s gospel reading seems to be about the conflict between a spirit which bows and bends us out of shape, and a spirit which helps us stand tall? This is what lies behind Jesus facing-off the religious leaders on the question of working on the Sabbath.
On the one hand is the spirit of finger-pointing accusations based on the long lists of rules and regulations which had developed around Moses’ commands to labour for six days and keep the seventh day as a Sabbath, rules which had made unlawful even the most modest forms of work. [3] Imagine the heavy yoke this laid on the people, turning their Sabbaths into days in which they could do or achieve nothing, crushing their agency, causing a kind of nervous numbness in them.
On the other hand there is, in this gospel, the spirit of Jesus, which treated the Sabbath as a day like every other day – a day for continuing God’s creative work in the world, for healing the sick, sharing food with the hungry, casting out the spirits which oppressed the bowed-down. Imagine the freeing effect of Jesus’ easy yoke on the people who he released to live full lives again.
Now, if we have respect for traditional Sabbath observance we may feel surprised to see that Jesus supports working on the Sabbath. There is a difference, though, between our society’s carnival of unrestrained capitalism and Jesus’ idea of ‘keeping the Sabbath holy to God’.
For Jesus this means continuing the work of creation. He made the Sabbath a day of re-creation, a day for the transformation of all creation into wholeness. This puts him at one with the farmers, the gardeners, the birds and bees, and the trees and fields which clap their hands in praise of their creator, every day, all the time.
And above all, this shows us that on Sunday, as on every day, Jesus’ first priority is always to help the bowed-down person stand tall.
We saw what this meant for the crippled woman Jesus met. Imagine what this could mean for our two Sunday girls, and for all those we know who are like them – us included, for it is not just our young, but all of us who are in the work of creating and re-creating ourselves, through the changing circumstances of life. The One who created all things in love, and gave us life, seeks to join us in this work, so that by his spirit we may be transformed into wholeness.
God knows that we are vulnerable to the spirits which oppresses us, bow us down, stop us becoming the person we were formed to be.
God sees the struggles of our young; of our two Sunday girls, of those shop workers or fast-food crew or security team members on-call for Sunday shift-work and for whom a living wage and a day of rest is an elusive dream. And God sees the struggles of our elders too, for whom the changing circumstances of life bring different but equally substantial challenges.
As life crowds in around you, you may not be aware of him, but Jesus sees you – not as the world sees you, or as you think the world sees you: he sees you as having been created beautifully just as you are; by him you are completely accepted and unconditionally loved; in him you are able to live the fullest life that God has for you.
When you’re bent and broken-down in spirit Jesus longs to call you over and say, ‘You are set free from your ailment’, to release you from all that harms you, to help you stand up tall in this world.
Notes
A rewrite of The Re-Creation of the Sunday Girl, preached in Somerset, 2016.
Credit to Paul Neuchterlein for the fruitful directions he sent me in, in preparation of this sermon, from his Girardian Lectionary Reflections on Proper 16c.
[1] René Girard, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), p.8-9, and sleeve notes.
[2] René Girard, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), p.25.
[3] Exodus 20.8-10. See also Wikipedia: Activities prohibited on Shabbat for the contemporary ‘yoke’.
