“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?” (Luke 13:16)

Big Issue sellers are perfectly legitimate traders, but many people hurry past them, with eyes averted. One seller of the magazine used to call out, “Buy The Big Issue – the magazine that makes you invisible,” because of people’s unwillingness to acknowledge his existence.

The woman in today’s Gospel reading has clearly become used to being invisible, too. It never occurs to her to approach Jesus and ask for healing. She just gets on with her usual business. Bent over, unable to stand upright, presumably in constant pain, she is still faithfully visiting the synagogue on the sabbath, expecting nothing, offering her patient devotion, unnoticed.

But Jesus calls her over, releases her spine to move from its locked position, and her instant reaction is to stand up straight and praise God. She is able to recognise the work of God at once.

But the other pious people are not so sure. She has put up with her affliction patiently for eighteen years; surely she could last one more day, so that she can be healed when the sabbath is over? Jesus could so easily have made an appointment to meet her the next day and heal her.

It isn’t that they don’t want Jesus to heal her at all; it’s just that they want him to respect the sabbath. From our first reading: ‘Refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day.’

But that is to misunderstand what this healing was all about. Luke gives us two huge clues: first of all, in verse 15, Luke suddenly calls Jesus “the Lord”. ‘The Lord answered him and said.’ “The Lord” is Israel’s God, who revealed himself to Moses, and freed his people from captivity in Egypt. And Luke gives Jesus this title. Secondly, Jesus calls the woman whom he has healed, “a daughter of Abraham”. That is an unusual term: “sons of Abraham” was much more common. “Sons of Abraham” inherit God’s covenant relationship with his people; they belong at the heart of God’s promises and plans for the world.

And suddenly we see what is going on here, and why it is entirely appropriate that this healing should take place on the sabbath. Jesus is acting out of the liberating power of God. He is to free one of God’s people who has been held in bondage. This woman is not just some inconspicuous, unimportant person, but a symbol of the whole people of God, whom Jesus has come to free. He is acting to bring her into her proper rest, her true sabbath freedom in God. He shows how all those locked into a cripplingly narrow field of spiritual vision can be released.

Of all the healings and parables centring on women in the Gospels, Luke’s Gospel contains a significant proportion – about half of all such stories in the Gospels. Luke is also very interested in non-Jews and in marginalised people. The people  whom the world barely sees and wholly discounts are often the ones who see, experience and understand Jesus’ mission.

This daughter of Abraham praises the God whom Mary describes in the Magnificat, as the God who has scattered the proud, lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry.

Learning to see with God’s eyes and to reimagine our priorities as a result of that vision is our work. Over and over again Jesus wrong-footed his contemporaries, not because they were more wicked than we are but because they, like us, had a value system that was drawn from human hierarchies of importance. The rich, the powerful, the eloquent, the energetic, the healthy, the high-achievers, these are the people we value and try to imitate.

The others, we barely see. But, for Jesus, these are precisely the people at the centre of God’s vision. All those who are pulled down, oppressed, enslaved by the imperfections of the world know that they need salvation, and praise God when they encounter it.