One Sabbath day, Jesus was teaching in a synagogue. A woman was there who was severely disabled. Her body was all bent over so bent over that her head was nearly even with her waist. Dr. Luke tells us she could not straighten up at all. That strikes me as an unbelievably sad situation. Forgetting the pain and the inconvenience of not being able to straighten one’s body, imagine what that would do to your self image. Imagine not just the physical pain, but the emotional pain of this kind of obvious deformity of the entire body.

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson suggests that this woman’s problem was probably what physician’s today would call Ankylosing Spondylitis, or Marie-Strümpell Disease, a disease that causes bones in the spine to fuse together. It is a disease that usually affects young men, thoug…