This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound... ought she not to have been set free

Gospel of the Day (Luke 13:10-17)

He was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath.

And a woman was there who for eighteen years had been crippled by a spirit; she was bent over, completely incapable of standing erect.

When Jesus saw her, he called to her and said, "Woman, you are set free of your infirmity."

He laid his hands on her, and she at once stood up straight and glorified God.

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant that Jesus had cured on the sabbath, said to the crowd in reply, "There are six days when work should be done. Come on those days to be cured, not on the sabbath day."

The Lord said to him in reply, "Hypocrites! Does not each one of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger and lead it out for watering?

This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now, ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day from this bondage?"

When he said this, all his adversaries were humiliated; and the whole crowd rejoiced at all the splendid deeds done by him.

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Reflections:

"This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound... ought she not to have been set free"

The freedom of man: God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. "God willed that man should be 'left in the hand of his own counsel' (Si 15,14) so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him»; «Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts» (Saint Irenaeus)...

Man's freedom is limited and fallible. In fact, man failed. He freely sinned. By refusing God's plan of love, he deceived himself and became a slave to sin. This first alienation engendered a multitude of others. From its outset, human history attests the wretchedness and oppression born of the human heart in consequence of the abuse of freedom... By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth.

By his glorious Cross Christ has won salvation for all men. He redeemed them from the sin that held them in bondage. "For freedom Christ has set us free" (Gal 5,1). In him we have communion with the "truth that makes us free" (Jn 8,32). The Holy Spirit has been given to us and, as the Apostle teaches, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2Cor 3,17). Already we glory in the "liberty of the children of God" (Rom 8,21).

The grace of Christ is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom when this freedom accords with the sense of the true and the good that God has put in the human heart. On the contrary, as Christian experience attests especially in prayer, the more docile we are to the promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom and confidence during trials, such as those we face in the pressures and constraints of the outer world. By the working of grace the Holy Spirit educates us in spiritual freedom in order to make us free collaborators in his work in the Church and in the world.