(Please read the Scripture passage before reading the homily.
You may want to read verses 31 to 37 of this chapter also. In that passage Luke tells us how Jesus cast the devil out of a man on the Sabbath by a verbal command. An unclean man had entered a holy place on a holy day and met the Holy One of Israel. On the Sabbath, the day that separates the ordinary from the holy, an unclean man had entered the place of cleanliness and encountered the holiness of God in the person of Jesus.
Now in the reading we are considering today, it is a woman afflicted by the devil, since fevers seemed to many to be a diabolical thing because of what feverish people say and do. The same word of God’s holiness that rebuked the devil in the synagogue, rebuked the fever of the woman who immediately was restored to health.
This was different from what would probably happen today. Today a doctor may tell a patient to take it easy for a few days, but with Jesus, the cure is immediate and without side effects or warnings.
Luke often tells parallel stories. He likes to be inclusive. In the synagogue he tells how Jesus healed a man with an unclean spirit. After the synagogue service, he tells how Jesus healed a woman with a bad fever. The healing presence of God is for women and men. It will also be for poor and rich, for Gentile and Jewish people, and for everyone. Whenever the biblical authors use pairs of opposites, they are including everything in between. We do the same with phrases like “from A to Z”, meaning everything.
Jesus had proclaimed the word in his hometown and he had proclaimed the word in Capernaum, now he had to go beyond “to the other towns”.
As Jesus was sent, so are we sent, not just to our hometowns, but to all the other places God sends us. There we must live the Word of God to men and women, in synagogues and outside of synagogues, in sacred spaces and in ordinary spaces, to young and old, to sinner and saint, to citizen and non-citizen, to those we like and those we do not like, in other words to all and in every place.