Unbinding Dignity
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In the beginning, God. In all fullness, all power, all majesty and glory, God. Before time and creation, before cosmos explosively spun into existence and atoms began their dance, God.
God spoke, “Let us make humanity. Let us take dirt and clay, mud and guts, and fashion for ourselves something of the earth, something of the creation we have woven into order and filled with goodness. Let us make humanity. But not as another beast of the field, bird of the air, or creature of the deep. No, let us give a new form, a new shape to this human.
“Let us make the human in our image.”
And thus, God created Imago Dei.
Imago Dei is a Latin phrase that means the image of God. So, in the beginning, God created the image of God, us. Humanity is the image of God. We are Imago Dei, fashioned to reflect the God of cosmos and microcosms, the God of salvation and redemption, the Self-sacrificing God who is the servant of all. We are God’s image.
This wasn’t a convenient accident. God made a deliberate choice to fashion and craft us in divinity’s image. This was the plan, the intent, the purpose of creating humanity. God wanted to display who and what God is, so we were made to showcase that image.
Being the image of God also means being called good. When God made creation, he dubbed every part good. But, after humanity was created, God saw that it all was VERY good. We are good; we are very good. It is inherent in us, part of the core of our being, part of being called Imago Dei. We are good, we have worth, value, and dignity simply because we are human.
This is something we share with every person of this world, throughout all time and space. If you are human, you have an inherent dignity.
Therefore, poverty should rattle us, slavery in any form should shake us up, abuse should cause us to quake. Anything that takes away the dignity of another human is a denial of their bearing the image of God. Murders (even state sanctioned) are a destruction of Imago Dei, a snuffing out of God’s image. Xenophobia, bigotry, racism, prejudice… all these things that turn our fellow Imago Dei into an “other” are affronts to God because they deny people the dignity inherently created in each one of us.
But how quickly we forget.
We are quick to draw lines around the good people and the bad people, around the acceptable and the unacceptable. Even when we acknowledge other people’s inherent dignity, we do so conditionally: as long as people act the way we deem respectable, then they are worthy of our time, our attention, our help, our acceptance.
Christians do this just as much-if not sometimes more-than others. But we shouldn’t. The pioneer and perfector of our faith doesn’t play those games. No, Jesus saw, embraced, and highlighted the dignity of every person he touched.
In the middle of teaching in a synagogue, Jesus stops the lesson. He has just seen a woman bound by weakness and infirmity. This woman came to hear the teaching of the Lord, and Jesus saw all of her, even in her pain and bondage.
Jesus could have simply told her she was well, healed her with a word. But he didn’t. Jesus touched her, laying his holy hands on her Imago Dei. What could she do but praise God as she stood, unbound and unburdened for the first time in almost two decades?
You would think this miracle would elicit nothing but praise and amazement. But no, the propriety patrol had to say something. The leader of the synagogue berates the people, reminding them that this is the Sabbath, a day in which no work is to be done. A day of rest. “There are six days of work; come to be healed on those days.”
Now, the way the synagogue leader instructs the crowd on proper behavior tells me there were probably many sick and burdened people in the crowd. Why instruct people who are well on when to come and be healed? This crowd needed healing, and he told them when and where they could ask for it. He told them when and where they could come to find relief for their burdens. He told them when and where they could come to Jesus.
The crowd was told that they needed to follow protocol, that they needed to behave with propriety, not disrupt the status quo or break a religious law in their quest to be freed from what binds them. Part of that religious law was keeping the Sabbath day. The Sabbath was a holy day, a day not to work, a day of rest. It was holy because it reflected God’s finished act of creation, and stood as a testament to his rest.
In the Jewish practice of keeping Torah, of keeping the religious law, things dubbed as work were forbidden on the Sabbath. To keep themselves from breaking the commandment of keeping the Sabbath holy, there were strict rules about what was and was not considered work. One of those things was untying knots. On the sabbath, what was bound remained bound… except it didn’t. See, there’s always an exception to the rule, and this rule’s exception was for leading livestock to water so they didn’t thirst, or possibly die.
The life and wellbeing of farm animals were an exception to the rule of work… but people had to follow the letter of the law and seek their wellbeing, their healing, their untying of what bound them on the other six days?!
Is it any wonder Jesus calls out this hypocrisy with a fierce quickness?
Human lives have an inherent dignity to them, and there is no reason healing shouldn’t come on the Sabbath. Isn’t it right that what binds us should become unknotted on this holy day, a day that remembers God rested only after he called humanity very good?
Jesus, the ultimate Imago Dei, says a holy yes to this woman’s healing on the Sabbath because he acknowledged the inherent dignity and worth in her that needed to be unbound and restored.
As we seek to love our others as Christ has loved us, we have a responsibility to acknowledge the dignity of each and every neighbor we come across. We are the ones responsible for removing the yokes of burden that are placed on people, things like the expectations of respectability when angry over unjust deaths and racism. The burdens of pulling yourself out of a bad situation by your bootstraps. The burdens of homelessness, poverty, ex-incarceration… the afflictions that we can’t relate to just as much as the ones we can. Instead of pointing a finger and telling them what they should do to fix themselves in the right way, maybe we should start laying our hands on them, like Jesus did, like God did when we were formed from the dust of the earth. Maybe we should get dirty precisely because this person in front of us is Imago Dei and has dignity, just as we do.
I can’t tell you what to do in every situation, but I can urge you to build the kingdom so it is wide and deep, with room for all. Every week, we come to the Eucharistic table and receive the body and blood of Jesus, the ultimate Imago Dei, and should be reminded of both our need and what we are. The priest tells us, “Behold what you are; become what you receive.” We are the body and blood of Christ to the world, reminding people of their dignity and worthiness before God, urging people to come to the table and receive life. The way we act as witnesses of God is by undoing the binds that tie people in knots and the yokes that weigh people down. We are called to be repairers of the breech, restorers of the streets.
With our dignity comes responsibility to not draw lines of in and out, who is worthy and how they must act. Rather, it is a responsibility to acknowledge the dignity and worth of every human, lay hands on who we can, and watch the binds come undone. Just like Jesus.
Amen