The four gospels aren’t in agreement about all the details of Jesus’ life. Each gospel has its own distinctive take on his life and purpose. But one detail that they all agree on is that he was a healer. There was something about his presence that made people well. The healings took place on multiple levels: physical, psychological, and social. For example, today’s reading is about the healing of a leper. The category of leprosy included what today we think of as leprosy, but it extended to include any disease that manifested in open sores. It wasn’t the disease so much as the open wound. When the skin was open it was subject to external influences of the surrounding culture. The sore was an opening through which unclean substances and even cultural influences could enter.
According to the purity code of first century Judaism, lepers were unclean. This meant that they needed to exclude themselves from contact with the community and live on the outskirts of towns and villages. The fact that this particular leper came to Jesus in the village meant that he was knowingly breaking the purity code. Jesus doesn’t have a problem with it. In fact, by touching him, he rendered himself impure. It’s possible that this is why the detail in verse 45 about Jesus having to stay in the countryside. Word might have spread quickly that Jesus had made himself impure. The countryside would be free from the Temple priests who would not approve.
So, at the social and cultural level, the conspiracy between the leper and Jesus to subvert the purity code is a kind of social healing. This is no small matter. Another subversive detail of the story is found in the fact that Jesus first performs the healing and then tells the man to go and show himself to the priests. But it wasn’t supposed to go in that order. First, a leper would go the priest, who would supervise a ritual cleansing by bathing, and then the priest would declare the person to be healed or not. But here is Jesus by-passing the entire Temple system, and then as though to rub it in the face of the system, the already healed man shows himself to the priest. Jesus preached and enacted direct, unbrokered access to the divine. Healing didn’t have to go through the priests or the Temple system.
At this level, the parable is about the healing of social illness that is perpetuated by a religious association of God with purity. In the religious system of his day, illness is seen as a sign of sin. We might understand illness as a symptom of some form of stress or that something is out of alignment. But have a chronic disease in first century Mediterranean culture was to be though to be a sinner. You would be cut off from community. This, in fact, might have been the deeper form of illness that Jesus healed. He was forever reaching out to those who had been excluded. His willingness to reach out and touch this leper in the midst of such pervasive fear, entrenched in the social and religious system, was a sign for the early church of the in breaking of the Kingdom of God.
But I don’t doubt that Jesus also was a conduit for physical healings. His unity with the divine was so deeply integrated that to be in his presence was to be in the presence of Wholeness. We now know that universe to be a single integrated flow of energy that shows up in different forms. In fact, we know ourselves to be the curriculum vitae of the universe in human form. If the universe was job searching, it could well just put the story of any one us here this morning down on paper, and you would have the entire story of the evolving universe. We are That energy, that flow, that single system having a human experience. The human body/mind complex is a conduit that connects and expresses the energy system of Earth with the transcendent energy systems of higher consciousness. As such—by which I mean, as this energy conduit—we always, already a complete manifestation of the Whole system of the universe.
And when that flow of energy gets blocked for some reason, say genetic material that predisposes one to a particular illness; or a mother whose alcoholism is passed on to a fetus; or a family that is dysfunctional: when the energy flow becomes blocked or interrupted in some way, it will materialize as some form of illness or disease. The disease itself is not the enemy. It’s a symptom that carries information about what is needed to restore as much balance as possible. Jesus was one of those people who had a gift of seeing what the underlying problem was restoring the energy balance. He helped people step back into the flow of the universe as it expressed itself in the body/mind/social system that we represent.
It came to me this morning that what Jesus really healed was hope. He gave people back their future. Where others could only see a life of misery, physical pain, and social stigma, Jesus reached out from the future, and touches the present with new possibilities. He gave the man with leprosy a future. He was the presence of the future Kingdom of God that was closed to this man. This may be the greatest healing power of all— somebody reaching out to us and touching us with hope. Your future doesn’t have to be an endless repetition of your present condition. In this church we would say that Jesus was the presence of God. We get that part. But consider the possibility that Jesus was also the presence of Love, calling to us, not so much from above, but from out in front—from the future that we hadn’t dare to imagine because we didn’t want to “get our hopes up”.
Ever heard that expression? Don’t get his hopes up! He’ll only suffer disappointment. Of course, there are times when you can’t deliver on a promise when it’s cruel to get another person’s hope up. But to hang with Jesus is to “get you hope up.” Jesus was a hope-getter-upper. I actually wonder if this is what made him a healer as much as anything else. This is why the cosmic and divine energies flowed through him in such abundance. He saw the future. And the future was good. The future was better.
What was the evidence? His own life. He was the presence of an alternative future, here and now. He called the disciples first to see what he saw, and then do what he did for the world. He was the guy who not just talked about how wrong it was to ostracize people with illness; he touched them. His touch was the future of radical inclusion. His touch was the end of the social stigma of leprosy. His touch was a signal from the future that a day was coming when illness and sin would be de-coupled, and social isolation would be replaced by compassion. His touch was the touch of the future that signaled a new religious system and consciousness was on its way.
Did you catch what the man with leprosy said to Jesus? “If you choose, you can make me clean?” That’s quite a statement. That is a profession of hope. It is interesting that he didn’t say, “You can heal me.” They might have meant the same thing to him. We don’t know. But it’s also possible that this man saw in Jesus the kind of human being who could reach across those artificially constructed categories of clean and unclean, and end it all with a touch. He saw that one man’s willingness to actually call b.s. on the purity code as it existed could bring it down this house of cards with a touch. This man was touched by hope that a new future was possible for him and this religious system. This is a story about the arousal of hope.
The writer of the story carefully chooses the words. When Jesus responds to the man’s confidence in the possibility with the words, “I do choose. Be clean”, he is setting up a field of resonance with the leper. Or you might call it a field of hope that was being shaped and strengthened by their reciprocal agreement about the possibility of the Kingdom of God happening right then and there. Where two or three are gathered in the spirit of Jesus, the Christ, and agree on the future that needs their shared confidence in order to emergence, there is the Kingdom of God. I just gave a pretty good definition of what the church is called to be.
What this exchange makes clear is that the Kingdom of God is ushered in through conscious choice and reciprocal confidence that a new future is possible. “I do choose”, says Jesus. Powerful three words. “I do choose”. This may represent that true healing of our species as we ask ourselves what kind of future do we collectively imagine.
When you come forward this morning to receive the touch of a healer, think of it as an exchange of energy, not a one-way transmission. Remember that the man with leprosy actually challenged Jesus, causing him to step up when the man put it that Jesus could make him clean if he chose. The one ostensibly on the receiving end, in other words, was an evocation of Jesus’ confidence in an alternative future. When you sit in the chair and feel those hands on your shoulders feel them as the touch of the future. Imagine that the two of you are entering an agreement of hope, that your future and the future of our very planet will not be merely the perpetuation of existing conditions. The exchange between the all healers and the “healees” this morning is an agreement to build the field of hope for the future. Bring on the Kin(g)dom.
