If you ever read any of the gospels all the way through, every time you do it, something new will strike you that you have never noticed before. And I’ll bet that one thing you would notice sooner rather than later is how much of Jesus’s life was spent healing people. We tend to imagine a great deal of his life was spent talking, because so much care was taken to record some of the things he repeatedly said. But really, when he went from place to place, he must have spent more time healing people than preaching, and it’s that, more than his words, that drew enormous crowds to him. And that isn’t surprising, the same thing would happen today. Because if we’re honest, that is what humans need, healing.
Being a leper back in Jesus’s time made it particularly obvious how much human beings need healing and why. No one knew how leprosy worked or how people got it. And so, understandably, people wanted their community free from things they thought were unclean and dangerous. Lepers were excluded from any role in the community so that the community was safe. So when Jesus cures this man, this isn’t just a private healing of shame and physical suffering. Jesus is restoring this man to society, so he can live and work with other people again. Jesus doesn’t just want people physically better. He wants a community where people aren’t divided and shunned.
There’s a great spiritual writer who says that really the whole Christian life, everything we’re all trying to do here, is about one thing: It’s about us, over the course of our lives, turning what we want into what God wants. And what God wants for people is not just health, but an end to the division and fear that separates the people he created. The leper tells Jesus that he can cure him if he wants to, and Jesus clearly wants to. This translation says that Jesus when he was asked this question was moved with pity, but the actual word that the gospel writer uses is stronger than that, in fact some translators say it’s a lot closer to our saying that the sight of the man was like a punch in the gut to Jesus. It was a strong reaction of not only compassion but maybe even shock and anger. The idea of this man’s suffering and separation stirred something up inside Jesus. So if we’re supposed to want what God wants, apparently God wants us to feel the same way when we see someone not just sick but separated from the human community, out of neglect or fear. He wants us to feel it and desire to fix it.
We know that there are plenty of people in this world and in our country who live apart and are not quite included in the life the rest of us lead. We also know there are plenty of prisoners and other outcasts, many of whom will spend the rest of their lives afflicted with the sense that they are unclean, shunned by people who believe they are people who can’t be healed or changed and that they’re a danger to the rest of us. It’s also not hard to imagine that even here close to home, there are people who feel themselves to be separated from God by their own imperfections, or they feel weighed down by sins that can’t be forgiven, people who are discouraged and feel set apart by the judgments that other people and maybe even our church have passed on them.
We say Lord I am not worthy every Sunday, and it’s true that none of us is worthy. But it’s also true that in God’s eyes, all of us are, equally. Jesus lived here on this earth in the same world with this leper, and he saw that this is the human condition, everyone needing healing, especially those who have been out of sight and shunned. He has the power to do something about it and he does.
Unlike Jesus, we don’t have the power to heal everyone who feels damaged and separated, to make that burden go away by ourselves. But we do have the power to be people who know that the separation of people from one another out of fear is not God’s plan, and that the people society has placed out on the edges can sometimes be restored to being part of the world with the rest of us.
So what God wants is what Jesus felt in his heart that day, the impatient desire to have people be healed and restored to one another. That is a message that with God’s help we can bring to the people who need to hear it, and we know that God will not be satisfied until no one feels that they are beyond God’s reach.