Come to Jesus: Healing
Come to Jesus: Healing
Luke 5: 12-6
Part of being a pastor is spending a lot of time with people around health care issues. I have been to a lot of doctor’s offices and chemo floors and a full spectrum of waiting rooms. I remember holding Lori Jones’s prematurely born twins, each in the palm of a hand, and being overwhelmed with how tiny they were. (Now they are young adults.) I remember accompanying Barb Mortimer to chemo and hearing the man sitting next to us as he called his wife and told her that the good news was that he was only going to lose part of his leg. I remember sitting on several occasions in hospital rooms and hearing that there were no choices left, that it was time to live as fully as possible in the time that remained or, simply, that it was time to turn off the machines and wait for the end.
I have found myself working hard over the years to help people hold onto hope but to also adjust their hopes in the light of what was happening. I’ve fought to try to preserve people’s dignity in the midst of processes that can feel so dehumanizing. I’ve tried to help nurses know who this person was and what mattered to them before the stroke or whatever other catastrophe might have happened. I sat with one friend and worked to have a regular old conversation when Lou Gehrig’s Disease had reduced him to using his eyes and an electic keyboard to make words that were his only speech. (He always programmed a joke for me that he would play as I walked into the room. He’d beam when I laughed.)
Every one of those people had lives before they were sick. They had plans—places to go and things to do. Then, in an instant, their worlds radically changed. Pain exploded or their phone rang and they were asked to come in person to find out the results of a test or that “annoying thing” became the “screaming symptom” and they soon learned why that was the case.
We are so good at denying how utterly vulnerable we are until, suddenly, we can’t deny it at all. If what we are dealing with suddenly is acute, we struggle to catch up. If what we are dealing with is chronic, we fight like crazy to keep hope alive. Depending on our life situation, we are likely to feel very alone, or at least, to feel like what we are going through is so all encompassing that we wouldn’t know where to start in sharing it if we could.
Some things have gotten better in the course of these walks I’ve taken with folks. The world of medicine, in my time, has come to accept that there are likely to be more treatment options than a person may be ready to explore. I’ve had folks who have chosen, very intentionally, to place real limits on what they were willing to do for treatment. Their premium has been on preserving the quality of their life. I’ve had other people who clearly wanted to exhaust every possible option because they really wanted to live and they really wanted to hold onto hope for a cure.
When people wanted to limit treatment in the past, doctors and hospitals were very reluctant to support those decisions. I watched as people were likely leveraged into more aggressive treatments. I saw people suffer and probably lose the chance to enjoy the life that they had left as a result. Doctors and nurses saw that, too. I think collectively things have moved much more toward people making the decisions that fit for them and people can change those decisions along the way when their needs and their energy change. That makes this a better world to be a patient. I advocate hard for people to have those choices.
Another shift that I’ve seen has been for any number of diseases—especially cancers—that used to be terminal diagnoses becoming chronic diseases. Real advances in medicine have led to this change. It has also led to the person with the chronic disease being able to actually enjoy their lives at the same time. It’s not that we are immortal or that chronic issues don’t take a toll. It’s simply the case that scientific advancements and medical breakthroughs have made it possible to have a life as a patient and still continue with the rest of your life.
This is why I spend so much time being concerned these days about the politicization of scientific research grant support. The advances that I see people enjoying today—people that I love—are the result of research that has been going on for years. People that I love—in two years or four years or 10 years—are going to miss the benefits of research that should have been happening now but was interrupted. We may not ever even know what that missing research was. It just won’t happen. Or, it will just be delayed. The drug we need won’t be there.
The one thing that I’m really disappointed and surprised has not changed in my life is that the world of health care is so expensive. Medical expenses destroy our fellow citizens lives—here, and not in any other “first world” developed economy. It’s more difficult than ever to have an ongoing relationship with a doctor—unless you have the resources to have a “concierge” physician. And, more and more people are driven to seek care at emergency rooms, where care is legally required but is generally limited, by definition, to emergency care. Add to this the subversion of support for public health and vaccination and we continue to have some of the best medical research and technology in the world and continue to put the health of our citizens at risk.
It’s this last issue that connects us to Jesus in our text. First and foremost, the unavoidable conclusion—it just seems so obvious to me—is that Jesus cares first for the poor. We would say that he spent a lot of time dealing with rural poverty. Galilee was considered the “sticks” and Galileans were the “hicks.” Just like in our rural areas, if you moved even a step or two off the beaten path, you found people who were hungry, people who were lonely, people who were sick. As someone who was devoting his life to caring for people in need, Jesus didn’t have to look hard to find them. (Either do we, if we are willing to look.)
In our text, the sick person has found Jesus. People joke sometimes about someone having a “come to Jesus” moment, in the way that people speak in dismissive ways about faith: “Ya, he really messed things up with his wife. I told him it was time to have his “come to Jesus” moment with her.” In Jesus own day, “coming to Jesus” was not an abstraction. Lots of people came to him for help, dealing with all sorts of different things, but united by the fact that Jesus was their person of last resort, the place that they could go when they were on the brink of despair. It’s a woman who has been bleeding for years. It’s a Roman guard, who’s daughter is terribly sick. In this case, it is a man who is completely awash in leprosy.
Now, here’s what we need to know. Leprosy, in Jesus’ world, would have included any number of skin diseases but what would have distinguished that set of diseases was that they were very visible and very disfiguring. In a world that had no scientific understanding of disease, the shared belief was that people got sick because they had offended God. God was punishing them with the illness. As a result, the only treatment was to go to the temple and have the priests perform rites that would get God to forgive them and make the disease go away. This made money for the temple. If you had a lot of money, you might even be able to hire a “doctor” but without science you would have been questioning that doctor’s title pretty fast.
The only other hope that was available were itinerant, traveling healers—kind of like the snake oil dealers of 100 years ago in our country. They would roll into town, gather a crowd, maybe get lucky and heal someone or maybe just have a “plant” in the crowd who would experience a miracle. They’d make a few bucks and move on. The good news if you were rural and poor was that they came to you. The bad news was that they were going to take your money and your hope and move on.
Jesus healed people—by all accounts. I can’t explain that in any “how to” sort of way. I can only listen to people’s accounts. What’s more obvious and understandable is that however he did that, the more important question is who he did it for—the poorest of the poor. Didn’t he know that he could have made a fortune in Jerusalem? Didn’t he know that the authorities, who did make a fortune off the poor, were going to be angry that he was moving in on their territory? What kind of a business man was this Jesus?
What Jesus did was recognize the pain of the person standing in front of him. More importantly, what he did was recognize that a sick person—even a person who was sick with diseases that scared everyone—was still a person—a child of God. He did whatever it took to help that person heal and become whole. And then, in a move that would still confound our world today, he told the person to tell no one and did his level best to fade into the background and move on. Heck, I see nothing but ads on t.v. with songs about miraculous drugs. Jesus couldn’t use these miracles to drum up a little business?
Our leper would have been one of the most scorned people around. They were forced to wear bells and announce their presence. They were banished from living among other people. Even the most faithful disciples would have been horrified to see the leper talking to Jesus at all. The only worse thing would have been to see Jesus walk toward the man and engage him.
I wonder if those faithful disciples could get past all that judgement and hear what the man and Jesus said. The leper says to Jesus, “If you want to, you can cleanse me.” It may be one of the clearest statements of faith uttered in Jesus’ presence: “I believe in you and I believe in the power you have to heal me.” Then, Jesus does something that no one had done since the day this man got sick. Jesus touches him. (Do you remember Princess Diana and the days when everyone was so afraid of AIDS and she visited AIDS patients?) Jesus’ touch is the moment when healing happens. The words are an afterthought: “I want to. Be clean.” Immediately, the man’s skin is clear. Jesus tells the man to tell no one. The man, though, can’t contain the good news. What follows are waves of people hoping to be healed.
Jesus showed us that sick people are still people, that they deserve our care and our best help, and that this is especially true for people who happen to be both poor and sick. It’s awfully hard to try to be a disciple of Jesus, doing our best to follow him, and not be bothered by our continued insistence that caring for sick people should be a “for profit” enterprise. It’s hard to look at the poor among us and dismiss them with the thought that they could get the care they need if they only had the money.
Jesus did care. As our leaders prepare to cut health care for the poor, I suspect he’s calling us to care, too.