A few weeks ago I heard a report on National Public Radio about a medical team that went to Kenya to meet the medical needs of those who had the least receive medical care available to them. They started out with a survey to see where the people were and where the doctors were. And in that survey they were amazed to find a huge shantytown slum quite near the capital city of Nairobi that didn’t show up on their map. It was like the people didn’t exist. And if the people didn’t even get enough recognition for their city to be put on a map, was there a hospital or any clinics there? Nothing! It was like they were invisible people. And of course the medical team set up shop in that slum.
Sometimes people are invisible to us because we just don’t cross paths with them. Sometimes people are invisible because we don’t want to see them. Jesus had radar for seeing invisible people. And today we look at a downright shocking story of what Jesus did one day.
Please turn to our text in your pew Bible. It’s Luke 5:12-16 and it’s on page 62 of the New Testament section. And please stand for the reading of God’s word. And keep your Bible open after Linda reads.
12 While Jesus was in one of the towns, a man came along who was covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he fell with his face to the ground and begged him, `Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.'
13 Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. `I am willing,' he said. `Be clean!' And immediately the leprosy left him.
14 Then Jesus ordered him, `Don't tell anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.
15 Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. 16 But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
Most Americans have never seen leprosy, but it’s a horrible thing. I visited in a leprosarium near where we lived in Nepal, run by a courageous Christian English woman, Eileen Lodge. For these patients the original disease of leprosy had been cured once they came under the care of a doctor. But the damage had been done. Most of the patients were missing fingers and toes. Leprosy destroys the feeling in your body. So you might push your hand against a burning ember that rolled out of the family cooking fire and not know that your flesh is burning. You could break your toe on a root in a path or get a piece of glass stuck in the bottom of a bare foot. And if you forget to check yourself carefully every day, you might not realize what happened until you had a horrendous infection. Lepers can wake up in the morning to find that a rat had chewed off part of their foot and they didn’t know what was happening. It’s horrible.
I once visited a much larger leprosy hospital in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, not far from where the standoff is happening around the Red Mosque in Islamabad. As the nuns were giving us a tour, they pointed out someone ahead of us near the side walk and asked us to guess how old she was. Her face was creased with deep, deep lines, making you think she might have been a hundred years old. But as we got closer her giggling gave her away. She was a teenager. And the disease had stolen her chances of ever finding a husband. I remember someone whose nose had been eaten away. There was just a gross hole in the middle of his face.
Leprosy can be cured and prevented today for those who have access to medical care. Probably all the patients I saw came from remote places where no medical care was available until it was too late.
Imagine now what leprosy would be like in a world that had no medicines to stop it and no antibiotics to fight infections. Open sores would just get worse and worse.
So did this guy have a bad case of leprosy? What does the Bible tell us? Look at verse 12. He was ‘covered with leprosy.’ This was somebody you don’t want to look at. This was gross.
Even worse than the physical problems that this would cause, he would be ostracized by the community. I remember visiting some missionary friends in a remote Nepali village. There was a woman with leprosy in their village. She had to live alone, outside the village, away from everyone. She had a sod house, with a dirt floor maybe a foot below ground level, walls made of chunks of sod, probably sheet metal roof, with more sod on it to insulate it from the hot sun. The roof was at most 5 feet above the floor. Even she couldn’t stand up straight in it. Our missionary friends brought her food each day. Otherwise she probably would have died.
The Old Testament prescription for skin diseases was isolation. Actually leprosy has a very low rate of contagion, but there were similar skin diseases that were very contagious and they didn’t have the medical science to know the difference, so people with skin diseases were to stay away from other people. And in time they came to be treated very cruelly. People came to assume that anyone with this horrible disease had done bad things and was under God’s curse. They deserved it. They weren’t allowed to come into cities. They weren’t allowed to go to church. They had to build shacks outside the gates and beg for handouts from passersby. People would cross the street to avoid walking close to them. If they came too close to the wrong person, they would have rocks thrown at them. Even some of the rabbis made a point of showing off their personal purity by having nothing to do with lepers. Lepers were unclean. There is a story of one rabbi who said that if he knew a leper had walked down a street he wouldn’t buy an egg from any of the stands he had passed. How would that feel?
Lepers experienced rejection at every turn. And that rejection was probably more destructive of them as persons even than the disease. You have enough people tell you that they don’t want you around and pretty soon you start to think that even God doesn’t want you around.
You can see his pain of rejection in the way he came to Jesus. He didn’t ask Jesus to heal him. He asked Jesus to make him clean, make him fit to be treated like a human being again.
So on this day this man dared to come up to Jesus. He seemed to have no doubt that Jesus could heal him. His question was whether Jesus would want to heal him. “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.” And what did Jesus say? “I do choose. Be made clean.” And he was healed.
But the healing isn’t the most amazing part of the story. There’s something else that Jesus did that was more amazing to those who were present. Look at the text and tell me what Jesus did, even before he answered this poor man. It’s in the first half of verse 13. Before he spoke, what did he do? He “touched him.” How long had it been since someone had actually touched that man?
When we lived in Asia, the custom was to use your right hand for most normal things. Your left hand was unclean. I won’t explain the reason here in church. But there were a lot of things that you just didn’t touch with your left hand. My wife, Kathy, is left handed. And if she did something unusual with her left hand, people would notice it right away. “You’re left handed,” they would say. And they understood that she was a westerner and so they weren’t insulted. But they were very sensitive to certain kinds of touch. Everybody would have noticed when a holy teacher touched a leper. All three gospels include this detail. This was shocking.
Would anybody here like to touch this man? It would have been gross. But Jesus did. How could he do such a thing?
This story was recorded for us in three out of the four gospels. That tells us how important this was to the early church. And often you can get a better understanding of events like this by looking at how the story is told in other gospels. And Mark’s gospel fills in something Luke leaves out. Can somebody turn to Mark 1:41 and tell us what motivated Jesus? Our NRSV pew Bible says that Jesus felt “pity” for him. The NIV Bible says “compassion.” Jesus didn’t pay any attention to himself and what he might feel about this man. His focus was on what the man felt. That’s compassion. That’s Christian discipleship, die to yourself and focus on caring for others.
So, what does this have to do with us? Are there any lepers in our culture?
The first time I preached on this text was back in the 1980s. The liturgist was a sharp young man who had just joined the church. His brother was wasting away with a mysterious disease. The church prayed for him. I went and visited him and prayed with him. And so this young man and his wife had started coming to church. He read this scripture for the congregation. I talked about AIDS victims being the new lepers and the importance of caring for them, regardless of how they had contracted the disease. Years later I found out through the grapevine what the mysterious disease was that finally killed his brother. It was AIDS. But he never spoke of it. The family just couldn’t say it out loud to the community.
Things have changed since then. We know it is only caught in very specific ways. But can the stigma still be there?
Jesus calls his followers to do like he did. Let compassion overwhelm our fears and questions and love those the rest of the world doesn’t want to see. Love casts out fear.
When we lived up in Harvard, Illinois there was a large Mexican population in town, most of them recent immigrants, many of them migrants. When I passed them on the sidewalk they would always look away, as if they really didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And I didn’t like that. I wondered what I could do to make some human connection with them.
Then one day I mentioned that to a Mexican woman who also spoke very good English and knew both cultures well. She said that in their culture, they were too lowly to look me in the eye, so they looked at the ground instead. How it must hurt to feel like that! Do you think God wants anybody feeling like that?
I got a CD with Spanish language lessons on it and started picking up a little Spanish. If I even said ‘Olla’, that’s ‘hi,’ they would look up with the most beautiful smiles. I’m sure they knew that was the end of my Spanish abilities. But we touched as humans for a moment.
Are there any other lepers in our culture? They’re all around us: adults who can’t read, stuck in the lowest job, bluffing through things very afraid that people will find out, the mentally ill, the homeless, immigrants, people who have been in jail. Right now our culture is working pretty hard to grind those who have broken the law into the dirt. The list can go on and on. Think for a moment how they must feel in our world. Let the compassion of Jesus into your heart.
We serve a God who cares deeply for us, who understands us, who cares for us, not only when we are doing well, not only when we are looking good, not only when we feel ourselves worthy. We serve a God who touches us, deeper inside than anyone else can. And that makes all the difference.
Disciples of Jesus Christ, love casts out fear. Go and share that love wherever you go. AMEN
