“If you wish, you can make me clean.”
It can become difficult to believe that the Lord does want to make us clean and whole. The longer we live with our weaknesses and ailments, be they physical or moral, the more we are forced to consider that the reason why we are still afflicted might be because the Lord does not in fact will it that we be made clean.
There is something in us that isn't content to remain unclean. We know that we were made for more. We sense that our leprosy has isolated us, kept us "outside the camp", and in some way cries out "Unclean, unclean!" to any who know us too well. It keeps our interactions with others at the borders of our personalities, preventing us from experiencing true intimacy, lest we risk that others would truly know us, and in knowing us, become contaminated. Worse still, our perceived condition as unclean keeps us from entering fully into the worship of the people of God. There too we participate only from the boundaries, never confident enough to come into the intimate presence of God.
The longer we live in our perceived condition as unclean the harder it is to imagine anything changing. Yet if we see Jesus with the same eyes of faith that the leper saw him we can be buoyed with new hope.
“If you wish, you can make me clean.”
Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand,
touched him, and said to him,
“I do will it. Be made clean.”
In any other circumstance we would be right to try to shield others from our affliction lest we contaminate them. The law itself could do no more than pronounce judgment upon us. It had no remedy to offer. But in Jesus the flow of contamination is reversed. Rather than the unclean contaminating him, we see that anyone he touched was made clean. This was because he himself was utterly holy, beyond the power of our sins and afflictions to contaminate. And it was because he himself chose to allow this holiness to go out from him to others as gift, as grace.
We might have expected the touch of God to be a consuming fire that destroyed the unclean. But instead we find that it destroyed only that darkness which made them unclean and set them on fire with divine love. Why this difference between those who reached out to touch the ark of the covenant and died and those who touched Jesus and lived? It was because of the direction of the touch, and the faith that welcomed it.
But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you (see Luke 11:20).
Even though hemorrhaging woman seemed to be reaching out to touch God it was actually the case, that, by the incarnation, God had first reached out to her in order to be touched.
she came up in the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. For she had been saying to herself, “If I just touch His garments, I will get well.” And immediately the flow of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease (see Mark 5:27-29)
Have we not yet received the healing we desire? Let us come to the Lord with faith in the superabundant grace with which he is filled, which flows from him at the slightest touch. He will certainly do what it takes to bring us back into the community, to restore our intimacy with himself and with our brothers and sisters. If he even heals us physically those eyes of faith will not be surprised. Yet this isn't the main point. It wasn't for the leper, which is why Jesus did not want to be known for the mere externalities of the event.
See that you tell no one anything
There is something that is so intimate in the touch of Jesus as to be incommunicable. When we speak of him to others the risk is that we only hit on externals because the true effects of the intimacy of his touch are harder to convey. Yet, though the external aspects of the way Jesus came to heal us may not be a template that he intends for everyone, and though the true intimacy of his touch is beyond words and not something which we ourselves can convey, it is the possibility of this intimacy to which we can point. We can't reduce it to a formula or a definition. But we can point to it. We can share the wonder of it.
We should remember too that, when we receive the Eucharist, we are experiencing this same touch that healed the leper, that cast out demons, that healed the hemorrhaging woman. We don't always experience anything spectacular when we receive Jesus in Holy Communion. But if we receive him with eyes of faith, with expectation of an overflow of grace, there is no limit to what he might do.
He who eats it with faith, eats Fire and Spirit- Ecclesia de Eucharistia 17 - Saint John Paul the Great
No comments:
Post a Comment