February
16, 2003 - Sixth
Sunday after Epiphany
2 King 5:1-14
NRSV
KJV
CEV
Mark 1:40-45
NRSV
KJV
CEV
Terminal Wholeness
Terminal illness – it sounds so very final, doesn’t it. Leprosy was a disease that rendered one terminally ill. It also made one a terminal outcast. There was no other terminus, end-point, save death and that death was a lonely one outside the comfort of human society. All a leper could do was ring a bell and warn people away – “Unclean!” Is it any wonder that Naaman feared the disease enough to travel to some obscure country to find a cure? Is it any wonder that the leper came to Jesus looking for whatever help he could find? Their situations are not really that different from some facing people today.
We have our own lepers in modern times, don’t we? We may be a bit more polite about it, but they’re still around. All of us can think of those off-putting diseases that make us shake our heads and want to avoid the one afflicted. We seem to be getting a bit better in dealing with those who have more severe forms of cancer. There was a time, however, when to hear that ‘c’ word made us want to run away. AIDS still has something of that effect, doesn’t it? And there is still the tendency to shy away from those with disease. Most notably, now our trip to be the dentist or doctor is marked with gloves, masks, and repeated hand-washings as a result of that particular disease and the fear of touching someone who has it. Touching is a problem – yet touching is what makes humans bond and it was a touch that brought healing.
At some levels we have to look at these stories from 2nd Kings and Mark’s Gospel and realize that God is trying to get our attention. God is trying to get us to understand that God’s desire for humanity, for our world, and for our life together is not a terminal point in the way that we’ve thought of it before. We need to remember that a terminus is not only a place where journeys end. It’s also a place where journeys begin. God’s desire for us – our ultimate end and beginning – is terminal wholeness.
The leprosy that causes more harm than the physical illness is that which afflicts the mind and the heart. Naaman’s bigger disease wasn’t his leprosy, but his unwillingness to allow God to be God. He wanted healing, but on his own terms, in line with how he thought things should work. We often fall into the same trap, don’t we? We say we want to be followers of Jesus, but then want to dictate what the path we walk will be and what the terms are by which we walk along it. To come to terminal wholeness requires our being willing to let go of our pet notions and comfortable assumptions of what God’s favor, God’s healing, and God’s wholeness look like. As with Naaman, we have to journey to what seems a foreign land in order to come to a new understanding, a new perspective. Naaman didn’t get exactly what he wanted, but ended up with a great deal more, he got exactly what he needed.
I believe it was the unlikely philosopher Mick Jagger who said, “You can’t always get what you want. But you get what you need.” It’s true – and the wholeness that God desires for us, outside our wants, is what we need. As one little anonymous piece put it:
I asked for strength…and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom…and God gave me problems to solve.
I asked for prosperity…. and God gave me brain and brawn to work.
I asked for courage…. and God gave me danger to overcome.
I asked for love…. and God gave me troubled people to help.
I asked for favors…and God gave me opportunities.
I received nothing I wanted …I received everything I needed.
What we need is to be restored to the fullness of our humanity.
When Jesus reached to touch the leper he was demonstrating true compassion and wholeness. He brought him back into the circle of God’s love and human community. Origen, one of the great teachers of the early church said:
And why did he touch him, since the law forbade the touching of a leper? He touched him to show that “all things are clean to the clean.” Because the filth that is in one person does not adhere to others, nor does external uncleanness defile the clean of heart. So he touches him in his untouchability, that he might instruct us in humility; the he might teach us that we should despise no one, or abhor them, or regard them as pitiable, because of some wound of their body or some blemish for which they might be called to render an account …. So, stretching forth his hand to touch, the leprosy immediately departs. The hand of the Lord is found to have touched not a leper, but a body made clean! Let us consider here, beloved, if there be anyone here that has the taint of leprosy in his soul, or the contamination of guilt in his heart? If he has, instantly adoring God, let him say: “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.”
Once we have been embraced by wholeness, known healing, been allowed to appreciate our world, and ourselves we’re to do the same for others. Those who have been embraced embrace in their turn.
The miracle of physical healings is not the point in these stories. They point to a deeper reality – the healing of the breach between humanity and God, between humanity and created reality, and between human beings. Salvation isn’t just about where you go after you’ve gone – it’s about how we’re to go about living in the here and now. That’s why Origen told his congregation to look to the leprosy in the mind and the heart and to be healed. Wholeness is supposed to be reflected in the values we live not only here in this meeting house on a Sunday morning, but in the approach we take to our lives at home, at work, or at school. Far too many Christians live with some sort of schizophrenia that divides their faith from their daily lives. The stories of healing and the proper understanding of salvation say: not so, true humanity is wholeness and we must live accordingly. I so appreciate what Matthew Fox has written in Original Blessing:
What light does the Via Positiva (the Positive Way) shed on our efforts to revivify the meanings of salvation? One scholar tells us that for St. Francis salvation was “enchanted existence.” There is an awakening of Eros, of love and awareness of life, in the Via Positiva that is truly salvific, healing individuals and society alike. Beauty becomes an experience again and constitutes a vocation in the long twenty-billion year vocation of the cosmos to become ever more beautiful. With a realization of beauty and its potential nearness to all, people become social once again. As Meister Eckhart put it, “This then is salvation: to marvel at the beauty of created things and praise the beautiful providence of their Creator.”
Salvation is about healing, and just as the cosmos itself can be ruptured and torn apart by injustice, so too it can be healed by all human efforts to bring justice, which is balance, back to human relationship to earth, air, fire, water, and one another…. The healing process of making whole and integration also includes a return to one’s origins.... With this examination comes a greater reverence for our uniqueness, and therefore a greater reverence for that of God’s other creatures. This reverence is itself salvific. [p. 120-121]
God restores us to wholeness and then our journey begins, again.
Where are the leprosies in our lives? Where are the lepers in our world? All of the things that keep us from missing the point, missing the fullness of God’s love can be healed, reconciled, made whole. I don’t think it at all odd that the words wholeness, health, and holiness in English all derive from the same root. How we live interiorly makes a huge difference in our wellness and our ability to live physically. I think there’s a reason why so many hospitals are developing “wellness programs” that involve spirituality – to be well, to be whole, to know healing is to have the body, the mind, and the spirit in harmony. That’s why Jesus touched the leper. That’s why Elisha told Naaman to go and do a simple thing, abandon preconceptions and be made well.
God invites us to experience terminal wholeness. Two lepers came looking and found something far greater than a physical healing. It’s no different for us, if we come looking and expecting something more, we will receive what we need. It begins when we put aside our expectations, put aside that which limits God and ourselves, and open ourselves to be touched. When we receive the touch we are on our way to terminal wholeness – and the journey can begin again and again and again.