Today, the World Day of the Sick, highlights the healing ministry of the Church. It reminds us that service to the
sick and suffering cannot be neglected. It recognizes the great efforts of
doctors, nurses, healthcare institutions and pastoral care givers to restore
health to those afflicted with illness and disease.
Appropriately, today’s gospel gives us account of Jesus
healing the man of his leprosy. Leprosy, or Hansen's disease as it is also
known, still exists today. It’s a bacterial decease affecting the nerves,
respiratory tract, skin, and eyes. This may result in a lack of ability to feel
pain, thus loss of parts of extremities due to repeated injuries or infection. Today
it is curable by medication.
In the ancient world leprosy was grouped in with other
visible skin conditions and was most feared and dreaded. People with these
conditions were forced to live apart from the general population, they must keep
their distance while warning that they were leprous. Chapter 14: in the book of
Leviticus gives details on how leprous people were controlled and the
complicated rituals they had to follow to be allowed to re-enter the
population, should their skin condition clear up.
That is why Jesus instructs the man he has just healed,
to go to the priests. It is interesting to note that Jesus also instructs him
not to tell anyone how he came to be healed. Why? Physical healing was not the
reason why the Father sent his Son into the world. The deadly condition Jesus
came to heal was much deeper – it was the condition of death itself, and not
physical death but eternal death, the death of sin. Euphoria over physical healing
would cause people to see only that, and so fail to hear the deeper message of
the gospel, which is exactly what started to happen.
We read: - “… the
man went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that
Jesus could no longer go into a town openly but stayed out in the country; (and
even then) people came to Jesus from every quarter.” It is interesting in
or world today to listen to those who deny God, use the argument of healing to
make their case. They say that it is medical science that cures leprosy not
religion. Then they go on to argue that if there is a God why does he let
leprosy exist at all – the classic “problem of evil”. They fail to understand
that Jesus has come from the Father to enable all of us to become healers, by turning
our hearts from hatred to compassion and love.
The man with
leprosy came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling said to Jesus, “If you choose,
you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and
touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” What the atheist
fails to recognise is that it was in the countries imbued with the gospel of
compassion and love, in Christian societies, that the sciences of healing medicine
were discovered, fostered, and developed. Where the gospel of love shaped man’s
thinking, the work of caregiving and healing flourished.
Just imagine what good would be ours today if the energy
and efforts spent on god-less war and hate hand been spent on finding healing,
not on making war. Today’s World Day of the Sick reminds us of this dimension of
our Christian faith, to be healers as Jesus was also a healer.
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