Coming Clean

     One of the first healing miracles that Jesus performs after he begins his ministry is emblematic of everything he embodies.  This man he heals is a leper, which means that he suffers from some sort of skin disease, probably a contagious one.  This is significant because, according to Mosaic law, he is unclean due to his condition.  He is therefore an outcast - isolated, probably friendless, and quite hopeless.
     However, this man has good vision; he sees Jesus for who he is, he recognizes the power that Jesus possesses.  "If you will, you can make me clean," the leper says as he kneels.  And of course Jesus wills that he should be healed.  It's the will of God that all should be made clean, and this man is no exception.  So Jesus does something extraordinary: he touches the leper.

     Our common understanding of uncleanliness is that it is something we catch.  So cliches like "one bad apple spoils the bunch" embody our perspective.  Because this is our perspective, we avoid spending time with people we perceive as unclean.  For many Christians this means we have no relationships with non-believers.  Our circle of friends is limited to people who we view as "ceremonially clean."  People who, in other words, are just like us.
     But here is what Jesus does: he stretches out his hand and touches the unclean.  And what we think should happen - that Jesus should be made unclean - does not.  The opposite happens.  When Jesus puts his hand on someone they are changed.  You don't come to Jesus clean in the hopes of receiving something greater because the greatest thing you receive from Jesus is the gift of being made clean.
   
     In the old covenant the healing wasn't enough.  Jesus heals the leper, and then tells him not to tell anyone what happened, but  to go an "offer what Moses commanded, for a proof to them."  What Moses commanded was a series of sacrifices and actions required for the healed leper to be made clean so that he could rejoin society.  Not a simple series of actions, but a complicated and expensive set.  Even though he has been healed, he is not clean.
     But in the new covenant a miraculous thing occurs when we are healed by the hand of Jesus, in that his touch does both: it heals and makes clean all in one fell swoop.  And it's permanent; did I mention that?  In the old covenant, if the disease came back, bye-bye cleanliness.  But not with Jesus.  With Jesus we are made clean once and for all when we kneel before his outstretched hand and believe.
     If you know the story of the healed leper, you know that he did not go back to the priest to make the offering.  And neither did he keep his mouth shut about Jesus.  I have been pondering over this for several days now, trying to understand the significance of it.  At first I thought that Jesus is trying to tell us something about follow through - that the healing is freely given, but that there is follow through afterwards that requires time, effort and discipline.  Then I thought that maybe the leper was just wrong, just greedy for the healing, and that he symbolizes some kind of disobedience.  However, I think there's a different lesson here, at least for me.  I believe that the leper didn't need to make the offering because he didn't need that old covenant cleansing.  He had received the great gift of the healing touch of Jesus, and he was changed; so why should he desire to return to the crowd, to be accepted on cultural terms.  In a way I think he is heralding the change that Jesus is bringing - the new covenant that allows us to approach the throne of Grace directly.

Finding Life

There is a promise that people make to God that is probably as old as the human race, and it is this:  if you will do this for me, I'll give you anything.  Have you ever made this promise?  It's a desperate promise.  If you've made it you were probably in dire straits at the time.  And in that moment that you made the promise you probably meant it.  If God had given you what you'd needed just then, no doubt He would have had your promised devotion...for a time.  If you're like me you would have tired of being in His debt and you would have moved on.

Why is that?  I think the reason we move on from this promise is because, regardless of how dire the circumstances at the moment, a thing given without cost is easily discarded.  When we make this promise to God - when we ask Him to rescue us and in exchange offer him essentially nothing - we know that we're asking for something for nothing.  After all, our dire straits are rarely foisted upon us in innocence.  Lord knows my dire straits, my lowest points, were directly linked to some bad decisions.  I have mumbled many a dark, desperate prayer to God with my fingers crossed hoping (but not really believing) that he would get me out of just one more jam.

This is just what we do.  But here is what Jesus tells us:

"Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it"

What we are doing when we sit and fervently pray our promise to God is we are finding our life.  All those dark times I promised my worthless exchange to the Father I was searching desperately for my life - for clarity, for solutions, for stability.  For a way out.  And when you live that way what winds up happening is you lose your life.  Things go to shit.  You hit a downward spiral.  Nothing changes.

The exchange that Jesus prompts us to make, the exchange that he himself promises to follow through on, is distinctly different.  It's opposite ours.  Jesus says that we have to give up first.  If we follow his advice, our promise goes from, "If you'll help me I'll give myself up," to, "I'll give myself up, and you'll help me."  The most difficult part of this promise is that we have to give up everything before we get anything.  Or rather, before we get EVERYTHING, because that is what Jesus promises in exchange.  He promises life.  Life.  His exchange is far, far beyond the scope of what we in our desperation were willing to accept.

So here is a truth: you will not find what you seek until you first surrender your search.  That's what Jesus says; he says we have to give up what we are in order to get what we need.  Because whether we realize it or not, Life is what we're searching for.  We are hungry for this life that he offers, as surely as the lame and the blind and the destitute were hungry for it when Jesus walked this earth.  We are so hungry for it that in our times of need we make hasty, desperate promises of all that we have.  May we just learn to make those promises in the right order, and make them now.