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March 23, 2003
The Compassion and Privacy of Jesus
The Compassion and Privacy of Jesus
Psalm 14 / Leviticus 13: 45-52
Luke 5: 12-16
March 23rd, 2003
I have been asked by a few people this week if I was going to preach about the war. Perhaps you’ll be relieved and glad to know that today I want to talk about Jesus.
I want to expose as clearly as I can the compassion of Jesus, and His reserve. Compassion and reserve were two aspects of His life that people were grateful for then, that the world needs Christians to mimic now. Compassion and reserve figured so prominently in Jesus’ life. Time and again he cared for someone, then backed away from the limelight. “Say nothing about what I did for you.”
This seems at odds with Jesus’ command to His disciples, “Go and preach the Gospel.” But the Gospel they preached extended Jesus’ compassion and reserve. The Gospel was not to be a “sounding gong, a clanging cymbal,” grating on the ears of a suffering world, but a winsome, welcome word of relief offered with the eloquence of reserve.
Christianity has become very “in your face,” when it was intended most to be “in your heart.” It is to spread “from faith to faith,” from heart to heart. You know what your heart responds to. How impressed you and I are when we see Jesus’ ways in someone!
Today let us see how Luke describes Jesus’ compassion and reserve as He encountered a man with leprosy.
As you can tell from the passage in Leviticus that Chris read, leprosy was a terrible disease, common and dreaded in ancient times. Now called Hanson’s Disease, after a 19th century physician who discovered the range of conditions lumped under the name of leprosy. It was one of the greatest scourges of the ancient world. By the 7th century BC it had spread throughout the world. It was a mystery disease, dreaded and contagious. No wonder so much is said in the Bible about leprosy.
One of the principal duties of the Temple priests in King David’s day, in the 10th century BC, and in Jesus’ day was to diagnose leprosy. Here was sacred medicine at its most tragic. The priests had to make sure lepers were quarantined so as not to infect other people—even if the ones who stood before them were wife, father, son, daughter, or close friend.
In some ways leprosy then was as AIDS is now. In the ancient world it was the common view that people who suffered from any disease or deformity deserved what they got. Do you remember the disciples once asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?”
In our day AIDS has had the stigma of deserving bexcause it can be transmitted by sexual contact, and rages in the homosexual community. To be diagnosed with leprosy was to be given a sentence of ostracism, as with modern people with AIDS. Even Ryan White, not a homosexual, who caught the HIV virus from a blood transfusion, found it hard to find a school that would accept him. People were afraid he would spread his disease by touching him, or touching anything he touched, or even by breathing in the vicinity where he was.
The lepers’ problem was even worse. Lepers were automatically banished, no questions asked. No special clinics for lepers. You remember the scenes in the movie “Ben Hur,” where Judea Ben Hur’s mother and sister were condemned to live in the garbage dump of Jerusalem because they were lepers. It didn’t matter that they were of noble birth. A leper was duty bound to call out “Unclean! Unclean!” if people came near.
Luke introduces us to this moment in Jesus’ life, “once, when Jesus was in one of the cities, there was a man covered with leprosy.” It was like saying, “Once when Margaret went to the grocery store.” It was a daily occurrence. This man was covered with the disease—not just hands, or feet that could be hidden. It was impossible to hide his leprosy. It looked gross. It smelled gross. He was an outcast.
A consequence of being an outcast was that many a leper lost all dignity. Lepers were identified by their disease—celebrities of disdain. It is painful and off-putting to confront a person who has lost all dignity, and grovels before you. There is an element of loathing many ordinary people feel toward people who have lost all pride. How unattractive it is to have hope crushed.
Luke tells us that on this day the leper begged Jesus, his face bowed to the ground, with an imploring voice, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.” Picture that in your mind’s eye—his face to the dirt as he spoke. When he said, “If you choose,” he dared to propose that Jesus was responsible to help him.
One other time the Gospels tell us a desperate father said something like this to Jesus. He said to Jesus, “if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.” This father challenged Jesus’ power, a power he had heard so much about. His son was demon-possessed and was throwing himself into the fire.
It’s an odd feeling when I get a phone call or a letter asking for help from someone who knows I have the ability to help—if I will, if I choose. The moral ball is in my end of the court. The leper hit the ball into Jesus’ end of the court. “If you choose,” when he knew Jesus ability was famous. He said, face in the dirt.
Good people respond in a number of ways when they are faced with this kind of challenge. Jesus might have said, “It’s not my fault you are a leper.” And that was true. Or, “Don’t try to send me on a guilt trip, as if I owe it to you to help you.” Jesus could have passed by with a pious, “There but for the grace of God go I,” relieved that it was the other guy and not him that was the leper. He could have said, “If I help him, then everyone with leprosy will start bugging me.” And that was true. Aren’t these ways that we respond to needy people whose need confronts us too closely for comfort?
But Luke, the beloved physician, tells us that Jesus “stretched out his hand and touched him.” Luke knew the healing power of a doctor’s touch. He tells us that Jesus, the great Physician, reached out, touched him and said, “I do choose. Be made clean.” Jesus chose to help the least elegant of the needy. How personal. How direct. This was essential to the Gospel. This is essential to the Gospel.
Isaiah wrote of Jesus, “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a deer, and the tongue of the deaf shall sing.” It was unthinkable, I suppose, that Isaiah should have included lepers in his prophecy. This was too much to expect even of the Messiah.
How dignifying that Jesus stretched out His hand to lepers, as He would reach out His hand to shake the hand of a priest at the Temple, or a Roman centurion, or a personal friend. We customarily touch people who are attractive to us. We avoid touching those who are unattractive to us. Jesus touched lepers, the neediest of the needy, who had lost all dignity. They noticed this. They felt His compassion. There was more than physical healing in Jesus’ touch. He gave lepers back their dignity as other people saw Him touch them.
How important it is for us who want to follow Jesus to treat people, face to face, with compassion, to extend ourselves to them, to give them dignity. As Jesus said, “I choose to help you,” the needy need to hear us say and know it is sincere, “I choose to help you.” And then to feel our touch that raises them from indignity to personhood. This was essential, and still is essential, to proclaiming the Gospel.
It occurred to me that in these days when on either side of the great issues that separate us, whether they be theological divisions in Christendom, religious divisions—Muslim vs Christian, divisions in attitude toward moral issues, divisions over the war, that people on either side are often so outraged that they treat the other like moral lepers. Religious people easily consider it their moral duty, a matter of principle, to loathe those with whom they differ. This attitude has no support from Jesus.
I wonder if you see, as I do, that our present impasse, when the nation is divided, and Christians are divided, when Muslims feel despised by Christians, that you and I must extend our hand and touch the one we may be tempted to loathe. “If you choose,” the leper said to Jesus. He said, “I do choose.” It will change you and me if we will so choose, and that’s at least half the problem today.
What do you choose? What are you able to do, because you choose, because you have recognized Jesus’ compassion?
Second, and last, I call your attention to Jesus’ final remark: He told the leper to tell no one what He had done. Jesus withdrew to a deserted place to pray.
Jesus said this so often to those He healed that we wonder why. Some scholars have come up with the term “the messianic secret.” Jesus thought it important to hide the fact that He was the Messiah. It wasn’t yet time for this to be known.
It seems odd that Jesus should tell His disciples to go into all the world and preach the Gospel when He told nearly everyone He touched to say nothing about it. What’s going on?
I remind you that even though Jesus told people to say nothing about it, they naturally told anyone who would listen. Part of the fascination of Jesus was not only His ability to heal, but His reserve. He didn’t use His healing power as a means to gather fame and a following. He drew attention to Himself by not calling attention to Himself. His fame radiated from what He was and did, not from how He proclaimed Himself.
Back in the 18th century a new wrinkle came into American Christianity. John Wesley had become well known in England by word of mouth as common people spread the word about his preaching in the fields. People learned that they didn’t have to go into the churches to hear the Gospel. The Church of England in those days was stuffy, an enclave of the upper classes. The word got around that they could hear the Gospel out in the fields. Wesley spawned a great revival of the faith of Jesus among the common people.
But George Whitefield, Wesley’s friend, went one step farther. When he came to this country he sent out advance teams to let it be known he was coming. He became, as one of Purdue’s fine historians put it, “a peddler of divinity.” And thus Whitefield not only called attention to the Gospel, but he called attention to himself as a preacher of the Gospel.
In one way we might say that George Whitefield made wise use of the media available to him. But in another way he introduced something that was very different from Jesus’ way. In fact, it was the very opposite of Jesus’ way. The reserve that accentuated the inner beauty of Jesus was displaced by publicity. The idea caught on. And now big-time and small-time preachers seek to get on TV. The medium and the message have become blurred. When many people think of the Christian Gospel they have flash before them the image of a preacher. The wisdom of John the Baptist has been largely lost. “He must increase but I must decrease.”
I wonder if part of the reason why the Church now influences society so meagerly is that we have forgotten the reserve of Jesus. We have forgotten the power of under-statement.
My heart’s longing, that I lay before you this morning, is to see Christians retreat from the noisy, brassy, publicity-conscious ways the Church has adopted, to a quiet exhibit of the compassion and reserve of Jesus. Eliminate the Jesus-T-shirts, the bumper stickers, and all of that. Let them know of Jesus by the genuine display of the ways of Jesus. Speak of Jesus to those who ask you because they have seen the power of your compassion. It will be clear whether you are proclaiming how religious you are, or whether you are just telling another beggar where you have found bread.
The present state of controversy in our land, when anti-war protestors and pro-war protestors are shouting their loathing of the other, and inter-religious conflict is rising to a crescendo, presents you and me with a rare opportunity. You and I who do not all agree on war, and who live in an increasingly pluralistic religious society, can treat others not as lepers to be despised, but as objects of Jesus’ compassion. You are the principal vehicle Jesus has now. Stretch out your hand and touch him. Say, “I do choose.”
And then, having given all the compassion you have, that rescues the leper from his plight, retreat to a deserted place to pray. Pray in your closet, not by the flag pole.
If this were the pattern of our practice of the faith of Jesus, who could resist asking about this Jesus? And then we could say: “This is what Jesus did for me––and that is very persuasive. How different and winsome would seem the faith that we profess. Think on these things.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we thank You for Jesus, for His compassion, and for His reserve. Help us to follow Him. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at March 23, 2003 09:30 AM