“Seeing Jesus he fell on his face and implored him saying, 'Sir, if you are willing you can cleanse me.' He stretched out his hand, and touched him saying, 'I am willing. Be cleansed.’” (Lk 5: 12-13)
As a child growing up in the mountains of rural Pennsylvania, I fondly remember running around in the woods with my sister, playing hide and seek in our backyard, and riding my bike up and down our quiet street. We lived at the top of a huge hill and had a steep, winding driveway flanked by two rocky, thorny ditches. Despite my mother’s warnings not to, I loved racing up and down that driveway. Consequently, I was always getting scraped up.
Every time I got hurt from my daredevil antics, I remember being filled with fear that my parents would punish me. After all, I usually got hurt doing something they told me not to do. That fear was so childlike, so irrational, because one of two things always happened: my mom and dad would either witness the accident and come running to help me, or I would go to them, scraped and tearstained, ashamed and afraid, and they would take me in their arms, lift me onto the bathroom counter, and bandage me up. They made a point to tell me I should learn from what happened, but they were never angry with me for getting hurt.
As adults, we should better understand the consequences of our choices, so if we get hurt because we made a bad choice, it’s our own fault and nobody should have to be burdened by our mistakes. As the gospel shows us, though, that is simply not the case. If we are children of God, and He is our loving, compassionate, merciful Father, would he really leave us to pick ourselves up on our own?
The man in Luke’s gospel was truly suffering. Being covered with a skin disease on his face would have marked him as unholy in his time and culture. He would have been unloved, uncared for, lonely, and broken. Imagine the shame and fear he must have felt approaching Jesus, knowing that if his own town rejected him for the disease he suffered, the Savior of the world could find him even more unworthy.
Despite these insecurities, this man approached Jesus. And Jesus never turned him away. Instead of being angry or disgusted, Jesus reassured the man that He was willing to heal him, that He wanted to heal him, and He healed him instantly.
Throughout our lives we are constantly struggling to live as Christ asks us. Despite our own capabilities, we fall and get scraped up in that process, but just because we fall of our own accord, doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t want to heal the pain we experience from falling. The Father waits patiently for us, His little children, to humbly turn to Him and ask for healing. Even though it’s scary to turn our brokenness over to the One who is perfect, we are called to approach God just as the man from Luke’s gospel did: with trust that He can heal us and confidence that He wants to.
