Alms for An Ex-Leper?

Brad Sullivan

St. Mark’s, Bay City

May 1, 2016

6 Easter, Year C

Acts 16:9-15

John 5:1-9

Alms for An Ex-Leper?

In the movie, The Life of Brian, Monty Python showed a rather silly example of this idea that being healed can actually be rather difficult.  The movie was a comedy, which took place in Israel during the lifetime of Jesus.  Brian, a historically insignificant and unknown Jew, found himself caught up in a series of crazy situations, his life often mirroring the life of Jesus.  In the scene showing the difficulty of being healed, Brian is walking through town when a man comes prancing up to him asking, “Alms for an ex-leper?”  Brian is not initially interested, and there is some haggling going on as the Ex-Leper continues to reduce the amount he is asking for when he finally comes to his rock bottom offer: 

Ex-Leper: Okay, sir, my final offer: half a shekel for an old ex-leper?

Brian: Did you say "ex-leper"?

Ex-Leper: That's right, sir, 16 years behind a veil and proud of it, sir.

Brian: Well, what happened?

Ex-Leper: Oh, cured, sir.

Brian: Cured?

Ex-Leper: Yes sir, bloody miracle, sir. Bless you!

Brian: Who cured you?

Ex-Leper: Jesus did, sir. I was hopping along, minding my own business, all of a sudden, up he comes, cures me! One minute I'm a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood's gone. Not so much as a by-your-leave! "You're cured, mate." Bloody do-gooder.

Brian:  Alright, well, here you go.

Ex-Leper:  Half a denarii for my bloody life story.

Brian:  There’s just no pleasing some people.

Ex-Leper:  That’s just what Jesus said sir.

The ex-leper did admit that leprosy was awful and that he would have preferred Jesus to have come back and given him some less-bothersome, yet alms-worthy malady, so that he could have continued to ply his trade of begging alms.  Sometimes, the hardest thing in the world is to be healed.  Without healing, life may be kind of crummy, but we adjust and adapt and become so accustomed to how things are, that we’d prefer not to be healed over risking changing how things are. 

“Do you want to be made well?”  Jesus asked the man who had been ill for 38 years. I heard the suggestion recently that Jesus’ questions was not rhetorical, but an honest question.  “Do you want to be made well?”  Jesus had a gift to offer this man, but he would not force it on him.

Imagine the change that would come upon this man when suddenly he was made well, when suddenly he wasn’t lying by this pool anymore waiting to come into the waters.  When he didn’t’ have people pitying him anymore, he whole world was going to change.  Responsibilities would be now upon him.  While welcome, that was probably going to be a daunting transformation of his life.

If we look at this story of physical healing and apply it to our spiritual healing, we see Jesus asking us that same question, “Do you want to be healed?”, and we find that our answers are not always “Yes.”  For the healing that comes through accepting Jesus’ grace and love, through trusting in him and following in his ways, sometimes our answer to “Do you want to be healed?”, is “Yes, but not yet.” 

That was St. Augustine of Hippo’s famous prayer, “Lord, please make me a Christian, just not yet.”  He believed that if he were to become a Christian, he would have to change his life; he’d have to give up a rather carefree, womanizing life, and actually be dedicated to Jesus’ teachings.  He believed that following in Jesus’ way would be a better life for him.  He believed that it would be more fulfilling, that it would bring about more good, that he would actually enjoy life more, but he just wasn’t ready to bite the bullet and stop his carousing, carefree, party-boy life.  So, his response to Jesus’ question, “Do you want to be made well?”, was “Yes Lord, just not yet.”

Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to be healed.  The healing that Jesus offers means transformation, and transformation is a daunting prospect.  I may know that things aren’t good the way they are, but I can’t imagine life any other way.  We may hold onto our past hurts, cling to our pain, because it feels like a shield against future pain.

The man Jesus healed had been ill for 38 years.  The story doesn’t say what his malady was, just that he was ill.  He said he had no one to put him into the pool when the water was stirred up (when the healing powers of the water were present), and so someone else would always beat him to the water.  I’ve always imagined the man as a cripple who was crawling to the water with lifeless legs dragging behind him, and perhaps that is the case, but perhaps not. 

Perhaps the man could walk, he just walked slowly, fearful of what would happen if he was healed, or maybe fearful that he would enter the water and not be healed.  Perhaps he was afraid that he would enter the water and not be worthy of being healed.  Remember that sickness was often seen as an affliction given by God as punishment for sin.  If the man entered the water and was not healed, then he was not forgiven.  Perhaps that fear of being unforgiven, that fear of being unlovable was too great, and the man remained as he was.

Ultimately, that was the healing Jesus gave to the man.  He cured the man’s illness, whatever it was, and in doing so, he declared the man forgiven of his sins and beloved of God.   Be not afraid, be not ashamed, for you are God’s beloved, and God’s grace is more than sufficient for your sins. 

Lutheran Pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, wrote of God’s grace being enough for her sins.  She had at one point been a bit of a jerk to a parishioner, totally unknown to the parishioner, but it was weighing on her, and she needed absolution; she needed to say out loud to another human being the crappy thing she had done, and she then needed to hear the words of God’s forgiveness spoken over her.  So, she called her friend, Caitlin, who was also her confessor.  Of Caitlin, she wrote:

[Caitlin] knows me.  Really well.  And she is unimpressed with my sin.  I’ve told her things about myself that I’ve not told anyone else and she still wants to be my friend.  Not because she is magnanimous but because she believes in the power of forgiveness and the grace of God. 

Caitlin was unimpressed with Nadia’s sins.  That’s how God is with us, unimpressed with our sins.  Our sins are a big deal to us, and in one sense our sins are a big deal to God.  Our sins are a big deal and they matter to God because our sins are the ways we hurt ourselves and each other.  Our sins are a big deal to God because we are a big deal to God.  Through our sins, we end up separating ourselves from each other and from God, and God wants to be united to us and for us to be united to each other.  So our sins are a big deal to God, a big enough deal that God became human in the person of Jesus and let us kill him on the cross so that he could receive all of our sins, receive all of our sins in that macabre embrace, and having taken all of our sins upon himself, could say, “Father, forgive them.” 

Such is the grace of Jesus, that having taken all of our sins upon himself and having been killed by us, he has forgiven us.  So, while our sins matter to God, God is also totally unimpressed by our sins, because his grace, forgiveness, and love are so much greater.  The sins of the entirety of all human kind throughout all time are very great indeed:  pettiness, insults, jealousy, abuse, rape, murder, genocide, holocausts.  The sins of humanity are vast as the ocean, limitless as the sky, beyond our reckoning, and the sins of humanity are totally unimpressive when met with God’s grace, forgiveness, and love.

That is what Jesus offers us when he says, “Do you want to be healed?”  Imagine a life not held captive by guilt or shame from past sins.  Imagine a life not constantly scrambling to be good enough to be worthy of God’s love.  Imagine a life not held captive by the past hurts that others have given because you have been forgiven yourself by God and therefore able to forgive others. 

Imagine a life transformed, sometimes a daunting prospect, and so Jesus asks, “Do you want to be healed.”  Do you want to be transformed by God’s grace?  Do you want to be transformed by God’s forgiveness?  Do you want to be transformed by God’s love?  Do you want to let go the sins and the hurts of the past as God has let them go for you?  Do you want to accept that there will be more sins and hurts in the future and let go of those as well?  No longer clinging to our sins and our hurts, no longer clinging to our feelings of needing to be good enough to be worthy of God’s love, not longer clinging to all of the past and future mess, “Do you want,” Jesus asks, “to fall into God’s grace and accept that you are forgiven and beloved?”  Amen.