Who are the lepers of today?
Go rather to the lost sheep .... As you go, preach this message: 'The kingdom of heaven is near.' Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give (Matt. 10:6-8 NIV).
Jesus spells out very clearly what He is calling us ~ His followers ~ to do. In proclaiming the Good News, we don't just talk about it. We prove that the kingdom of heaven is real by healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and overcoming demons. In our everyday lives, that means taking care of the needs of those who are sick and praying for them. It means taking time to reach those who are spiritually dead and bringing them to life in God. It means cleaning out the hearts and minds of lepers. It means identifying the lies and temptations of demons that affect the people we know, while helping them become stronger in obeying God's ways, in living out the truth and in resisting evil choices.
Cleaning out the hearts and minds of lepers ~ what does that mean? Who are the lepers of today? In biblical days, lepers were outcasts. They were forced to spend the rest of their years in leper colonies because healthy people were afraid of catching the disease. Touch was forbidden.
How important touch is! Abandoned babies in institutions die from lack of touch. Marriages wither from lack of hugging. Children grow up with poor self esteem from lack of physical nurturing. Jesus knew how important touch is. Despite being able to heal people from a distance, without even seeing the one who was suffering, when it came to dealing with lepers, He not only healed their bodies, He also healed their spirits by giving them what they needed most ~ human touch.
A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, "If you are willing, you can make me clean." Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured (Mark 1:40-42 NIV).
Who are the lepers in our lives that need our healing touch?
A typical first answer is AIDS victims or others who have diseases that we fear and lifestyles that we disapprove of. But our society has been doing a lot to encourage us to accept and reach out to these people. I propose that the real lepers, the ones who are outcast and forced to keep their distance, are the addicts ~ all kinds of addicts.
These addicts are in my life and your life, usually on a daily basis. They are the people who are the most difficult to love, the ones we reject because they keep hurting us, the jerks who make our lives miserable, the trouble-makers we dump to protect ourselves.
Some people are addicted to alcohol or drugs. Their thinking is clouded by the buzz they like to get. We get hurt by their undependability, the loosening of their inhibitions (leading to lust, for example), the warped understanding they have of themselves and of us, and their foolish behaviors that harm them while they believe they are doing good for themselves.
Some are addicted to significant persons in their lives; this is called co-dependency. They latch onto parents or lovers or spouses or friends in a desperate attempt to feel whole. They hurt us by smothering us and demanding from us what we cannot or should not give, and when we refuse to behave co-dependently toward them, they interpret us wrongly and increase the misery, bad-mouthing us and clinging to us all the more.
Some are addicted to violence and abuse. Others are addicted to sex and porn. The hurts these people cause can be very traumatic.*
Some are addicted to power ~ these are the control freaks. They squash us and trample on our wills. They reject our dreams and desires to pursue their own agendas.
Some are addicted to greed ~ they care more about money and possessions than about us. They take advantage of us to achieve their goals of accumulating more. They snub us if we can't help them get richer.
The types of addictions that exist are as numerous as the ability we humans have for finding substitutes for God. All addictions are a substitute for God. Only God's love can fill the holes in their wounded hearts, but lacking an understanding of that, they try to get more love from people than the people can give, and when that doesn't satisfy their needs, they try to stuff their holes with anything that seems appealing. They use the object of their addictions as an anesthesia to dull the pain that never heals ~ the pain that comes from not being sufficiently loved.
Jesus tells us, "Freely you have received, freely give." What have we freely and abundantly received from Him? Love! What do addicts/lepers need most? The healing touch of love, but Jesus is no longer here in the flesh unless He touches lepers through us. It's up to us. We are called to this. It's our vocation if we take seriously the commitment to be followers of Jesus.
And yet, it's hard to give love ~ and persist in it ~ to the lepers of our world. We prefer to limit our love to those who love us back. We cast away those who make our lives difficult. We accept that we have to work in the same jobs with them, but we won't invite them to our homes for dinner. We give them a friendly hello in church, but we won't sit down with them and ask how we can help. We tolerate leprous family members on Thanksgiving, but we won't invite them to join us on vacations. And yet, what they need most is our love ~ or more accurately, Jesus' love coming to them through us.
Love cannot help but to give itself to others, regardless of the outcome. If we are willing to love others only when it will be given back to us, what merit is there in that? If we are willing to love others only when they treat us well, we are not loving them unconditionally. In fact, if love is conditional, it is not love at all! Love is not love unless it is giving love. Love can do nothing but love, even when there are no good results that come from its efforts.
The reason that addicts are addicts is because they are in desperate need of love. They have received less of it than we have. Often, they have never received real love ~ their only experience of so-called "love" is really co-dependency or control or conditions. They cannot give to us what they do not have. But we are commanded by our Lord to give to them what He has given freely to us. We have it! We have it to give!
Our problem is that when cleansing lepers of their lack of love, we have to be willing to forgive them over and over and over, seventy times seven times every day. They don't know how to receive our love. They don't even know how to recognize it. So we have to persist and forgive and persist and forgive until finally ~ finally! ~ our love breaks through and the cleansing begins. And when they slip back into their old leprosy, we love them more and forgive them again. Our persistent, unconditional love will eventually bring them all the way to the full cleansing that Jesus wants to give them.
The process is long. We can only persist if we continually turn to God for strength and endurance. We have to repeatedly ask Him to give us renewed love for the jerks we'd rather be rid of. This is a supernatural love. We cannot do this without extra help from Jesus, who freely gives us everything we need in order to remain in the process of loving the unlovable and cleansing the lepers.
When it gets hard, when it really, really hurts and our instinct is to give up and cast out the lepers, we can look at Jesus hanging on the cross for us. He did not give up on us. Neither is He going to give up on the jerks we know. We can become like Him. We can unite our sufferings to His cross. We can feel more closely connected to Him as we lay down our lives for the sake of redeeming others, by sacrificing our comfort because love is more important, and by praying, "Father forgive them, because they don't know what they are doing."
Remember: After crucifixion there is always resurrection!
* I do not propose that we allow such abuse to continue. Often, the only way to bring healing love to a violent or sexually abusive situation is to draw healthy boundaries and enforce them. If you are in an abusive environment, create separation until the abuser gets the counseling and anger management training he/she needs and becomes safe to live with, then welcome him/her back with the same joy as the father felt for his Prodigal Son.
