Day: January 24, 2021

“I will; be thou clean … I will come and heal him.”

How wonderful that the Epiphany season this year ends with this Gospel story of a double healing! It signals the idea of epiphany as healing. And what is the healing? Simply the Word of God which reaches out and touches us whether near and at hand or far away and at a distance. The Word is the divine Word. Epiphany makes Christ known as the eternal Word and Son of God; the Word which comes near to us. That Word which comes to us in Christ’s Incarnation is ever present and ever near and yet ever coming to us. At issue is our relation to it; in short, our awakening to its transforming presence.

Epiphany as healing highlights another truth which is being made manifest to us. It is the awareness of our brokenness, our incompleteness, and therefore the awareness of our need for healing. This is a profound spiritual truth that belongs to the doctrine of original sin. As G.K. Chesterton notes, paradoxical as it may seem, “it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.” Why? Because it locates the good of our humanity not in ourselves but only in God and with God in us. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one”, as the Psalmist says (Ps.14.3) and as Paul came to realize (Rom. 3.12) in the face of the self-righteousness of the Pharisees for example. The New Testament ground for the doctrine is Paul’s insight that “the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Rom. 7.19). As he goes on to say, “sin dwelleth in me.” The paradox is that to know this is to know the good from which you are separated. This Gospel shows us the next step: the desire to be healed which is the movement of God in us.

“Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean,” the leper says to Jesus and as the scene indicates, he is Jewish. After healing him, Jesus bids him go and “show thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded”. The healing happens within the context of Israel. “Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented,” the centurion says to Jesus in Capernaum. That is all he says, a simple description of his servant’s condition. Yet he has come to Jesus on behalf of another, his servant for whom he cares and towards whom he feels some responsibility, a sense of regard and concern for another. The centurion, of course, is a Roman officer in charge, nominally speaking, of one hundred soldiers. He expresses to Jesus his concern for another who is in need of healing. But he is from outside the context of Israel.

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