by CCW | 24 January 2021 08:00
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.
Yet, just as Jesus had said to the Jewish leper, “I will; be thou clean,” so he says to the centurion, “I will come and heal him.” God’s Word is our health and our strength as the Psalms make so abundantly clear but that Word is not the possession of one group to the exclusion of others. It is not, if I may put it this way, the possession of the Jews nor the possession of Christians nor Muslims, nor anyone for that matter. For that would be to deny the absolute and eternal truth of the Word of God which by definition cannot be contained and limited to our interests, projects, and agendas nor our cultures and communities. At the same time, that Word can only go forth through us, through the forms of intellectual mediation which belong to the highest truths of the spiritual traditions of our cultures and communities. In short, epiphany as healing is about the mediation of that Word to us.
What this means is the honouring of the Law within and without Israel. In a way, the second healing brings out the true meaning of the Law which defines Israel. It is for all people through the mission of Israel as “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel”, as Isaiah proclaims and Simeon will repeat in what becomes the Nunc Dimittis of our evening prayers. It is about the radical meaning of our response to that Word. “Be it unto me according to thy Word”, as Mary says.
Last week we saw how Mary learns from the story of Jesus in the Temple, having “kept all these sayings in her heart”; in this case, Jesus’s own saying about being “about his Father’s business” which extends to the miracle of the water turned into wine in anticipation of his passion and death. Thus, Mary bids us do whatever he tells us to do. It is to act just like the Jewish leper and the Roman centurion. They acknowledge their need and they respond to Jesus’s word.
Something of the radical meaning of that response to Jesus’s word is shown by the centurion. His words are great words of faith. They reveal his grasp of the universal and eternal nature of God’s Word ever present and ever coming near. First, “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof” and then, he says, and this is the great wonder, “but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.” That is to have a strong hold on the radical truth of God’s Word and its healing power and strength. He points out how commands are passed on down through the ordered ranks of an army. It is a lovely image about the transmission of ideas, of truth, and of the ways in which words come to us and touch us from afar. He has an insight into the Word behind all words, the Word which is the wisdom of God and which is necessarily mediated to us. All wisdom, all that is good and true, belongs to God. “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding,” as one of our prayers puts it, reminding us that all forms of truth and wisdom ultimately derive and belong to God and are mediated to us in various ways. Such is the miracle of epiphany as healing. The healing is the truth and the wonder of God’s Word made known to us.
Jesus’s response to the response of the centurion is especially wonderful. It shows abundantly, I think, what God seeks for us as in last Sunday’s Gospel about the wedding feast of Cana of Galilee. God seeks our social joys, our good in his will and love for us. That means he takes delight in our taking ahold by faith and reason his Word for us in our lives. In other words, God takes delight in the activity of our knowing what he seeks and wants for us, the very things which these epiphany stories show us. Epiphany as teaching, as education, is our healing, our being made whole through our response to God’s Word. It is wonderfully crystallized in the response of the centurion. “Speak the word only”. For that is not only enough. It is everything.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 3, 2021
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