Today's gospel (Matthew 8: 5-17) and yesterday's (Matthew 8: 1-4) are to a great extent about the same thing: healing. Yesterday, Jesus cured a leper who approached him, saying: Sir, if you want to, you can cure me. Today, a centurion approaches Jesus and asks for the curing of his servant. We dwell naturally on the centurion's request as a story of faith, the perspective that Jesus Himself reflected on as He marvelled at the man's willingness for Him to perform this miracle at a distance. Yet what comes before this act of faith in Jesus - for the centurion and for yesterday's suppliant leper - is a recognition that they have a problem and they cannot solve it themselves.
Sir, if you want to, you can cure me, says the leper. But the real question is not whether Jesus wants to heal him. The real question is whether the leper wants to be cured. We all of us cling to things of this world, both tangible and intangible. Most of us would like a little more comfort; many of us would like a little more respect. But our attachments go deeper than this.
For sometimes, our attachments go as far as our wounds and weaknesses. We have the leprosy but, bizarrely, part of us does not want to be cured. To be cured means to surrender the advantages our wounds bring us, like a prisoner who knows that leaving prison means giving up a bed he likes, three square meals a day and also having to find a job. We are comfortable in our limitations, unchallenged by our easy vices. Being cured means having to think harder and to act with more responsibility because responsibility is the price of freedom. Being cured means not surrendering to our dissonant desires - our craving to be needed or our hardly-noticed but aggressive competitiveness. Refusing to be cured means hanging on to all the little lies we murmur ourselves to justify our behaviour. Everything can become a shackle that we cling to, even our sense of who we are, for through enslavement to our self image we run the risk of never waking up to God's dream for us. We all, as this blog said a few posts ago, are in danger of being merchants of our own glory, rather than being servants of God's glory.
Sir, if you want to, you can cure me. When John and James asked Jesus (through their mother) whether they could sit at His right and left in the kingdom, He responded: Do you know what you are asking? But exchange is echoed again and again every day.
Sir, if you want to, you can cure me, we pray with hands folded in piety.
Do you know what you are asking?, replies Jesus.
And thus He initially answers all our prayers. He is not the God of Merchandise. Our cures, when they come, are not part of some trade agreement; if we think of them in this way, we have mistaken our God for our grocer. Our deepest cures are - or they should be - the way in which we let go of the countless things we do not need in order to embrace more fully the one thing necessary.
The leper wanted to let go of his leper's life. The question is now: do we?
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