The cure

 A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 8: 1-4) shares with us a simple scene that, like so many gospel scenes, is layered with meaning. Jesus had just finished His sermon on the mount and was now pursued by large crowds. A leper approached Him with a vital need: if you want, you can heal me. Jesus first answers the conditional doubt, for indeed He does so wish, before proceeding to heal the man and ordering him to fulfil the law of Moses which ordained that the priests should verify recoveries from leprosy. This scene is a world of trouble and redemption in a few short lines.

First, it is always easier for Jesus to be followed when He comes down from the mountain. We like walking on the flat; we struggle to follow Him to the heights, whether it is to the heights of prayer or the heights of suffering. We should not struggle, then; we should surrender ourselves so that He takes us there. Or rather, we should await His command and His orders, for He may need us elsewhere, for our sake or the sake of others. God, who wishes mercy and not sacrifice, requires obedience and cooperation from us, for that is the currency that really counts; not the actions we heroically imagine for ourselves. We are called to the fruitfulness He desires for us; not the fruitfulness our dissonant needs secretly draw us towards where we are only ever a legend in our own lunchtimes, like a kind of St Walter Mitty.

Then, we see in this passage the approach of the leper with the words: if you want to, you can heal me.  We must not read this line as if the leper is trying to put Jesus on the spot; those who put Jesus on the spot in the gospel usually get short shrift. In the conditional clause here, if you want to, we would be better off hearing a prayer of surrender and of confidence. If you want to means according to your will; if you want to means I recognise who you are, the one who disposes of everything. If you want to in a sense means the same as Thomas’s My Lord and My God. You are the Master, or as the beautiful prayer during the Stations of the Cross has it:

              Grant that I may love you always, then do with me what you will.

How do we know these words carry all these various meanings? Only because Jesus treats them as a humble appeal and not as if the man had tried to corner him.

But then, let’s not be too hasty. The man says: if you want to, you can heal me. Yet the question here is not only whether Jesus desires to heal the man. Lepers were excluded from Jewish society and forced to beg for a living for exclusion meant no work. It is quite possible, however, that not all lepers lived this exclusion as a trial or a suffering. Some of us like dependency; some of us are glad to shelter from responsibility. As long as we can draw on the charity of others, we may be relieved not to shoulder their burdens. Those who suffer draw our pity, but human nature sometimes draws sufferers into selfishness, a moral instinct to try to protect themselves from even more suffering.

This is human nature; we sometimes prefer to suffer than to give something up, to surrender something that in truth we ought to surrender. The French fable writer La Fontaine concludes his fable of the Woodcutter and Death with these famous lines:

Le trépas vient tout guérir ;

Mais ne bougeons d'où nous sommes :

Plutôt souffrir que mourir,

C'est la devise des hommes.

Death cures all / but let us stay where we are / suffering rather than death / is man’s motto.

So, the question for us is not whether Jesus wants us to be healed, but whether we want to be healed? Do we want to surrender to Him all that such a healing will require of us? Do we want to end our life of exclusion and irresponsibility for a life in which our hearts must first break in contrition for our ongoing rebellion, a life then lived in His friendship where we ask Him to join our yes to His in every minute we draw breath, to the glory of the Father? The prison of sin is miserable, but it has its consolations, its comfortable isolation where we can be king of our own dung heap and not suffer the humiliation that comes to visit us from our own imperfection; we fear the crooked cross only because it will oblige us to offer our own crookedness to be straightened out by His grace.

None of this can be done in us without the sacraments either, for just as the leper must show himself to the priests, so we too must go to where the priests offer the sacraments, to where the gifts of the Lord are distributed, to where we can see in tangible form the gift of Himself take flesh again in our own histories. Then, as in Mary our model, the conception that happens first in our hearts through His inspiration can become real, substantial, and formative in our actions, our words, our lives, and our world.

And, thus in this passage from the gospel of St Matthew, we hear again and again the Lord send His invitation to us each day:

If you want to, I can cure you… What will we answer today?