October 25, 2009 Pastor Tim Pusey

THE DAY JESUS HEALED THE WRONG PERSON
Luke 5:12-16

[Use video “They’ll Let Anyone in That Church”—4:38]

Well, there’s a great challenge to any church—including ours! But it’s also reflective of the great love of Jesus who loved people unconditionally with a seemingly indiscriminate love. It was so unlike the religious folk of His day—and, sad to say, too often unlike the religious folk of our day!

Most of us live with certain expectations. We expect to eat every day. We expect the sun to shine most days in Idaho. And we expect the preacher to be done by noon!

We probably all have certain expectations as followers of Jesus. But Scripture often blows away our expectations—and certainly there were lots of times when Jesus didn’t do what most people expected Him to do! His response to people was totally different than what they expected! He surrounded Himself with the wrong people! He preached what seemed like the wrong theology! He kept the wrong company! He even healed what sometimes seemed like the wrong people!

We’re continuing in our series of sermons I’ve entitled “Close Enough to Feel the Pain.” We’re looking at scenes from Jesus’ life and ministry in Luke’s Gospel. Today we’re going to look at a scene in which Jesus healed the wrong person! And we’re going to need to climb into the perspective of the New Testament world to fully understand how this was clearly the wrong person for Jesus to heal.

Look with me at Luke 5:12-16—
[Read Luke 5:12-16, NIV]

From the vantage point of the average person of Jesus’ day, and particularly the religious leaders, this man was clearly the wrong person for Jesus to heal! This man with leprosy wasn’t even someone they were to touch at all! In fact, people with leprosy weren’t allowed to come close to other people! I suppose it was first a physical concern because of the concern for contamination that we spoke about last week.

In some ways, leprosy was the AIDS of that era. It was a frightening disease. “Leprosy” was a fairly general term in the New Testament world for certain skin diseases, not all of which are equivalent to what we’d call “leprosy” or “Hansen’s disease” today. Classic leprosy causes disfiguring skin lesions which do not heal, progressive debilitation, and severe nerve damage which often leads to the loss of limbs—and, untreated, it is very much contagious and very much a killer. That’s why people with leprosy were confined in “leper colonies”—forced to live their lives in isolation from family and friends. While it is treatable and curable today, it is still a threatening disease in some world areas where they can’t provide proper treatment. For example, I’m told that there are as many as 1,000 leper colonies in India today—plus many others in places like China, Romania, Egypt and Somalia.

Frankly, leprosy is a hideous disease—an ugly disease! In a time when they did not know how to treat it, people with leprosy became physically repulsive to others, and thus isolated socially and psychologically. They were completely ostracized from others because of the fear of contamination—but also because it was such a hideous thing to see.

But there was also another side to this, at least from the vantage point of the people of Jesus’ day. It was believed by many in His day that if you were ill that you had sinned in some way. And so if you had leprosy, it meant that you had committed some terrible sins!—and if you were a terrible sinner, the religious folk felt they needed to stay clear of you out of the fear of spiritual contamination. You were “unclean”!

Leprosy was considered a filthy disease. Good people just weren’t supposed to be around horrendous sinners—dirty people that they were! And that’s where Jesus made so many of the religious folk angry, because He refused to stay away from such people. And so, from their vantage point, He was healing the wrong person. But from Jesus’ vantage point, He couldn’t heal the “wrong” person—there were no “wrong” people when it came to love and care and compassion!

From the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, He spoke about “setting the captives free.” The lepers were the captives of their society. They desperately needed “set free”! In addition to coping with horrible and probably terminal illness, they were social outcasts—but Jesus didn’t consider them outcasts. He saw beyond the disease. He saw the person, and He saw the need.

So here was a man with leprosy, shamefully falling face downward at the feet of Jesus. He begged Jesus, saying, “Lord, if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean!” The man was desperate for a sense of cleansing from his deplorable condition. And while most everyone else wouldn’t even come near the guy, Jesus did the unthinkable—He reached out His hand and touched the man, declaring, “I am willing! Be healed!”

Again, it’s so incredibly significant that Jesus touched the man! In this scene, Jesus literally touched the untouchable! We talked last Sunday about the significance of human touch. Jesus clearly understood that. That’s why in so many cases when He came across people in great need, He placed His hands upon them. You and I know that there is power in human touch. And, as I said last week, we all understand that it can be abused, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater! There is something powerful in the human touch. We all need contact with other people. Jesus was the Son of God who set aside His power and authority as God to step into our world—and His literal touch upon people’s lives is a powerful demonstration of the love of God! And do you understand why His touch was particularly powerful for the man with leprosy? Chances are, he hadn’t felt human touch in a long, long time!

For Jesus, there were no “wrong” people to love and to care for and to heal! There was no such thing as an “untouchable” person! Every person matters! Every person is a recipient of the unmerited favor of God—His love and His grace. Jesus’ physical touch on the man was such an outward demonstration of His love for him! And, of course, He not only touched the man, Jesus healed this man whose body was ravaged with leprosy!

Now, we need to be careful that we don’t categorically connect Christ’s love with His healing. The Bible tells us of His great love for all people—regardless of whether or not He chooses to heal us. What I don’t want us to try to do is make His healing a test of His love—for God loves us all, but He doesn’t always chose to heal us. I was talking with someone from our congregation this week about these very things—together noting that it’s such a mystery as to why God chooses to heal some times and why He chooses not to heal other times. And if I understood all the mysteries of God, then I suppose I wouldn’t need God. I’m convinced that God doesn’t intend for us to understand all of His ways, and I become suspect of anyone who proclaims to know the mysteries of God.

I believe firmly that God loves each of us, and I also know that scripture urges us to pray for healing, trusting that God has the power to do so when He chooses. I remarked to you last week that God created us and put us in mortal bodies—that we were never meant to live forever. If we dared to think that God always wants to heal us, then we’re forgetting the fact that our bodies are, at best, temporary.

Besides that, how would we ever get to heaven if God always heals us?! If heaven’s as wonderful as Scripture describes, and I have every reason to believe it’s that and more, then why should I try to avoid heaven at all costs? Some day, in God’s perfect timing, I will die—and I have every confidence because of God’s grace that, as His child, I will be with Him forever.

And if we ever dare to think that it’s our faith in God that’s accomplishing the healing, then we’re somehow taking the healing power away from God and putting it simply at our disposal—to use or not to use according to our determination.

But here was a man bowing before Jesus, desperately desiring healing, and none of the religious leaders would have come close to this man. Why? Because He was the wrong guy to love and the wrong guy to heal. He was, they felt, obviously full of sin—filthy inside and out.

But Jesus was always loving the “wrong” people, wasn’t He? It’s what made the religious leaders so mad! It’s what kept getting Him into trouble! But He just kept doing it anyway—not to make them mad, but because He had a love for every person that would not stop and could not be stopped!

Christ’s love is unconditional. Unconditional love means that we love regardless of someone’s actions or even their beliefs. We love them regardless of their situation in life. Unconditional love separates the individual from his or her behaviors.

Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you get a puppy. The puppy is incredibly cute—and even though I don’t consider myself a huge dog lover, I’ve never seen a puppy that I didn’t think was cute! Our whole family still goes nuts whenever we see a Boston Terrier puppy that reminds us of the dog we had for 13 years! So the puppy is cute and playful, and it’s easy to love this adorable little being. Then the inevitable happens—the puppy has an accident on the floor! But you don’t quit loving the puppy just because of that, do you? No—you work on correcting the puppy and modifying its behavior through training.

Maybe a better example is a child. You love that little baby that comes into your home! You may not always know what to do to make that little one content or for the baby to quit crying, but there’s no doubt that you love this helpless tiny person who eventually calls you “mommy” or “daddy”! But as the child grows, they inevitably will do something like write on your bedroom wall with a crayon. You’re not happy about the crayon markings on your wall!—but you don’t stop loving that child!

How much more so is it true that our perfect, loving Heavenly Father loves us with a love that never ends. In the context of our Christian faith, we understand that God loves each person irrespective of that’s person’s love for God and regardless of the presence of sin in their lives. Sometimes we’ve put it in words like, “God loves the sinner, but hates the sin.” But the wonder of our faith in God is that, despite our sinful condition, He has loved us! He loves us with a love that will not go away! We cannot escape it!

His love is unconditional, even seemingly indiscriminate—because He seems to love even those who may not seem worthy of love. Our human tendency is to pick and choose who we’re going to love. That’s why I liked the video so much that we saw earlier—it’s just so much like us, even though we might be more subtle about it. We get repulsed by people’s choices and their behaviors. Sometimes we’re as shocked with people’s appearances as was the boy whose mouth dropped open when the rather radical teenage girl came to the door. We get disgusted with people’s habits—and allow our disgust for their habits to become disgust for them as persons.

But—thank the Lord!—from God’s perspective there are no “wrong” people to love or to heal! You and I might have been left out if it was anything other than this! This scene from Jesus’ life and ministry tells us so much about the powerful love of God that brings cleansing and healing to each of our lives—regardless of our story. We’re all stories of God’s grace—He has loved us even though we did not deserve it. That’s why it’s so amazing!

Have you ever felt that maybe you were that “wrong” person to love?—that you could never be “special” in God’s eyes because you just didn’t measure up?
• Maybe it was because of sin in your life—days and maybe years of which you are so ashamed! And you still carry such shame for your sins that you can’t get past the thought that you must surely be “second class” in God’s eyes.
• Maybe you see yourself as the “wrong” person for Jesus to love because you just keep messing up—you want to do what’s right but you just can’t seem to pull it off.
• Maybe you don’t feel like you have the right pedigree to be a child of God—you hear all the stories of those who grew up in wonderful Christian homes and that isn’t your story at all!
• Or maybe you keep hearing some people around here talk about their Nazarene roots—as if we assume we’re somehow more spiritual because of our Nazarene heritage!
• Or maybe you struggle to see yourself as a child truly loved by God because life’s simply been hard for you—and you wonder why God doesn’t instantly make it all easier.

May I remind you this morning that there are no “wrong” people for Jesus to love. Everyone is as precious in the sight of God as the next person. Despite our human inclination to see people through lenses that place more worth on some than on others, God doesn’t see us that way. God loves you—and He wants to touch your life and bless you and walk beside you.