Jesus met a man “covered with leprosy” Luke 5:12-16. Because Jesus had in equilibrium both POWER and COMPASSION to act, he touched the diseased flesh and his Deity removed the disease.
A priest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral met a man who had suffered 16 surgeries in 6 years in a leprosarium seeking to rebuild his body. His release nevertheless found him such an unwelcome addition to any family gathering that he used it as an excuse to become homeless. That priest befriended the man and invited him to dinner in a restaurant. There, because the man couldn’t, the priest unobtrusively cut the man’s meat for him. When installed as Bishop of Rochester, New York priest, now Bishop Fulton Sheen, reserved a seat for the man at the ceremony. He stopped to greet the man on his recessional. That man found in Sheen a Christian who did all he could to help a man be comfortable within the condition disease and surgery imposed. Sheen couldn’t eliminate the leprosy, because he couldn’t. Jesus did eliminate it, wherever he confronted it, because HE COULD. That’s the difference between being a vessel of clay holding God’s Treasure and God’s Son embodying the Treasure. Nor would the Bishop DO NOTHING because he couldn’t help every man disfigured by disease. He did what he could for one man he encountered. Sometimes our humanity, coupled with a person’s condition, limit ALL we would do if we could. Like Bishop Sheen, the most we can is to help the person find in God the courage to live productively despite his infirmity. That empowerment offers no small benefit. Sometimes we find ourselves wasting energy wishing we DID have something we DON’T; or wishing we DIDN’T that we DO. What ancestry bequeaths us through genetics can imprison us inside the someone we’d rather not be. In accepting it, however, and getting on with life, despite it, we find ourselves at peace with God, his presence guarding our life, his grace sufficient in our need. As a result, by being found in Christ, whom to know is to have eternal life, John 17:3, we forget our limitations, our weaknesses, and our own lives also. He increases as we decrease, and that decrease is our glory. For in him we delight in our weaknesses since his strength makes us strong II Corinthians 12:10. End Part I
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