Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Today’s text

Luke 6:17-19

He then came down with them and stopped at a piece of level ground where there was a large gathering of his disciples, with a great crowd of people from all parts of Judaea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon who had come to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. People tormented by unclean spirits were also cured and everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him because power came out of him that cured them all.

Reflection

The scene is unsettled, noisy, disordered. People come from across the countryside, jostling for position amid the crowd trying to glimpse you. They come with hope but are moved by desperation, seeking release from their torments.

They want to touch you and to be touched by something they can’t understand. But I understand, for this is what I want too.

Some have known little more than torment in their lives. But the deepest intuition of their humanity tells them life is more than agitation of body and spirit.

They come seeking release. They want freedom, the freedom of wholeness, of health, of souls and arms they can lift to the sky with joy.

They want to feel what their lives can be beyond the distortion and diminishment of disease and suffering. They want to feel alive and human, joyously eager for each new day, something they may have never felt.

And you cured them. You released them. I wonder what that moment was like. How did they feel? What expressions filtered across their faces as they realized they were free from the chains that bound them to lives of struggle?

I imagine tears of joy, laughter and disbelief. I imagine praise to God and grateful souls falling into your embrace. I see faces struck dumb in stunned silence, but I also hear the thump of feet running for the first time in years. I can’t think of if without smiling.

And that smile is magic. It’s healing and freeing. It covers my face and fills my soul, releasing me from the bondage of sadness.

I see you touch desperate souls and once again, for the umpteenth thousand time, I, too, am touched by the love that I see, the Love whom I see.

“Come and see,” you once urged a would-be disciple. “Come and see.”

Today, I came, and I saw. And in seeing, you give me the healing I need. As of old, you touch and set free. And I discover that, just maybe, I know exactly how they felt.

Pr. David L. Miller