Smooth Via

Thank God for the pastors he sends us. Some minister to us for years, some for decades. Some leave our congregations for another. Others retire or die while in office. But, dear Lord, let us never forget why they are there: they are the Spirit’s mouth, the proclaimers of his word. The church is not about them, their personalities, their charisma, their wisdom or scholarship. Their anonymity or fame means zilch. They are fellow mortals, fellow sinners, co-priests with all the baptized. One day mortality will overtake them. Others will take their place. But the word they preach, it abides forever.

In Matthew 8, a man kneels before Jesus and asks to be made clean. He has a skin disease, traditionally translated as leprosy, which renders him ritually unclean. What happens next is extraordinary. Jesus does cleanse the man, but only after touching him. According to purity laws, religious practices, and social standards, Jesus should have cleansed him first and then, and only then, touched him. But he didn’t. He first made contact. He first physically expressed solidarity with the unclean. He first reached out and expressed intimate love, concern, and mercy while the man was still defiled. Then, by his word, he cleansed him. Here we see exemplified Jesus’s ongoing mission in the church. He’s ready and willing to touch skin to skin with the unclean. He’s still living out the ramifications of his incarnation. The Word becomes flesh and slums among us. He doesn’t remain safely ensconced within a walled castle of moral superiority. He goes outside the camp, outside the holy zone of suburban sanctification, into the haunts of unholiness. In other words, he goes to where we live with our shame, our stained lives, our feelings of always existing in a world where nothing is as it should be. He becomes the priest par excellence, who searches out lepers and kisses their scabs. That’s the most amazing part of Jesus: that he, being the Holy of Holies, takes that Holy of Holies out to us. He’s the walking, talking, touching, healing tabernacle of God who, everywhere he goes, is un-breaking, un-dirtying, un-shaming us. He presents us to the Father no longer as pariahs, garbage, or damaged goods but as kings and queens for whom the angels throw a parade.