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A Common Struggle Many years ago, I was in the throes of a youthful and zealous phase of my faith journey, still fairly new to the path of radical discipleship. I recall one day when I was doing something that I did not infrequently in those heady days: I was reading the Sermon on the Mount. Reading it, I was, as usual, deeply stirred by Jesus’ radical vision, by this clarion call to the way of discipleship. Confronted with the challenges of turning the other cheek, loving enemies, blessing persecutors, taking no thought for what we eat or drink, I heard the echoes of St. Francis, of Dorothy Day, of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of Oscar Romero. Hearing the call to put my faith into action, I felt inspired and empowered on my own journey of discipleship. Finishing the sermon, I yearned to build my house on the solid rock of Jesus’ teaching, safe from the buffetings of society’s storms. On this particular occasion of Bible reading, though, I did something a bit unusual. I continued reading on from the seventh chapter of the Gospel of Matthew to the beginning of the eighth. Jesus, finishing the sermon, comes down from the mountain, where he is confronted by a leper in need of healing. It’s a particularly moving account, marked by the leper’s plaintive statement, “If you want to, you can heal me”—suggesting that perhaps that Rabbi Jesus might not want to heal him; perhaps Jesus, as a holy man, accepts Torah regulations that label this leper unclean and therefore socially segregated. But Jesus, of course, does want to heal—in fact, risking contagion, he touches the leper. He removes the leprosy, thereby freeing the man from the stigma and marginalization of the disease (Matt. 8:1-4). As I read this story, I sensed some odd things happening within myself. First of all, some curious questions came to me. I wondered: Did the leper hear the just-preached sermon? Was the leper called to the path of discipleship? Does Jesus expect the leper to heed his words, turn the other cheek, renounce possessions, to be light to the world? Or is the leper simply expected to be grateful, praising God for this miraculous deliverance from a horrid physical and emotional brokenness? More unsettling, I found myself unexpectedly resonating with the leper. Something in the story touched a deep part of me, a part I barely acknowledged—but with which I needed to grapple. At the time, I was following the script of radical discipleship flawlessly. I was part of an intentional Christian community living in a poor neighborhood. I was living in voluntary poverty, in solidarity with the marginalized. I was nonviolently resisting militarism and economic exploitation. I was also an emotional wreck. I was beginning to recognize, though only faintly, that there was a deep psychological dissonance in my vocation. Coming from an alcoholic family, there were severely wounded parts of myself that needed healing—but I was operating on an assumption that paying attention to my own pain was bourgeois, selfish. What I hadn’t yet come to realize was that my radical discipleship was partly motivated by two profoundly unhealthy instincts: one, a lashing back in anger at my father and his upper-middleclass world for the ways he and that world had scarred me; and two, a reckless perfectionism that needed to go to unhealthy extremes to please God—a father figure—and earn divine love. Reading the story of the leper that day, on the heels of the Sermon on the Mount, would become critical to my growing to spiritual health and wholeness. It opened up in me a deeper awareness that part of me simply needed to be healed. Over the years, I have come to suspect that my personal story is not all that unique in the circles of folks committed to serious biblical discipleship. Many of us are wounded, often in ways we don’t recognize. Sometimes our groping toward compassion and social healing are bound up with a deep and unexpressed internal need for compassion and healing of our selves. Sometimes our peacemaking is marred by our unresolved anger and internal violence. Sometimes we are advocating for justice in the wide world while neglecting the need to advocate for our own wholeness. Our instinct is to follow Jesus’ advice of building a firm foundation. It makes sense: We want to put forth our gifts, our strengths, our assets as the key components of who we are. We build the foundation of our lives and our vocations on our intelligence, our sensitivity, our passion, our organizing skills, our relationship skills. But I have come to believe that there is a subtle danger lurking behind the instinct. While there is nothing wrong with our gifts and assets, they are not the whole truth of who we are. We risk repressing a critical part of ourselves, living out a lie. Matthew’s placement of the story of Jesus’ encounter with the leper has a profound and revealing irony to it. Right on the heels of a powerful call to discipleship is a reminder of how broken and needy we are. It’s almost as if Matthew wants to remind us that part of the firm foundation for the house of discipleship consists precisely in acknowledging and acting on our need for grace and healing. It’s as if Matthew knows—and wants us to know—that we are not ready to embark on the path of discipleship until we acknowledge the leper within us. The impulse to follow Jesus is a holy and powerful one. But just as holy is the impulse to go before Jesus and boldly ask for healing. We need both. Much of my life was lived in this tension between the radical concern for Sermon-on-the-Mount-style discipleship and the cry of the leper. I often felt stuck between an instinct to pour myself out for the poor and a need to attend to my own poverty of spirit. In some respects, I have been especially like the leper—uncertain that the Lord truly wants to heal me and therefore all the more driven to a discipleship of perfectionism to earn divine favor. And because my discipleship is inevitably imperfect, because I fall short of the Sermon on the Mount, I long to hear Jesus say, simply and affectionately, “Of course I want to heal you!” Over the years, as I increasingly I took the time to attend to the pain in my family history and in my own psyche, it was not a divergence from the path of discipleship, it was a strengthening of that path. In fact, my relationships with and advocacy on behalf of homeless and mentally ill persons was deeply enriched when I acknowledged the alcoholism that had ravaged my family. As a disciple of Jesus, I felt called to serve my homeless brothers and sisters, bind their wounds, meet their needs. But over time I also learned to enter into community with them, and learn from and with them the common struggle we share for healing and recovery. Quite literally, there are times when they serve me. I am even tempted to say that their homelessness compels me precisely because of the emotional homelessness I often experienced. And I begin to understand: this, after all, is compassion, the suffering-with, the breaking down of distinctions between servant and served. This, after all, is biblical justice: not simply political advocacy by the privileged on behalf of the oppressed, but the building of that community of shalom, the common assent to the mystery of God’s reign wherein we recognize our oneness and right our relationships. Which brings us back to the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount—the Beatitudes, and their paradoxical proclamation of blessedness found in human brokenness. In fact, when I think of the leper in Matthew 8, I wonder if he isn’t enacting a kind of midrash on the Beatitudes: Blessed are those who know they are in need of mercy—they shall show mercy. Maybe in the end it’s not so bad to have the leper as a kind of role model. After all, while he comes forth in a state of need, he also has shown tremendous courage. He has risked serious approbation by breaking the social codes that demand he stay segregated. He has defied the religious rules of the day because he sensed a radical stirring of God’s power. He is moved to bold action, to civil disobedience, in fact, because he has heard the good news of the reign of God. In fact, how often does Jesus affirm the faith of those who boldly come forward to seek Gospel healing—as if the real transformative power is theirs as much as it is Jesus’. Maybe in the end the leper is already a disciple. Maybe he is an ironic prophet of the truest meaning of the Sermon on the Mount. May we learn from him—and thereby be strengthened in following the radical and healing ways of Jesus. Will O’Brien
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