Moved with Pity
Every symptom, beginning with the slightest, bearable one to the most severe and painful can be faced in two different ways: the first foresees a therapeutic intervention made up of cures and treatments that are appropriate to alleviate or eliminate the symptoms. This is symptomatic treatment whose principal aim is that of making the person with the problem feel better physically. It was the medical treatment reserved for the slaves and it was carried out with the intention of sending them back to work as soon as possible. It was the medical treatment carried out by the slaves themselves for the slaves who were ill. The first medical doctors were, in fact, slaves who gained privileges with respect to other common slaves because of their knowledge. In ancient times medicine was not practiced by free men and only later did that medical knowledge become utilized for slave owners and free men as well. It was at that time that the medical science of the slave completely changed its objective. And it was in this way that in the quest to care for the master, the rich man, it became necessary to develop a second form of therapy, of eziopathogenetic medicine, a therapy directed to curing the cause of the symptom by curing the whole person in all of his/her dimensions. It is the treatment, the method which attempts to know the cause (ezio) of the symptom causing the pain (patho) and its origin (genetic). The slaves cured themselves with the symptomatic method and cured their masters with the eziopathogenetic method. So above and beyond working to achieve a complete and integral healing of the symptom, it is possible to be interested in and to work towards the complete and integral recovery of the
There was a lot of dust on the road, and a long way to travel: towns, villages, synagogues, houses and squares. Pushing and shouting, fights, whispering and greetings, glances, touches, men, women and children. He made his way through all this and in this particular case a leper made his way through the crowd. Rags in tatters, skin and bones in tatters, odors, blood. Strange, illogical, irrational words words come out of this man's mouth, because no man has ever said: If you wish, you can make me clean. But there is no sign of derision; he is not kidding. He is kneeling, or more precisely he is bowed with his face touching the ground, in the dust that is only a few centimeters away from the Teacher's feet. The leper asks what cannot be asked, but he asks nevertheless, with his face to the ground; his request is really an affirmation stating an established fact, without any doubts or hesitation. He affirms the impossible which in some corner of his soul is a certainty: If you wish, you can make me clean. The leper raises his eyes and meets the eyes of God: they are bright and steady, although clouded by a tear. The Teacher is touched, the text says: moved with pity, literally his bowels were moved - while he looked and met those eyes, the skin, the soul, and the heart of that leper. His breathing deepens becoming almost a sigh of tenderness and grace, power and immensity. The leper is overwhelmed by his own request, and by the trembling response, that look and breathing that are so hospitable, God's breathing. The people are still, silent, waiting. The man is made clean, like a bolt of silent lightning, a total, complete, powerful healing. The bandages fall to the ground, as does the leper. Shame turns to amazement, to renewed beauty, and part of the body is exposed to the rays of the sun. The body is beautiful, bright, once again in the image of the divine. The leper is healed. The people shout, push, the crowd is stirred, there is no more peace. The leper is pushed around in a wave of curiosity and amazement, suspicion and fear; the uncontrollable confusion generates agitation. Jesus meets the eyes of his son ex leper and orders him firmly to complete the healing by witnessing to the priests of the synagogue. The leper is unable to contain himself, irrepressible, unmanageable. The healed man does not grasp that there is something in Jesus' words that is just as powerful and important if not more so than the healing itself. Not only the miracle of the healing but salvation itself could be achieved in that request to show himself to the priest according to what was prescribed by Moses. The leper wanted to be healed, he wanted to solve a problem, he wanted to feel better. He wanted a symptomatic solution. It was a comprehensible, obvious, normal, human reaction but not a divine one. All humans want to do is to feel better, to solve the problem, to silence the symptoms of their disharmonies and suffering, but God is interested in our total healing, our integral, complete, interior and physical salvation. We focus on the particular, the symptom, the thorn in our side, the problem that harasses or pains, God looks inside of us at our spirt, to the whole being, at the true and real integrity of the person. Man looks at the symptom, God teaches us to heal the cause generating our suffering. The Lord's entire life and Word go in this direction, in this divine direction. The Lord is interested in the leper's healing but even more, if it can be said, in the salvation of that son and through that son to open the way to salvation to all sons and daughters. Jesus wants a deep interior change for us as he and he alone knows that it can lead to the healing and health of the body and of the mind as a wonderful side effect . Jesus does not want to be considered a healer, an easy although powerful solution to the problems of humanity. He wants and desires to be loved and lived as mankind's integral salvation. It is important for Jesus to bring to our awareness knowledge of the cause and efffect between the state of our interior world and the state of our external world. And this uncontrollable, dusty crowd explodes with questions, a hundred, a thousand requests for help, solutions, and cures. The miracle has opened the door to faith, to comprehension, to conversion and to a new possibility of dialogue between man and God, but at the same time it has gutted a dam and the river of anticipation, fear, and haste which have scattered everything in an illogical, unmanageable, smoky, complicated sequence. And so the moved with pity of Jesus is transformed into warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once, literally: grumbling with him, he sent him away instantly. Moved with pity and grumbling all for the same humanity, for the same extraordinary, beautiful, restless humanity. It is an imploring humanity, kneeling in adoration but it has unbelievable difficulty in grasping the real meaning of integral healing in which it does not seem to be at all interested. Seeing Jesus who is moved with pity and then begins to grumble can only make us smile at God's patience and at mankind's cantankerous, illogical stupidity, at the the grace and peace of divine emotion and the obstinate human candor which, despite the fact it has eternal salvation at a hand's reach, slyly becomes excited over a vase of jam that has just been stolen.