Do we think of God as "real"? Dietrich Bonhoeffer had his seminarians
confess their sins to one another because he observed in himself that he often
confessed his sins to God without a sense of true contrition and repentance
because God was too ethereal, too impersonal.
If he confessed those same sins to a brother, he found that he was truly
ashamed of himself for acting in such ways or for allowing his thoughts to
run. Malachi records the Lord's disgust
with the sacrifices of the people by comparing Him to a governor and asking if
they would offer such things to a "real" ruler and if so, what would
be the result of their offering. Yes,
God is "other", He is transcendent but He is not immaterial and
unreal. Sin is costly and our confession
and contrition need to reveal that we understand that these things are
rebellion, not indiscretions.
It required faith for the lepers to ask Jesus as
"Master" to cure them. It required
faith for them to be obedient to His command to go to the priests and show
themselves. The priests had to observe
the healing to certify the cure prior to their re-admission to the temple
worship and to the community, so that they no longer had to identify themselves
as lepers to all who might come into contact with them. They all had faith, but only one had
thanksgiving to Jesus for healing him. On
the way to the priests they were all cleansed but only one turned back to the
One who had healed him. What use were
the priests to him? Jesus had healed him
so why did he need them to certify the healing.
Which was greater the one who healed or the one who could simply affirm
that healing had occurred? Worship One.
It seems that James believes God is bent on making us
different people, different from who we are at present and different from who
we might want to be, different from other people. Does anyone actually want to be that
different from others? That is the odd
thing about Christianity, God actually wants us to be different, just like His
only begotten Son, the one who was crucified for being different, having
different values, different aspirations, different ideas. We are called to change because we are called
to recognize that what we think, what we believe about the way things are, is
wrong, fatally wrong, not just askew. We
need a different kind of wisdom, a wisdom that is often at odds with the wisdom
of the world and we need a different worldview, one that understands that this
isn't all there is and that the creator of all is the one who knows best how we
are to live. Are we prepared to be
changed at a core level or are we more or less satisfied with the way we are? The one leper who was healed got a new
worldview, one that didn't involve an earthly temple or a hereditary
priesthood. He knew God was not only
real, He was personal and He just might be the One who healed him.
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