Lord... if you will.

A devotional on Matthew 8:2

In verse 2 of the 8^th Chapter of the gospel of Matthew we are told of a man who had leprosy who approached Jesus. The man comes to Jesus and says “Lord if you will you can make me clean.” Now if you look carefully this is a prayer, a very short prayer but a prayer nonetheless. And much like every other prayer this prayer too cannot be looked at in a vacuum but must be understood with the whole volume of context that it carries. The most obvious layer of context that we are given is that the man had leprosy. We must immediately understand that leprosy then was very different from leprosy now. Today a leper is merely someone who unfortunately contracted a miserable sickness. It can relegate a person to a secluded and painful life or maybe to a life on the streets as a beggar.

On our way to work every morning, my wife and I drive through this particular crossing where there sits a wonderful and loving old man. His eyes are filled with love and joy when he sees us and he always has some kind of a blessing or greeting to say to us when we do encounter him. Why is he there? He’s one such man whose leprosy has left him begging on the streets. And so as I read this layer of context the closest reality I think of is this man. Imagine with me if we even can that moment when the diagnosis comes back positive for leprosy. It’s a disease where your own body is eaten away as you live through it. It’s a sickness that kills you in a slow, torturous and obvious way. Imagine the years of living with that vile and uncompassionate reality within you.

But at least in today’s world society to some extent has removed the stigma that surrounds the sickness. In the time of the gospel of Matthew however this sickness came with a heavy layer of stigma which carried all sorts of beliefs and required rules. For example the most common interpretation for contracting leprosy was that God was judging you for a sinful life. So now the leper is not just sick in his body but his leprosy has also caused him to be viewed as sick in the soul. But in Jewish culture a leper was not merely sick in body and soul he was also called unclean. They had leper colonies that were outside the city limits and anyone with the sickness had to live their life outside the walls as much as possible. Imagine those colonies, a whole bunch of people rotting in their flesh, judged by the religious authorities as condemned by God and thrown outside the social and physical limits of the community to live their life or rather slowly die their death far away from any whom they would call their own.

That is the rich backstory or the thick layer of context that Matthew heaps on this man who approached Jesus. He had come carrying all that baggage of emotion, all those years of condemnation and the weight of being ostracised. Now here he had come to this Jesus who had been teaching and healing with authority. And in his words we find a wonderful prayer – “Lord if you will you can make me clean.” Please notice he does not say Jesus heal me. He acknowledges the authority of Jesus and appeals to the compassion of Jesus and he does all this in a manner that says “submission” all over it.

How different an attitude from some of our “name it and claim it” kind of prayers. Does God expect us to name and claim? Yes there are those promises that are ours for the claiming. In the very next story Jesus marvels at the faith of a Roman centurion and says to him “go and let it be done as you have believed” A great argument for the “name it and claim it cause”. But here in this story you find the powerful posture of a man on his knees before Jesus. A man who has no demands only a prayer that celebrates the character and compassion of God. A prayer that bows in submission to God’s will. He offers no debate and no argument for why he should get what he is asking for. He offers no questions or dialogue with Jesus for why he was struck with this disease. He just offers a simple faith statement and then submits himself to whether Jesus would be willing.

In the many examples of the many types of prayer that we can pray here is a powerful kind of prayer and prayer attitude to cultivate. One that doesn’t hide our desires from God and yet one that doesn’t expect that our desires or our will should override God’s own. May God help us grow in these kinds of prayers.