Devotion - Tuesday, October 12

These words from Virginia Stem Owens were powerful to me. I share them with you.

“We are not so familiar with freaks as Jesus was. He daily handled as bad or worse that what I see weekly in the hospital. People coming to him for healing were maimed, mutilated, and desperate. They didn’t even have on clean pajamas. It is we who have isolated ourselves from the Incarnation. Our fear of the flesh is so deep that we institutionalize death and decay wherever it breaks out. There would be little chance of Jesus meeting a leper on the road today. Any kind of freakishness, whether physical, mental, or emotional, must be put away from our midst. People on public view must be at least superficially healthy. The lame, the halt, the blind may not have had Medicare in the first century, but neither were they incarcerated for their offense against the sensibilities of the whole…

“I used the word “saliva” in a church group the other night. People shifted their eyes uneasily. Yet it was spittle that Jesus used for a poultice on the blind man’s eyes. Saliva and mud. Somehow we’ve gotten the idea salvation eliminates the efficacy of saliva.

“I have a notion that our flight from flesh will end in more and more mechanical parts for the human body. It is the cleanliness of nylon and silicone we seem to desire, not sweat and saliva…

“Will not the shinning substitutes of plastic parts begin to dampen our ardor for the Incarnation and dull our sense of the profundity of our Lord’s bodily death and resurrection? Are we not already a little secretly ashamed of the stripes that heal us, wishing instead for an unscathed savior, Jesus Superjock, borne aloft by teams of angels unwilling to let him stub his well-shod toe? The offense of the Cross began with the offense of the Incarnation. The bloody public death is foreshadowed by a bloody stable birth. Perhaps it is not in disease and disfigurement that we reach the limits of the image of God. Disease can be healed and disfigurement restored. But would the image fade with each cloned replica of the perfect physique equipped with replaceable parts?”