Leprosy and Healing

My wife shared with me an interaction she had with her son that has me thinking. He was asking what leprosy was. She told him about a disease involving flesh-eating bacteria, social isolation, and a general lack of hope. They also talked about how Jesus was willing to minister to the lepers, and even healed a few. (As a side note, my wife is Unitarian Universalist, and my step-son is half-Christian, half-Confused.) But then the half-confused kid asks a very lucid question-- "Why didn't He just cure all of them?"

Um, well, uh, you see, uh. Hmmm.

So she asks me, mostly because I love these sort of questions. I think the official answer is that we don't know. And that's OK. But first I went through some different viewpoints.

I think the popular religious answer that I have heard the most, involves a serpent and a misguided couple eating a bad piece of fruit. Never listen to a snake. But if memory serves, I thought the result of that temporary lapse in judgement was that men had to toil to grow things, women had to have pain with child birth, and snakes had to be very unpopular with people. Something about trying to crush them under our heels. I swear that was the version they gave us in Sunday school.

A popular practical answer is that no one has ever seen a one-sided coin. It can't exist. We can't have good without bad, or happiness without sadness. Without sickness, we would not recognize wellness when it occurs, you see. So the argument goes. I'm not so sure about this. When not properly medicated, I suffer from a severe, dangerous, debilitating form of depression. It's horrendous when it's out of control. Does it have to be that bad, just so that wellness can exist? I think I would still appreciate wellness even if the illness were milder. But that's just me.

The atheists I know use the existence of suffering as an argument for their beliefs. They say it is nonsensical that an all-loving, all-powerful God would let people suffer.

The response to this is usually that we have free will, and along with it comes a full range of resultant feelings.

Another popular argument put forward by my faithful friends is that it is futile for us humans to even try to understand God's reasons for anything. We simply don't have the ability to understand concepts like God. We are just supposed to have faith. This brings me back to what I said at the beginning, which is that we don't know why Jesus didn't heal all the lepers, or for that matter, everyone who was unwell.

An idea that I find very intriguing is the question of how Jesus' human side played into His life's decisions. If He were simply a deity, without being a man at all, would anything have been different? I don't know.

But it's an interesting question. Some say that it is heresy to ask questions about God. I don't think so. The minister who ran things at my confirmation camp (back in 1978) said that God probably is very much pleased when we use the inquisitive minds He gave us to think about Him.