In the Bible Jesus meets a leper.

I understand why he hugged that leper.

Of all the ways Jesus could have approached this disease, he chose the most affectionate. Until a few weeks ago, I never really understood why this was such a big deal. What difference did it make that Jesus hugged this leper or not?

But a few weeks ago I was catching a train south towards Cochin Station and I stood next to a man that looked broken. He was missing part of his ears and a lot of his lips. His teeth were exposed and his face withered. The entire time I stood next to him, he never raised his eyes. He never looked anywhere other than the train floor, just staring the whole time at the ground.

When he first walked towards me, I don’t think he was coming to stand by me, but every time he would stop, people would push money at him to keep moving. No one would stand next to him. This man was a leper. And while the disease had torn away his flesh relatively painlessly, I imagine it was not the same for his soul.

For those of you who don’t know, leprosy does not hurt much in the later stages. The nerves are often the first things to go leading to loss of sensation. Then as the flesh rots off there is no pain. Or at least not of the flesh. I can only imagine what this man was feeling in his heart.

This is why I get why Jesus hugged him. Leprosy doesn’t just take your ears and lips, your face and your hands. It ostracizes you in a way nothing else ever could. It takes your humanity and leaves you to rot. So when Jesus ran into this leper, there was more than flesh to be mended. More needed to be done than a few whispered words or a lecture on faith. This man was hurting and lonely and broken and sick. But not sick in the way a disease makes you. Sick in a way consistent and persistent rejection makes you. So Jesus reached out and touched him, something that this leper had not felt in many years. He gave him a hug and in doing so recognized his humanity.

All of this got me thinking. In so many ways the poor of our country are treated like they are diseased. As your car pulls up to a stop light, you notice them out of the corner of your eye. One man is begging for change. You begin to pray the light turns green before he makes it to your car. It doesn’t. You scuffle for change, anything to keep him moving -anything to keep him from standing by you.

We isolate them. We wish the police would clean up our streets as if they were trash and not really people. We deny their humanity to them. In that way, they are most like lepers. It’s not the pain that comes from being impoverished that’s unbearable, but the pain that comes from being regarded as subhuman, something to be cleaned up and moved on. That’s the pain that really hurts. Yet being impoverished is a cruel fate brought on by laziness as much as leprosy was caused by sin. Still, we condemn people for it. We see them as beneath us. We isolate them and neglect them. We feel we are better than them because we were born to prettier lives with prettier faces.

I have struggled a long time with what to do in the face of poverty. I used to think Jesus was a little overzealous when he started talking about feeding the hungry and clothing all the naked. That’s a big task. He was absolutely nuts though when he said let the homeless in your homes. Or was he? Now I feel like I am going a little nuts-o myself.

There are two pains that broken men feel. The first is the outer that made them into a broken man. The second is being broken. The leper is diseased, and then he is shunned. The beggar is impoverished, and then he is ostracized. The outer pain can be taken away but inside they would still be broken, lacking the human dignity that has been for so long denied to them.

I could buy a homeless man a house. I could give him a shelter and food and drink, and at the end of the day he is still a homeless man. At the end of the day, the outer wounds would have mended, but there would have been no true healing. The same was true of the leper. There was more to be patched up than flesh. The soul was hurting from a lack of dignity. With that hug, and that love, there was a restoration of something that that man, a leper, had not felt in a long time. Jesus gave him his humanity.

I get frustrated with the pain of the world. I look at people and wonder why they are suffering, why others aren’t doing more. The world is hurting. There is poverty, and hunger, and broken people. Every seven seconds a child under the age of five dies of hunger. But did you know that one third of all Americans are taking anti-depressants? So why I often rant about the poor, and the needy, and the broken, they are not the only broken ones. How many people are there who are lonely, are suicidal, and are hurting? Perhaps more ostracized than a leper ever could be?

All of this makes me wonder if Jesus really cared about the poor in so much as he cared about the suffering.

There is a hurt today that runs deeper than basic looks and physical appearances. This hurt can’t be healed with just a wave of the hand and a few magic words. It needs something more intimate, more loving. I think that is something we need to realize in today’s world. We have stopped seeing each other’s humanity. We have stopped seeing our own humanity. We have stopped loving ourselves, just in the same way we have stopped loving our neighbors.

Time spent is just that, considered spent. Negotiating social lives become a cost-benefit task trying to get the most for your money with the right people. Money is spent to impress and to buy more. Cars, TVs, Houses. We buy huge houses and fill them with things to be one of the unhappiest people around the world. We don’t talk to our neighbors. We don’t even talk to our friends. We isolate ourselves in piles of things meant to impress others. And at least a third of us are not happy with it.

The flip of the coin is you have people on the opposite side of the world working day in and out trying to make ends meet and they can’t. They are anything but lazy and they suffer immeasurably anyway. They have huge amounts of social capital and everyone in the community has got their neighbor’s back. It is a way of survival that allows no one to suffer troubles on their own. But when everyone is fighting and losing the same battle for the basics, even if together, they are still losing.

One day we will have to reconcile with this -may I call it a sickness- that is consuming our souls more so than our flesh as we deny each other and ourselves our own humanity. One day we will have to meet our neighbor who has been wasting away not under poverty, but a denied humanity. Things then won’t be restored with a blank check or an opened wallet; it will have to come from a deeper level, something more like a hug. It will not only have to mend the outer but also heal entirely, internally. It would be false for us with money, however, to think that we are Jesus hugging lepers, saving them from the poverty if that is the call we choose to make. Because with the hug comes a recognition of mutual humanity, the humanity that we have been denying those in poverty as well as ourselves.

He could have done it from afar, but he didn’t. I understand why Jesus hugged that leper.