A Healing Look

"A Healing Look"
Mark 1:40-45


Every once in a while I run across a writer who has a unique way of describing a character’s face.  In one story, the author wrote, “Her face was as white and colorless as an icicle.”  It gives you the shivers just thinking of a face like that.  Irvin Cobb once described a character with the line, “His face looked like a face that had refused to jell and was about to run down on his clothes.”  Joseph Lincoln wrote about a character whose “face fell like a cookbook cake.”  One of my favorites is from an Oliver Wendell Holmes story in which he described a man who had “a face that looked like it had worn out four bodies.”

Isn’t it amazing how quickly we evaluate a person by just glancing at their face?  In an instant we decide if we want to keep looking at their face or turn away.  No words or thoughts; it’s all on the feeling, intuitive level.  We, just like that, make a judgment as to a person’s appeal from a quick scan of their face.

That scan would have been even more instantaneous if you were looking at the face of a leper.  The disease of leprosy appears all over the victim’s body, but is most prominent on the toes, fingers, and face.  Let’s say one of our members came down with leprosy.  Who should we give leprosy to?  Let’s give it Tonie Graber.

Now it takes a few years for leprosy to fully settle in.  At first we just notice Tonie’s face and hands are getting a little blotchy.  Little pinkish, discolored patches would appear on her skin.  Those slowly turn brown.  The skin underneath begins to thicken into tiny nodules that gradually begin to enlarge.

We don’t think too much about it.  But after a couple of years her face and fingers are getting all lumpy.  The lumps are really ugly, and they are beginning to disfigure the beauty of her face.  There is no cure.  She is helpless in the progression that is transforming her beauty into repulsive ugliness.

A couple more years and Tonie is totally unrecognizable.  A smelly discharge is constantly running down her face.  She’s lost a lot of fingers.  Toes have fallen off and she’s having trouble walking.  Her nose is one big sore and it’s basically gone.  Her eyebrows have fallen off.  Her lips have disappeared into a mass of pustule sores.  She can barely get a few words out because her throat and mouth are full of nodules.

We all know and love Tonie.  We know that underneath that repugnant exterior is a wonderful, faithful person.  She is Tonie, beautiful and talented Tonie.  But we can’t see her anymore.  All we see is a disease.  She is so hard to look at, it’s not even a face a mother can love anymore.  Is she Tonie or is she a leper?  Before, you would have had no problem looking at her, talking with her face-to-face.  After...what about after?  For Tonie, how awful it would be, to know she was the same as she’s always been, but her exterior body has been taken over by horrific disease.

Lucy Grealy has written one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve read, titled, An Autobiography of a Face.  It’s her own story from the time when she was nine years old.  At the age of nine she was diagnosed with bone cancer in the jaw.  She had to have a lot of the jawbone on the right side of her face removed.  Then began a long progression of surgeries trying to reconstruct that side of her face.  With no jawbone, the right side of her face had collapsed.  (Feel the line of your own jawbone; imagine it not there, what your face would look like.)  She wrote about that time:

This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape.  It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life.  Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.  The pain other children brought with their stares engulfed every other pain in my life.  (page 7)

What happened for Lucy Grealy or for a leper is that you don’t have to look in a mirror to see your reflection.  Your reflection is given back to you every time you look into the face of someone staring at you.  You see, in their look of disgust, exactly what you look like.  Lucy Grealy wrote:

I felt there was something empty about me.  I didn’t tell anyone, not my twin sister, not my closest friends, that I had stopped looking in mirrors.  I found that I could stare straight through a mirror, allowing none of the reflection to get back at me … My trick of the eye was the result of my lifelong refusal to learn how to name the person in the mirror.  (page 221)

People like Lucy Grealy, or like the leper, probably also learned how to look through people’s staring so they didn’t have to see their reflection in the looks of horror.  How is Lucy Grealy or a leper supposed to name themselves apart from their reflections?  Who are they apart from their faces?  They are persons with feelings and thoughts and dreams and hopes.  But we never see that person because we can’t bear to look at them.

Lucy wrote these biting words of truth at the end of her book:

Society is no help.  It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else, only to leave our original faces behind to turn into ghosts that will inevitably resent and haunt us.  (page 222)

So, every time we are looking into another face, we are looking into a mirror by which we judge if we are acceptable or appealing.  If we don’t like what we see, by the way they are looking at us, or not looking at us, we try to change our face into something else, desperately hoping we will be noticed and accepted.

In the process, we are so afraid of what we will see in other’s faces that we are becoming a society that won’t look each other in the eye.  Email, texting, instant messaging, Facebook, all of that allows us the freedom from that fear by communicating with each other in a non face-to-face manner.  We can have a conversation and never have to worry about what we might see in someone else’s face when they look at us.

There is a whole other level to all this.  We don’t have to have leprosy or be disfigured by jaw cancer to worry about being seen as repulsive.  For example, let’s say you have a friend or spouse you can tell most anything to.  One day, you tell your friend about an incident in your life that is revolting and repulsive to you.  You know you are taking a huge risk.  You are taking a risk of “face”--of keeping face.

After getting this burden off your chest to your friend, what will that friend’s face reflect back to you?  Will it reflect disdain?  Disrespect?  Revulsion?  You may not be an ugly person, as beauty and handsomeness goes, but the ugliness of some past act, now known by another, may make you look like a leper to the other person.  Now, every time you look in your confidant’s face, you will be looking for a reflection or facial inflection of how they are “seeing” you.

Or if you feel like you’ve done something “leprous” everyone knows about, every time you walk down the halls of school, or the halls of work, or the sidewalks of town, or the halls of church, you are looking into each face that is looking at you, and you feel you know exactly what they are seeing.  Lepers know how you feel about them by the way you look at them.  Or, refuse to look at them.

This leper in Mark’s story came and fell at Jesus’ feet.  He probably didn’t even dare look up at Jesus because he thought he knew what he’d see in Jesus’ face.  He’d seen the look of horror and disgust a hundred times before.  He didn’t need one more.

The kneeling man with leprosy had to be surprised when he felt a hand on his shoulder.  Another human being probably hadn’t touched him in years.  Jesus looked into the man’s leprous face and what the man saw being reflected back to him was not disgust but compassion.  Not pity but respect.  Just that look from Jesus must have been healing in and of itself.  Imagine feeling so alone, so isolated, so ridiculed and then seeing someone look at you with compassion, with deep feeling and caring emotion.

Out of Jesus’ compassion the man found healing.  But let’s not be fooled about what that healing meant.  What if it didn’t mean the man’s fingers and toes grew back?  What if it didn’t mean the man’s nose magically reappeared on his face.  Or that it didn’t mean his eyebrows instantaneously grew back fuzzy and full.  The man remained as he had become, but he was disease free.  The deadly progression of it had been permanently halted.

If that were the case, we may be forced us to ask the question, “What is the most important part of healing?”  If Jesus’ healing doesn’t restore us back to our pre-disease state, but leaves us with scars, what’s the purpose of being healed?  For Lucy Grealy, when all the operations were over and nothing more could be done, and her face was still somewhat collapsed on the right side, her sense of healing came down to one question.  She was looking at some old pictures of herself, from a time when she had just had the first surgery to remove the section of cancerous jawbone.  “When I see those photos,” she wrote, “I am now filled with questions I rarely allowed myself to ask, such as, how do we go about turning into the people we were meant to be.”

Maybe that’s the answer to what is really healed for the man with leprosy by Jesus.  And possibly for us all.  Even though some scars remain, we are given a new chance to become someone, or something, that we didn’t have the chance to be before.  The man with leprosy was healed with the chance to redefine the rest of his future.

We all have scars.  Some are physical.  Some are emotional.  But scars are places that have been healed.  They are no longer active wounds.  Christ has touched us--touched our wounded places, looked upon them--and allowed us to live--even triumph!--over our wounds and the disillusionment that came with those wounds.  Christ wants us to live even with our scars staring us in the face.  Because of Jesus’ healing look and touch, the past is behind us.  A new future is before us.

When you look yourself over in the mirror, you can still concentrate on the scars.  Or, you can rejoice that because of Christ, you are healed, and you are free to be alive in a new way.  That you have been given the opportunity to become the person you were meant to be.