We look down on beggars. We figure that they are people who couldn’t get control of themselves, who couldn’t find socially acceptable ways to live. We ignore them if we can. We turn our eyes away. We drop a quarter in the bucket at Christmas, hoping that the beggar with the bell will stop ringing in our hearts.

The beggar in the middle of Luke 5, however, wasn’t an ordinary beggar. He had leprosy. He was shut off from normal human contact. He had to tell people to stay away. He had lost relationship, was losing his body, and was on his way to losing his life.

When this man was begging, he wasn’t asking for a few coins to get a beer, he was asking for his life. Literally. He had no hope for ever being normal again. And so he was begging for Jesus to heal him.

And his begging wasn’t linked to Jesus’ capacity to heal him. “If you are willing,” he said, “you can make me clean.” He knew Jesus could. He asked if Jesus would.

1. Are we begging for healing because we know our lives are ending?

2. Are we confident that Jesus has the capacity and we just are asking if he has the willingness?

3. Are we willing to be known as beggars, for our lives, if that is a way for healing to happen?

We’ve had moments when we have wondered where our children are. We spent what seemed like hours searching for our son at a theme park once. But three days? I’m guessing that we would be pretty frantic if we couldn’t find either of our children for three days.

We would look everywhere. We would ask everyone we could find if they had seen someone about this tall, with this color eyes, wearing that tunic I made…

The people most desperate to find Jesus, the people willing to give up just about anything to figure out where he was were…Mary and Joseph.

They had been up to Jerusalem as a family, taking Jesus when he was about 12. It was about the time when he would go from being a child of his parents to being a child of the law, accountable for his own behavior before the law.  When his parents left, they thought he was with other relatives, perhaps with his cousin John. A day into the trip back to Nazareth, it was clear that he wasn’t near.

And then, they started their desperate search.

Of course they found him, reasoning in the temple with the (rest of the) rabbis.  And he told them he was involved in the family business. Since Joseph was a carpenter, not a rabbi, it was pretty clear that Jesus was talking about his Real Father.

But that desperation. I can’t get past that desperation. What would it be like to be that devoted to finding Jesus?

I wonder.