God became like the sick, so that the sick might become like God.
This humbling truth is perhaps best depicted in a famous image of the Crucifixion in the Isenheim Altarpiece by the artist, Matthias Grünwald.
It is an incredibly gruesome painting, showing Jesus in absolute agony on the Cross: His body is twisted, his hands are distorted and gnarled with all his fingers reaching out desperately. His skin, pale and green, is almost completely covered with sores, and the look on his face is one of total exhaustion.
But this altar piece was not created to terrify its viewers or even to make them disgusted… No. This truthfully awful image of our Lord dying on the Cross was actually meant to comfort those who saw it.
That’s because it was commissioned by a monastery that cared for people suffering from terrible skin diseases.
So when they looked at this painting: They saw themselves on the Cross. Jesus looked just like them: God became like the sick, that the sick might become like God.
Isn’t this what’s happening in our Gospel today? After calling the tax-collector, Levi, to himself, Jesus eats with him and all his friends. Jesus enters into that place of spiritual-disease — he plants himself squarely in the heart of their messy life. To all the world, he looks like one of them: He looks like a sinner! He looks like a sick person!
And the Pharisees are quick to point that fact out: “Jesus, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Why are you becoming one of them? Why are you coming into contact with their mess? With their dysfunction? With their sin? Stay far away from them! They’re sick can’t you see?”
Jesus responds with such soothing, healing words — words that can give us so much hope in our own struggles:
“Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do.”
Something similar is going on in our first reading. Isaiah is writing to a people who thought they were perfectly healthy. In the verses right before what we heard today, they basically say: “Look at us, God — We’re fasting, we’re praying, we’re worshipping you…We’re doing the thing! We’re fine.
But God responds to them in love: “Don’t you see that you’re sick? Don’t you see you’re doing all of these things for yourselves and not for Me? You’re only worried about doing your own thing! You’ve excluded Me… cut me out. How can I be intimately part of your life if you don’t even need Me? If you’re just fine on your own?”
My brothers and sisters, why do we so often pretend to be healthier than we really are? Why even try to play that game? When we buy into this lie, we are distancing ourselves from that Sick Man on the Cross: We end up saying “No thanks” to the Savior who came only to save sick and dying people.
G.K. Chesterton put it best when he said: “We’re all in the same boat, and we’re all seasick.”
So if you find yourself four days into Lent already feeling like a total mess of a failure, then take courage: Thank God you know you’re sick. Go to Confession, bring your sins to the Good Doctor. Turn your gaze to the Cross: Your disease is hanging there in Jesus — He became sick for you.
And then boldly approach this Altar of God’s Love poured out for us: Receive the medicine which He won for you on that terrible Cross.
