Daily Lesson for September 27, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 5 verses 17 through 20:

17 On one of those days, as he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there, who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with him to heal. 18 And behold, some men were bringing on a bed a man who was paralyzed, and they were seeking to bring him in and lay him before Jesus, 19 but finding no way to bring him in, because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the midst before Jesus. 20 And when he saw their faith, he said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.”

In the 1950s a one hundred thousand year old skeleton of a Neaderthal was found by archaeologist Ralph Solecki.  The skeletal record was shocking in all that had happened to it. The man had a multitude of very serious fractures. A crushing blow to the left side of his head had fractured his eye socket, displacing the eye and probably blinding him. Another blow to his right side had so incapacitated him that his right arm had withered to a point of disuse. The right lower arm and hand were missing altogether, while the right foot and lower right leg were damaged to a point of disability.

It was an astonishing discovery in the sheer brutality of what this person had suffered. But what made the discovery so extraordinary was not the bones' state of fracture, but rather their state of healing. The injuries sustained by this person were all in various states of healing when he died of likely natural causes. And the only conclusion that could be drawn from the evidence was that in spite of the prevailing idea the history of the human community entailed hundreds of thousands of years of advancement preconditioned by the survival of only the fittest, in fact the true history of humanity is a long history of the survival of the weakest supported by the community.

This severely wounded person could never have survived without the care and attention of those around him. In fact, with such debilitating injuries a whole community of people would have had to organize themselves around him. They would have had to devote hours per day to his survival and healing.   He would have been the center of their lives.

Though the discovery happened in the 1950s, I just read about the discovery recently. It is truly extraordinary to me. I don't quite know what to do with it. Except this; it is causing me to reflect on the organization of my day. What would it mean, I keep asking myself, to move the weak and the suffering and the vulnerable from the margins to the center?  What would it mean to take the hurting and wounded and place them more at the center of my own life?

I know the answer. I feel it already in my heart. In my own bones.

I would become more human.