Labels

“Immediately the leprosy left him.” (Mark 1:42)

Labels.  They are a normal part of life.  Who would go to the grocery store and take a can off the shelf if it didn’t have a label on it to tell what’s inside.  Labels identify products, boxes, and packages.  Labels identify who a shipment is going to.  Labels give us instructions and warnings.  Labels tell us who the manufacture is.  Labels tell us who the designer is.  In general, labels are very helpful.

However, we sometimes forget that labels are for products not people.  Labels we place on our self and others can be negative as well as dangerous.  They create stereotypes, bias, fears, stigma.  They can judge, condemn and separate people.  So, Jesus teaches us an important lesson in Mark chapter 1 about doing away with labels on people.  Here we find the account of Jesus healing a man with leprosy.  This man came to Jesus, begging on his knees for the Messiah to be willing to heal him.  We are told in verse 40 that he cried, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”  The result was Jesus willingly stretching out his hand, touching the man and making him clean.  But verse 42 is the key to this healing.  It reads, “Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was cleansed.”  “The leprosy left him.”  It would be more natural to say the man was healed from leprosy.  But that is not what this verse says.  Instead, the verse separates the disease from the man.  That is because Jesus separates what afflicts us from who we really are.

We often look at people and label them by their afflictions.  Someone is selfish, rather than that individual struggles with selfishness, but can be free from it.  Or another person has a difficulty in their life with greed, but Christ can relieve them of that.  Another wrestles with lust, but the Lord can remove that.  Or another is addicted, but Jesus can deliver them from that addiction.  We need to see people NOT as they appear to be, overtaken by their sin, but as God made them to be, and as the Messiah can redeem them to become.

We need to learn to separate the sin from the person – including our person.  This is why Paul wrote in II Corinthians 5:17, “Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation, and the old things have passed away.”  Old things are struggles with labels on them.  We need to get rid of the labels we put on people, as well as ourselves.  Jesus separates individuals from the labels.  Lord, help us to do the same.   

                                               Darlene