Jesus eschewed social distancing

This past Wednesday, one of our local supermarkets set aside an hour for older people to come and shop for groceries. "Older people," in this instance, may be identified as people 60 and over.

Voila! I qualified.

As a member of the age demographic most vulnerable to the coronavirus, it was thoughtful for store managers to think of us chronologically advanced folks in this time of crisis.

The "old folks" hour, as I'm calling it, was 6-7 a.m.

I was there with my wife-approved list. Alas, of the six items she asked me to procure, the supermarket only had three.

Many of the shelves were bare.

Toilet paper. No dice.

Paper towels. Good luck.

Hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, what -- are you kidding?

Bread. Nope.

As a former Russian language student in high school, while walking the supermarket aisles in the early morning, I began to think of what grocery shopping must have been like in the Soviet Union.

Our Slavic teacher, Mr. Klimchak, used to regale us with stories about the old Soviet department store in Moscow, called Gum.

A huge store, the largest he'd ever seen, with virtually no consumer goods.

Nothing to buy.

There were long lines in the 1970s, Klimchak said, for the few items the Gum did have -- a carton of eggs, a pound of bacon, a gallon of milk.

Not a whole lot different than the third week of March 2020 in Cape Girardeau County.

It's amazing how the synapses of the brain work.

Empty shelves to Soviet stores.

For me, when I consider almost anything, my mind eventually turns to Jesus.

There were no grocery stores in Palestine in the first century. Although the gospels don't provide this level of detail, we can accurately infer Jesus and his disciples didn't shop but subsisted on the generosity of others.

Those 13 men were poor, certainly not destitute because each of them had a vocational background, but constant traveling made wage earning impossible.

Jesus left us nothing written in his own hand, no diary or journal, so what we know about his daily life leaves something to be desired.

When Jesus had a headache, there was no aspirin.

When a disciple came down with something contagious, there was no practical way to protect yourself.

I am humbled to realize how much of a better person Jesus was.

He didn't self-shelter.

Jesus sought out sick people -- and this was an era, the Greco-Roman period, in which health care options were nonexistent.

In my New Testament class at Southeast Missouri State, we learn a basic truth about the time in which Jesus of Nazareth lived.

Here it is.

If you got sick, you probably died.

Tradition says the Lord died at age 33.

The truth is, though, among the peasant and working classes of ancient Galilee and Judah, people rarely lived longer than 40.

It was incredibly hard to stay well.

Yet there Jesus was -- seeking out the ill, the maimed, the diseased.

Note his famous encounter recounted in each of the synoptic gospels about Jesus cleansing a leper.

When we talk social distancing, we have few contemporary parallels to the anxiety around leprosy.

Lepers were isolated into colonies, separated from the general population.

The fear of what we now know as "Hansen's disease," was widespread and paralyzing.

If you saw a leper, in other words, you ran away.

Leprosy produced skin lesions.

It destroyed nerve endings.

If a leper's foot, for example, touched something hot or cold, the nerves failed to alert the brain.

A toe would literally fall off because of the inability to register pain.

Terrifying doesn't begin to explain how the average person felt about lepers.

Yet Jesus waded into their midst, eschewing the danger.

Matthew's Gospel tells us as soon as Jesus finished the Sermon the Mount, he was approached by a leper, a man who did not stay 10 feet away -- as you and I are supposed to do now because of coronavirus anxiety.

The man knelt before him, asking Jesus to heal him.

"Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man." (Matthew 8:3)

Uh-oh, Lord, you're not following best practices!

I'm glad to have a Savior who didn't allow social distancing and self-sheltering to stand in the way of human need.

I am humbled to realize how much of a better person Jesus was.

Because I'm an anxiety-riddled 21st century man, one in need of a Savior, I'll see you soon in a supermarket aisle looking for sanitizer with at least 60 percent alcohol content.