Jesus has HIV

I remember my first friend who died of HIV.

He was a small shrivelled man with clunky black glasses through which he looked at me and talked during his last days.

His name was Vanlalringa

I am using a real name for a change. I can't hide my friend's identity with a pseudonym.

I knew Ringa for a few weeks in 1995. It was the first time I really got to know someone living with HIV. Ringa was my first friend to die with HIV.

Ringa was an all out follower of Jesus. He had been to a prestigous Bible college. I won't name it, but when he got sick he had to leave. A past history of drug use caught up to his body. The virus that had entered him so long before was doing its nasty work when I met him. Those were the days before ART was commonly available. Most of what we did was try and deal with opportunistic infections - and try and make things as comfortable as possible.

My memory clouds now 16 years later about when I last met Ringa alive. But I still remember the rainy days I would walk over to his little home. I still remember is small silent mother - and the look of sadness and love on her face as she cared for her seminarian son dying of AIDS.

I remember the funeral wake - locally called a lengkham. After a person dies the house is cleared out of furniture - benches are brought in and the whole community comes to sing songs all night before the funeral. I think it was my first lengkham that I attended. It was the first where I knew the person. I said some few words during the time.

Does Jesus have HIV? He does. His body here on earth - the flesh and blood followers who have been touched by His love have HIV. So many of them. Some like Ringa have already passed on to glory. Others are living through the days and weeks and months and years alloted to them. Many with hope. Many with tears. Many living out the love that their Lord showed to them.

Dan Turello (a good friend of mine who I would love to have living next door instead of in Boston MA) sent me a gentle nudge to look at an article about a South African pastor who preached a sermon called "Jesus had HIV".

I was surprised that people were upset at the statement - specifically because they thought it implied that Jesus slept around.

But look at what Isaiah says about our Lord:

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53.3-4

Christians through the ages have been given glimpses into the awesome mystery of the Lord of the universe suffering physically. Some eras saw this clearer than others. With the swirl of antibiotics on one hand and the name-it-claim-it-heal-yourself folks on the other, we in the church seem to have forgotten about Jesus who "surely took up our infirmities." He did not lift them with a forklift and dump them in a trash can. He bore them on Himself. Phillip Yancey footnotes his The Jesus I Never Knew with the statement that some of the Crusaders in the middle ages returned being convinced that Jesus actualy suffered from Leprosy (what we call Hansen's disease today). So much so that those who returned from the holy land with leprosy were considered to have been given the 'holy disease' and looked after in Lazar-houses (named after the beggar Lazarus in the parable Jesus told). One of the German words for 'hospital' - Lazarett - springs from this tradition.

Jesus has HIV not only because His body on earth has it. He also knows the shame and disgust that people treat the disease with. Born of parents who were pregnant when they were married - he knows the scorn of being called a bastard. I had always wondered why a certain band was called Pantera. I now know. Early Greek opponents of the fledgling Christian church (such as the philosopher Celsus) lost no time in painting a scurrilous picture of Jesus' father. They claimed that Jesus was born to Mary after she had an illicit relationship with a wandering Roman soldier named Pantera. His growing up in the small village of Nazareth would have had plenty of opportunities for people to abuse him. All the more likely since we do not hear about Joseph after Jesus' 12th birthday. You can just imagine the talk: "An early death ... what could that mean but God's punishment for a man who sinned?"

Jesus was stripped naked and hung to die by asphixiation on a set of crooked pieces of wood - a curse in Jewish law and an abomenation to everyone who passed. He was spat upon, abused by all and sundry, abandonned and betrayed by his friends. He if anyone knows what suffering is like. He has been through it all.

I don't like pictures of Christ on the cross. Because they are always too Barbie for me. They are too washed-in-Rin-soap safe. They are not the bloodied corpse that still breathed that bore the filth and shame of all my sin upon Him.

Does Jesus have HIV? Yes He does. And everything else that we find loathesome. And more. Much more. HIV would be one of the least of His issues. The true scandal of the ages is that He who knew no sin, who was spotless in this maculate world that He trod - was coated, cloaked, smeared and covered with it. So much so that Father turned away His holy face and prompted Jesus to cry out in the darkness - "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

We have become so sanitized in our faith - so neat, peppy and perky - so spiffy and sparkly that we choose the gloss over the vast tracts of anguish that the good book lays out for us.

The part of Scripture that brought us to the Mumbai area to work with people with HIV was this:

The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Heb. 13.12-14

It struck us that HIV/AIDS was and is a disease linked with shame. There may be many reasons for this - but no matter which society we are in - we see the deep stigma people living with HIV face. God's people are not to shy away from this - but rather embrace it. Our lives should be sharing in the shame of Jesus - the shame and disgrace that every person with HIV is living through in greater and lesser measure as they live through today.

But there is one other thing to remember. Jesus may have HIV now. But He will not be bearing it forever.

Though He did not flinch from suffering. Though He chose willingly to pay the cost for me. Though He expects nothing less from us - and our lives should be marked out with shame and suffering if we are really 'taking up the cross and following Him' - Jesus does not put suffering into a holy box and make a religion out of it.

Instead we look forward to the fulfillment of His kingdom when there will be no more sorrow, no more shame, no more death, no more pain. This is no pie-in-the-sky-in-the-sweet-by-and-by. This is the real hope that each humble follower of Jesus Christ has. Eternal, unending, unbounded, complete, fulfilled, life-as-it-should-be, and life-overflowing-spilling-over-into-forever-and-ever.

If we do look back from whatever time-state eternity is in - we will see that Jesus had HIV - but not-anymore.

My friend Vanlalringa will agree to that. I look forward to talking to him about it - and not having to leave after 1.5 hours like I used to back in Churchandpur, 16 years and a death ago.