The Priest Who Became a Leper

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Father Damien de Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the shores of Molokai, Hawaii. He had volunteered for what no one else would accept — ministry to the leper colony at Kalaupapa, a settlement of eight hundred exiled souls whom the world had abandoned on a remote peninsula surrounded by sea cliffs.

Damien did not stand at a safe distance and shout encouragement. He shared their poi bowls, bandaged their wounds with bare hands, built coffins, and dug graves. He constructed houses and a church. He dressed ulcers that made other visitors retch. For sixteen years he lived among them, ate with them, and called them by name.

Then one Sunday morning in 1885, Damien began his sermon not with his usual greeting — "my brethren" — but with two devastating words: "We lepers." The disease had crossed into his own body. He had become what they were.

This is the staggering claim of John's prologue. The Word who was with God, who was God, through whom every star and cell was made — this Word did not remain in unapproachable glory and call down instructions. He "became flesh and dwelt among us." The Almighty took on our skin, our hunger, our weariness, our mortality. He moved into the colony of human brokenness not as a visitor but as one of us, so that we might finally see the Father's glory — full of grace and truth.