When Father Damien Said "We

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien de Veuster stepped off a boat onto Molokai, a Hawaiian island that had become a colony of exile for people suffering from leprosy. The government had quarantined hundreds there to die — abandoned, forgotten, without doctors, priests, or hope. Damien chose to go.

For eleven years he lived among them — building churches, digging graves, dressing wounds, learning their names. He slept in their huts, ate from their bowls, held their disfigured hands in prayer. His superiors back in Belgium wrote worried letters. He stayed.

Then one Sunday morning in 1884, Damien stood before his congregation and began his sermon with three words that changed everything: "We lepers..."

He had contracted the disease. He was one of them now — not a visitor, not a missionary from a safe distance, but a man who carried their suffering in his own body.

The congregation wept.

This is what John wants us to understand when he writes that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The eternal God — the One through whom all things were made — did not shout instructions from heaven. He stepped off the boat. He learned our names. He ate with us, wept with us, and ultimately carried our disease in His own body. The Word did not remain distant. He looked out at a broken, exiled humanity and said, in effect, "We."