Centurion Moment
Looking at the 12 Steps of AA as a rite of passage: separation from the now too-small world we knew, to a disorienting transition, to reincorporation—a changed person returning to community. It’s the shape of every human life, but the trick is to make it conscious, our steps intentional. The danger is substituting the ritual for the real thing—talk about it or work through a book—useful in mapping our way, but never the journey itself.
A Roman centurion approaches Jesus and implores him to heal his servant. Jesus says sure, take me to him. Centurion says I’m not worthy to have you in my home, just say the word. Jesus is amazed, has never seen such faith in all Israel.
So much happening in so few words.
A military commander of a ruthless empire, hated by the Jews, loves his servant enough to publicly humiliate himself before a ragtag Jewish healer…compassion cutting through rank and status. Aware of the blood on his hands, the military atrocities…remorse has opened him to a vulnerable humility. Understanding how authority works, he sees it in Jesus…discernment, submission to the point Jesus is amazed. The centurion’s whole life has propelled him to this moment.
To admit that he was powerless to help himself, that all his authority was useless. To come to trust that he was standing before a power greater than himself that could and cared to restore. To make a decision to publicly display vulnerability, to submit his will over to that care…these are the first three Steps in real life. It’s a serial surrender of everything we have imagined ourselves to be. Too big to happen all at once, but over time, life events and our own growing self-awareness conspire to take us down the steps our ego would never allow. And the steps do go down…until we’re stripped of all that obscures the truth.
As with the centurion, life will do its job, breaking us open, exposing us to bigger and bigger truth. But we have to help. Will we remain defended, reinforce the illusions we’ve built about ourselves? Or let that truth grow into a fearless vulnerability that brings us face to face with a power that cares and restores?
