The Toothache Lord

Long ago, when the statue of the suffering Lord was still placed outside the cathedral, a young woman came regularly to pray to Jesus there. One day she decorated his head with a wreath of flowers which she fixed around his head with some ribbons, so that they wouldn’t be blown away by the wind. In the evening three drunken lads passed the statue on heir way home from a party. The first who saw the flower wreath joked mockingly: “Look, the Lord has a toothache.”, the other one said: “No surprise, he stands in a draught all day long” and the third said: “he will have to have his tooth pulled out!” Laughingly they went and didn’t think of it anymore. Later at home, Leopold, one of these men, wanted to go to sleep immediately. However he couldn’t fall asleep and tossed and turned in his bed for some time before he suddenly developed a terrible toothache. He got up angrily and took a large gulp of spirits to kill the pain, but the pain didn’t stop and in the end he had to cal a doctor. The doctor however, who could not find the reason for his pain, said: “You are the third man complaining to me about such a toothache. You must have all caught the tooth plague and this is an illness I cannot treat. Only the Lord Almighty can help you, which he might do if you ask him nicely.” Leopold remembered his mocking remarks at the evening before and knew that his toothache was his punishment for it. Full of remorse he went to the Lord’s statue, where he surprisingly found his two friends. They kneeled down together and asked the Lord for forgiveness for their mockery.

People passing by laughed about the three naughty friends kneeling in the street before the Lord’s statue. The Lord however, forgave them and cured their pain.

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