Jesus Cleanses a Leper

Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

On this last Sunday of Ordinary Time before we begin Lent, the Gospel of St. Mark continues to show us what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

The first reading from the Hebrew Scriptures comes to us from the Book of Leviticus. Leviticus is all about the rules and regulations of the Jewish faith. Most of these rules deal with the subject of ritual purity. Perhaps those who are affected most by these rules are the people who are dealing with skin diseases. The Hebrew Scriptures identify these diseases as leprosy. However, the very first diagnosis of Hansen’s disease, what we know to be leprosy today, does not occur until well after the first and second centuries after Christ. So, the first context that we must realize is that diseases that we know of as acne, psoriasis, eczema, rashes, and a host of others would all come under the category of leprosy in the first century Mediterranean culture. Any kind of skin diseases that involved bodily fluids escaping through the skin was considered leprosy.

The restrictions that are imposed on people with leprosy must be looked at as more than simply fear of contagion. In this society with its rigorous laws of ritual purity, the leper embodied all that was unclean – a living representation of contagion, corruption, and sin. Consequently, leprosy meant that the leper was completely cut off from all association with others. Anything that the leper touched incurred the same ritual impurity that was imposed upon the person. A leper was not allowed to gather with others for worship, to engage in any commercial activity, and was also relegated to the peripheries of the community.

In the light of this heritage, the cure of the leper by Jesus carries more meaning than we would suppose in our own time. When Jesus touches the leper, he does the unthinkable and involves himself in ritual impurity as well as placing himself at the risk of contagion and the necessity to overcome a certain revulsion. When Jesus heals by his touch, he challenges the division between the ritually pure and the ritually impure as well as accomplishing that which was thought to be as difficult as raising a person from the dead. The form of this healing and the words that go with it are those of an exorcism. In St. Mark’s account it results in a joyful explosion of missionary zeal and proclamation of the good news on the part of the former leper. Even though Jesus warns him not to tell anyone what Jesus has done, the leper is so overcome by his newfound health that he literally is overcome with emotion and cannot contain it. Why would Jesus ask him to keep silent? Consider this – when word spreads that Jesus could cure even leprosy, something that was considered as hard as raising one from the dead, Jesus would have been inundated by others who needed his healing hand. That is, in effect, exactly what happened.

When a St. Mark tells this story, it suggests comparison with baptism in no uncertain terms. In baptism, the believers have been touched by Christ, cleansed of sin, released from any distinction between the holy and the unholy or the ritually acceptable and the ritually impure. All distinctions like this are supposed to have fallen away. In Christ there is no question of condoning categories of excluded, disgraced people in order to preserve the community at their expense. In Christ there are no categories of people beyond the protection of the law, beyond the reach of grace, or beyond the power of healing and forgiveness. In Christ, no one is abandoned.

Perhaps this holds some important analogies for the community of the baptized. When we know that Jesus is the promised savior of the world because of his gift to us, it is not appropriate to pass on a hearsay message. It is appropriate to pass on the living experience of transformation, so that the truth may unfold through life and action and through the impact that the touch of Christ has in the world. The Gospel suggests that when true testimony of that sort is given, people flock to Jesus from all sides without further bidding.

To pursue this one step further, we must ask what such testimony might look like in our world today. Certainly, to proclaim the good news of salvation by doing as Jesus does in this particular Gospel scene, must be a matter of breaking down divisions which seem inevitable to us today. It must be a matter of caring for, touching people who seem beyond redemption today, rather than excluding them in order to protect the rest of society. Certainly, it must be a matter of confronting in faith the problems that seem as difficult as raising the dead. Would Jesus respond with passionate anger over the plight of the destitute in our world of plenty as he did over the plight of the lepers? What would Jesus say about isolating people, abandoning them out of fear, for the protection of society? How would he look at situations in which differential value is placed on human lives according to which race, or economic class, or nation is involved? What would Jesus think about the condition of our nursing homes in neighborhoods of poverty? How would Jesus react to the substandard schools that populate our ghettos?

An interesting detail about this particular Gospel reading, pointed out by some Scripture scholars, is that there is more emotion expressed in this story than anywhere else in the four Gospels. It is expressed in the kneeling and pleading of the leper, and it is echoed in the passion with which Jesus responds. It seems to express the desperation of someone who has been totally abandoned by his society and who does not count or matter to that society anymore. It also seems to express the passionate and compassionate judgment of God in vindication of such persons.

Indeed, the readings for today’s liturgy make us wonder just where we, as disciples of Jesus, stand in matters of exclusion which come in so many different ways in today’s culture and society.