Epiphany 6

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Epiphany 6
PROPER: B
PLACE: St. John’s Episcopal Church, Kingsville
DATE: February 16, 2003

TEXT: Mark 1:40-45 The Healing of a Leper
“A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him . . .”

See also 2 Kings 5:1-15ab – Elisha heals Naaman of his leprosy.

ISSUE: Israel is expected to be holy, as the Lord is holy. (Lev. 19:2) People who were diseased were considered unholy, and often were considered polluted, and unworthy of being God’s people, and in the worst situations like lepers had to live isolated and alone. In Mark’s story Jesus touches and embraces the leper with restoration. Today the church is the agent of Jesus, as he was the agent of God. We must also reach out, and reclaim the people of the world for the God of love and healing. (In the Naaman story from 2 Kings, Elisha heals a gentile and an enemy.)
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Mark’s account of the Gospel of Jesus is telling us a wonderful story of the healing of a leper by Jesus. Mark always from the beginning is conveying the fact that Jesus is Lord, Son of God, and that the Good News of God has come into the world. The order of things is in the process of change. Just like Israel’s ancient champion, Elisha the Prophet, Jesus can heal even lepers. There are some curious aspects to this story and it is particularly helpful to understand the passage in its context and time.
First and foremost it is important to understand in this healing story what leprosy was in the first century. We think of leprosy as what is presently called Hansen’s disease. Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, is nasty. It causes the loss of sensation, and an ulceration of the extremities, and can cause disfiguring nodules on the face. It is not terribly infectious, and for a spouse to catch it is rare. Leprosy is never white in color. What’s more, leprosy is rare in the Middle East, and the leprosy in the Bible is not Hansen’s disease.
Biblical leprosy is described in the Hebrew Scripture book of Leviticus. It is a very real and terrible experience, but not what we know as modern leprosy. Leviticus describes a very scaly disease like psoriasis, or a variety of other skin diseases where there is a breakdown of the skin and an oozing of body fluid and signs of severe infection of the skin. It could begin as a boil or inflammation. What’s more, your house or clothes could have leprosy, or what we call mildew or a fungal growth on the walls of your house or on your clothing. In Leviticus 13-14, there were strict laws governing what happened to a person or a house with this kind of disorder. (Unlike Hansen’s disease, there could be cures or remissions of psoriasis. And a house with mildew could be cleaned, and restored.
Persons who were declared to have a skin disease, which they called leprosy, was required to live outside the camp, or town, until there was a time of healing, if that occurred. You were required to cry out “Unclean, Unclean, I am unclean,” whenever you were in the proximity of other people. If they touched you, they would also be considered unclean and have to perform required rituals of cleansing. They were dirty and could pollute the whole community. Remember that to be away from your family and community was a fate worse than death. Lepers had to resort to begging for a living. If your skin disease or psoriasis improved or went into some kind of remission, you would then show yourself to the priest and if he declared that you were clean, or healed, you performed a variety of prescribed rituals, and returned to the community.
Please understand, that people were not allowed to touch you for fear of catching the skin disease. These people had little or no concept of germs. People with skin disorder were considered unclean, polluted. If you touched anything unclean or polluted, then you were unclean. For this reason tax collectors were considered unclean, because they often touched and examined foreign goods of questionable cleanliness. When you crossed into Israel from a Gentile land, you shook the dirt from your feet.
What was behind this was a statement in Leviticus 19:2, “The Lord spoke to Moses and said, “Speak to all the community of the Israelites in these words: You shall be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Israelites had to keep themselves clean, wholesome, pure, unpolluted from the rest of the world that was unclean. Bodily wholeness and integrity were of extraordinary importance. Leviticus 21:16-20 reads: “The Lord commanded Moses to tell Aaron, ‘None of your descendants who has any physical defects may present the food offering to me. This applies for all time to come. No man with any physical defects may make the offering: no one who is blind, lame, disfigured, or deformed; no one with a crippled hand or foot; no one who is a hunchback or a dwarf; no one with any eye or skin disease; and no eunuch. . . . but because he has a physical defect, he shall not come near the sacred curtain or approach the alter. He must not profane these holy things, because I am the Lord and I make them holy.’” This law is hardly good news for anybody, especially in a world of nearly non-existent medical care!
Look what Jesus does. In the spirit of Elisha, and as Mark’s Son of God who brings Good News, and unclean man with biblical leprosy dares to come to Jesus. “If you choose, you can make me clean,” he says. Jesus is moved with great pity and compassion for this unclean man, this suffering person, who suffers not only from his disease, but from his isolation, and dreadful lack of esteem and dignity as a declared useless, expendable creature who must declare verbally that he is unclean everywhere he goes, and live without family or support system, and reduced to begging for a living. What a profound act of faith! Jesus is moved to compassion and pity. He touches the man declaring, “I do choose (to make you clean), Be made clean!” ‘Be made clean’ is a divine passive. Without saying the name of God, he uses this passive voice, called the divine passive, which means, “God makes you clean.” By touching the man, Jesus is challenging all the cultural judgment. For Jesus the leper’s problem is not polluting and with his touch he restores the leper to full membership in God’s Community, and to solidarity in human fellowship and community.
Then Jesus sends the man to a confrontation with the priest in the Temple. It is as if Jesus is sending the man to flaunt his worthiness, his dignity as one to be respected. A new age has come, the power of God in Jesus Christ has come to restore the broken, the expendable, the outcasts, the infidels, the sinners to wholeness and forgiveness. They are worthy, and they are clean in the sight of Jesus Christ who brings a new order of reconciliation and redemption to the world. It is a great act of acceptance and love, of great compassion, and a brilliantly lovely concept of the love of God.
What’s this story mean for us? What is its relevance in the world we live in today? Surely it gives us a picture of what the Christian community thinks that God is like. It is a revelation of a God of restoration who seeks all of his creation to be a part of his holiness in spite of our own pollution in the world we live. It tells too the great compassion and pity that Jesus has for people who were considered the outcasts: the blind, deaf, lame. Expanding upon its meaning it speaks of the worthiness of those who even in our society are considered outcasts. Each of us should notice our own discomforts with people who are considered deviant or different in our time. People with mental handicapped problems are often held at arms length. So called “retarded” people and people with Cerebral Palsy have met with dreadful exclusion from our communities. We are uncomfortable around people with cancer as some how polluted, and having the potential for polluting us. Think of how our society, and even some Christian denominations have viewed people with AIDs, even when it comes from drug abuse and blood transfusions. We have something within us that will set people apart. Psychologically we can be inclined to look down upon people different from ourselves and consider them as outcasts, even though we would be ashamed to admit it openly.
It has become culturally acceptable in our society to make certain types of people as subjects of mockery and turn them in to some kind of amusing fools. Some of the recent TV shows expose the poor and the less educated to be subjects of ridicule. Some of the programs that show petty trials on TV, in the guise of showing the American system of justice, do little more than make some poor people look like fools and buffoons. Other TV shows turn people into clowns revealing their sexy secrets and poor judgments on national television, like the Sally Jessie Show, and others of this kind. This kind of foolish entertainment seems designed for mass humor, and has no other redeeming qualities. It is a kind of exposure that is no less than another kind of psychological pornography that entertains the prurient interests of the masses. It has no sense of pity or compassion for the human poor.
Today, not unlike Jesus’ day, the world seeks acceptance and restoration to healing and wholeness. A sad and injured man comes to Jesus seeking healing. “If you choose,” says the man, “You can make me clean.” As Son of God, agent of God, a man of God, prophet and healer, Jesus has great pity, compassion, and a profound understanding of what it is like for this man in his rejecting world. Jesus responds with healing acceptance, and restoration. Today, in the world, the church of Jesus Christ stands as the community agents with Jesus Christ. Baptized members of the church are his brothers and sisters, and the children of God. We belong to the family of pity and compassion, of restoration, forgiveness, and love, because it was given to us. With Christ and in Christ we have to be ready, prepared and determined to respond to the human needs of people for belonging to community of God, whether they are gay, male, female, retarded, AIDS victims, Moslems, Buddhists, atheists, pagans. The redeeming grace, pity, love, and forgiveness are handed out to all who need their humanity and their dignity restored.
Jesus Christ died on a cross giving himself for the sins of the world, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. “If you choose,” the world says, “you can restore us all.”