6^th Sunday of Ordinary Time (B); February 11, 2024

Lv 13:1-2,44-46.  Ps 32.  1 Cor 10:31—11:1.  Mk 1:40-45

Deacon Jim McFadden

            The last few Sundays we have encountered Jesus, the Divine Physician of our bodies and souls.  He was sent into our world plagued by alienation, polarization, dissension, dysfunction, and social injustice of every sort—all of which makes us spiritually sick, even affecting our bodies.  The Father sent his Son into our world to touch our wounded humanity, to heal our brokenness, marked by sin and its consequences, which we see graphically displayed in our time and place.

            Today’s Gospel passage (cf. Mark 1:40-45) presents us with the healing of a man afflicted with leprosy, a disease considered  to be in the Old Testament a grave impurity with moral overtones: namely, it was seen as a result of a bad moral action of himself or his family.  So, the person was seen to be impure both morally and physically, which required separation from his family, community, and even the synagogue.  So, as he moves about, he has to give warning to others, “Unclean, unclean!” (Lv 13:45c) and “Being unclean, the individual shall dwell apart, taking up residence outside the camp” (v. 46). The fate of a leper is as bad as it can get: the instructions from Leviticus make the leper the ultimate outsider.  What’s worse is that the poor miserable  creature internalized his society’s opprobrium  making him feel unclean to himself and even before God: for example,  he wasn’t allowed to worship with the believing synagogue/temple community.  Can you imagine living a wretched life without any kind of hope?  The mental anguish, the excruciating isolation must have been devastating.

            Despite all of this, the leper in today’s Gospel sensed that Jesus was different; more to it, he believed that Jesus could liberate him from his external and internal affliction.  He had heard about Jesus from Nazareth who healed all sorts of people—how he gathered people who were excluded, such as public sinners and tax collectors.  So, grasping for the last shred of hope, he boldly came forward, which in itself broke social taboos and the Mosaic Law.  Publicly, he became a transgressor. 

            Jesus should have kept the man at a distance.  But, instead Jesus allows the man to draw near him.  Then Jesus does something that was unthinkable at the time: he is moved to the point of reaching out and touching him.  By so doing, Jesus also becomes a transgressor.  What does this say about the Good News he proclaims: God draws near to our lives where we are here and now; he is moved by compassion by the fate of our wounded humanity and comes to break down any barrier  that prevents us from being in relationship with him, with others, and ourselves.  He drew near…closeness.  That’s how Jesus relates to us.  Compassion:  he suffers with us.  Tenderness: Jesus cares for us and he lets us know that by “touching us.” 

            In this episode we see two transgressors: the leper and Jesus.  The leper should not have approached Jesus and the Lord should not have touched him.  Both of them are transgressors; both committed transgressions. 

            The first transgression is the leper: he knew what the Law was and he should have stayed in his isolation, but he goes to Jesus.  His illness was considered a divine punishment: he was not only physically unclean but he was internally morally corrupt.  He deserves being a leper.  But, in Jesus, the other transgressor, we see another side of God: not the God who punishes us for our transgressions, but the Father of compassion and love who frees us from our sin and never excludes us from his mercy.  Thus, the man is able to emerge from his isolation because in Jesus he finds a God of communion who is willing to share his pain by touching him.

            Brothers and sisters, we cannot minimize how shocking this is: Jesus touched the leper, which was absolutely prohibited by the Mosaic law.  Touching a leper meant being unclean oneself: that is, one is infected inside because one has intentionally gone against God’s law.  But, by doing so, Jesus is revealing that God’s desire is to purify us from illness that disfigures us and ruins our relationships.  In that simple but radical touch between Jesus’ hand and the leper, every barrier between God and human impurity, disfigurement, alienation, between the sacred and profane, is pulled down. 

            Each one of us has experienced deep wounds, failure, suffering, rejection, and selfishness that make us close ourselves off from God and others because that what sin does: it closes ourselves from God and others because we feel shame: so internally, we keep people away by saying “unclean, unclean!”  But, God wants to remove our humiliation by opening our heart.  In the face of all this, Jesus announces that God is not an abstraction, let alone an ideology, but God is the one who ‘taints’ himself with our wounded humanity and he is not afraid to come in contract with our sores.  This is not a contemporary spin on the Gospel, but St. Paul first said it in his 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians: “For our sake, he made himself to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (v. 21).  So, look to God who tainted himself to draw near to us, to have compassion for us and to make us experience his tenderness.  Closeness, compassion, and tenderness: Jesus, the icon of the invisible God reveals all of that to us. 

            People of God, this is the kind of healing that awaits us we contend with so much isolation, ugliness, division, and dysfunction.  The question is: do we believe that Jesus will taint himself for our behalf?  That Jesus can heal our “leprosy”?  Do we believe that Jesus wants to transform our wounded condition and bring us closer to the love of the Triune God?  Do you believe that Jesus wants to do that for you?  If you do, let Jesus touch you! 

            May the Blessed Virgin Mary accompany us on this journey as we invoke her that we may share fully in her Son’s resurrected life.  Amen.