SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B

[cappie]

In the Gospel, we continue to hear Mark report the miraculous healings that Jesus performed in Galilee. 

Leprosy is a disfiguring, infectious skin disease that has been surrounded by many social and religious taboos throughout history. This morning we hear Jesus encounter a character for whom this word, leprosy, doubtless signified a need as urgent as life and death.

In Jesus’ time,  many of Jesus' contemporaries held to an implicit theology of reward and punishment, believing that the universe operates on a law of karma that rewards good and punishes evil. That belief can be quite pleasing to the prosperous — "blessed people" can take credit for their own good health, their affluence and other varieties of privilege or good luck.

The assumption that logically flows from this dogma is that people with social deficits (think of poverty, sickness, intellectual disability, a denigrated class background, skin colour, sex, or gender identity) are responsible for the disfavour society accords them. Crudely put, it becomes a way for the well-off to say, "I'm OK, you're trash."

Jesus refused to be trapped in that narrow norm.

“If you choose, said the leper to Jesus, you can make me clean.”    God had already looked at him and said I do choose. Perhaps this is why our leper comes to Jesus and asks him, plainly, to choose. 

Of all the vocabulary of the spiritual life, the notion of ‘cleanliness’ or ‘purity’ is the most difficult. It is all too easy to use it to reify or protect the power or privilege of a select group. Yet it is not clear that our leper had any of that kind of analysis in mind. To be sure, the symbolic resonances of ‘cleanliness’ or ‘purity’ language are not in themselves suspicious or bad. There are spiritual truths to which this language points, and much of what might scandalize us about ancient Israelite liturgical prohibitions probably served more as a teaching tool—a way of unlearning deeply engrained residues of idolatrous worship inherited from ambient Canaanite religion.

Yet it is nonetheless difficult to ignore the kinds of people and bodies Levitical purity laws necessarily prohibited from full fellowship with the people of God, and the ways we have generally used this like of language to judge the sick, the chronically ill, or the differently abled. For no one who has a blemish, reads the 21st chapter of Leviticus, shall draw near, one who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or. . . . Or, or, or…

No matter how uncomfortable we are made by language of cleanliness or purity, the choice of God in Christ speaks a Love that knows and companions us no matter how ‘dirty’ or ‘unclean’ the world may tell us we are; no matter how dirty or unclean we tell ourselves we are. Our cleanliness or purity is of concern, in the end, to but one person. A person who asked us once, who told you that you were naked? Who told you that you were dirty? He has already chosen us, sisters, and brothers; and choosing us, he invited us to lay these categories aside and rest in His words, I do choose.

In 1868, American Baptist minister Robert Lowry published a hymn in his songbook Bright Jewels of the Sunday School which included these words:

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I hear the sweet, tho’ far-off hymn
That hails a new creation;
Thro’ all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

Mark's first stories of healing demonstrate that a disciple's evangelizing message must spring from encountering Christ's forgiveness, compassion, love. It begins in our hearts, in our own spiritual lives, and moves out to the world around us. We love Jesus because he first loved us l. And in loving us, he gives us power to do the work. He taught us what we need to know to be his disciples, giving us the example of his limitless love.