Can you recall the geography of the past weeks in these stories from Mark’s gospel? Right after his baptism in the Jordan and the temptations in the desert, Jesus began his very active ministry: he called his first disciples, cured a demoniac in the synagogue, entered the house of Peter’s family and cured his mother-in-law. Today we find him outdoors, since lepers were barred from the community (cf. our first reading: “They shall dwell apart, making their abode outside the camp”). We can presume the encounter between Jesus and the leper happened in the countryside, where other lepers were forced to roam.
Judging from our Leviticus reading, any suspicious skin ailment (“a scab, or pustule or blotch”) could be labeled leprosy. In biblical times little was known about illnesses and their cures. So, as a precautionary means, certain people — a woman with an irregular discharge of blood (Leviticus 15:25- 27) and those suspected of leprosy, were cast out, excommunicated from the community. It makes you wonder, which was more painful for the person, the illness or the expulsion from family and friends. who normally would have cared for and supported the sick?
Sick people, the elderly, residents in nursing homes, the handicapped, besides their physical condition, often feel isolated from the community of family, work and their religious assembly. Visitors, phone calls, get-well cards have a sacramental value for the confined, besides bringing comfort and concern, they are also concrete reminders linking them to the outside world.
In our parishes we have trained ministers who take communion to those at home, hospitals, nursing homes and prisons. They take the sacrament to those cut off from the community, but their very presence is a sacramental sign, a source of healing to those isolated “outside the village.”
Chapter 1 of Mark’s Gospel closes with the healing of the leper. At this point in the gospel Mark has are already established Jesus’ “credentials.” He is the “Son of God,” who heals, preachers, drives out evil spirits, and teaches with authority, in religious and domestic settings — but also outside cities and villages, on the roads. That’s enough information to stir up concern and questions by the religious authorities, which we will see as we progress through Mark.
Jesus’ first response to the leper is that he was “moved with pity.” The English translation doesn’t communicate the depth and intensity of Jesus’ feelings. The word Mark uses (“splanchnizomai”) suggests that Jesus didn’t just feel compassion or pity for the man. The verb describes a gut, or instinctual response, which moves a person to do something for someone in dire need. Jesus doesn’t just feel bad, or have pity for people, he reacts instinctively and does something. In addition, he doesn’t just address individual needs, but condemns practices that cause people’s misery. Jesus’ followers can’t miss how he reacts to need as he journeys to Jerusalem.
We too must work to take down walls that separate people according to religious, social, economic, racial, gender, etc. differences. The leper’s pain wasn’t just physical, but included the misery of being counted as unworthy of the secular and religious life of the community. He would also have thought that he was unloved by God. In the thinking of his day he would have thought that his illness was a punishment from God for some sin or ritual violation he had done. Not only would he experience expulsion from human society, but would feel as an outcast before God. How desolate was that! — to be suffering so much and feel that not even God was there for support?
A woman told me recently that after her divorce she was cut off from old friends, some family members and her parish. “I felt like a leper!” And what about the handicapped, gays, elderly, women, immigrants, the very poor and even teens? Have we ever heard from them: how they are treated by our parish, their families, neighbors and the community? Remember, the man Jesus healed was outside the community. That’s how the above-mentioned often feel — cast off and forgotten.
We say we “feel bad” for someone. According to what Jesus did that isn’t enough. We need to get in touch with our deep feelings of compassion and then do something for those who move us. And still more — we need to go beyond the usual boundaries our church and society observe. By curing the excommunicated leper, Jesus tells us where we Christians should be found — “outside the pale” — beyond traditional boundaries. Why? Because that’s where we will find Jesus and his community of the healed and saved.
After he heals him Jesus tells the man to be silent. He wants the miracle to be personal and quiet for a purpose. The man is to go first to the priests and go through the ritual cleansing prescribed in Leviticus (14:1ff.) Maybe the priests would ask the man how he was cured and then they would hear about Jesus. Who better to give witness to Jesus than someone whose life has been changed by him? Who better to witness to the strength, joy, encouragement, hope and direction that Jesus gives us than one who has been transformed by him?
The man’s life was changed not by any observance of religious codes or rituals, but by Jesus’ compassion, touch and words. If the man had listened to Jesus and gone to tell the priests, their authority would have been undermined and they would be challenged to see God acting outside their influence in this itinerant preacher whom John the Baptist had described as “one more powerful than I” (1:7).
Chapter 1 comes to a close and, because of his contacts with the leper, Jesus is now ritually unclean, polluted. He has traded places with the leper who is now an “insider,” while Jesus has become an “outsider.” There he will be with people like us when sin cuts us off from others; when even our religious neighbors consider us less worthy to share their lives. Jesus, the outsider, is looking for those who have walked away or had to leave their religious communities because they don’t feel welcome and are just tired of trying to fit in.
The story isn’t just about Jesus taking pity on an outcast and healing him, is it? After all, he breaks a strict religious code by touching the man. In the eyes of religious people a holy God required a holy people. The man’s disease made him unholy and so his presence defiled the community. He was cast out. Without his community how could he come to know and worship God, because God is known in community? In ancient times expulsion was a form of death. A person’s physical survival was impossible without the protection and identity offered by human relationships. Jesus confronts the people’s notions of God and religion by touching and curing the man. He breaks the barrier the community puts up between good and bad, clean and unclean.
We have already seen in Mark that Jesus doesn’t draw on other authorities for his teaching and practices. Two weeks ago we heard the astonished crowds say, “He taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes” (1:22). The barriers are down; where is God to be found? According to today’s gospel, among the outcasts.
Jesus is founding a new community, which includes those he called to be his followers; but also the outcasts, widows, orphans, the poor and the impure. There is no exclusion in his community, contrary to the religious atmosphere of Jesus’ time and, it must be said, of our own as well. God’s kindness has broken into our world and changed our ways of judging others and is reconstituting the human family.