Sixth Sunday In Ordinary Time (Year B)

Lev 13.1-2, 44-46;
I Cor 10.31-11.1;
Mk 1.40-45

OTHERS CARE BUT JESUS HEALS AND CARES

Today we celebrate the World Day of the Sick. Our readings today touches on the sickness of leprosy. This Sunday’s first reading is taken from the Book of Leviticus. The Book of Leviticus contains many laws for the ancient people of Israel which are rooted in practicality, and the isolation of lepers was thought necessary because of the fear of contagion.

But lepers were not only isolated because of a medical condition. In a world where sickness was seen as a punishment, lepers came to be seen as serious sinners, people who had placed themselves outside God’s domain, miserable creatures who were suffering punishment for wrongdoing.

On the contrary, Jesus in today’s reading from Saint Mark’s Gospel, touches a leper. It is hard to imagine what horror this description would have caused to the Jewish community. Jesus would have been seen to be taking a huge risk by establishing physical contact – how could He avoid catching the terrible disease Himself? Once again, the friend of tax collectors and sinners is seen to identify himself with those beyond the pale, those outside the camp, as Leviticus would put it. Our Lord breaks the taboo.

To the devout Jews of His time, this would be challenging enough. But then He heals the leper. The man is cured, his symptoms disappear, the hideous deformity vanishes, he is restored. To eliminate any possible explaining away or misunderstanding, Our Lord tells the healed leper to go to the priest and make the offering prescribed in the law.

The implication of the physical healing is that the man’s sins must have been forgiven. So once again, Jesus is suspect in the eyes of many of his hearers – who can forgive sins but God alone?

One might think in the early twenty-first century that the story of Jesus and the leper would be out of date. Yet it was only a few years ago that the late Princess Diana caused a huge stir in the national press by touching a person in hospital who had AIDS.

To the organisations working to promote research into the condition and to care for those dying of it, this simple action by a much-loved member of the Royal Family was vitally important. If Princess Diana could touch a person with AIDS, then society could, and must, care for such people. Before that defining moment, AIDS had been presented by the media as a plague and a punishment for people whose lifestyle was beyond the pale.

Afterward, a more understanding, accepting, and forgiving attitude began to prevail. Our Lord behaved in the same way in his own time, with the difference that, in Christ, God himself touched the sick and dying.

Among the saints of the Church’s Calendar there is a family of carers, men and women who imitated Our Lord in his ministry to the dross of society, to the sick and maimed, the despised and rejected. Saint Lawrence took care of the poor in Rome. Saint Francis imitated our Lord in embracing a leper.

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary devoted herself to the needs of the sick and poor. Saint Joseph Marello cared for the young and old of northern Italy. Saint Vincent De Paul-the servant of the poor. A number of well-known Christians of our own time have attracted attention from the media for their selfless giving of time and compassion to the handicapped, sick, and rejected. These faithful witnesses to God’s love should inspire us to open our own hearts to society’s rejects, to those beyond the pale, to the people who no-one else will acknowledge or care for.

It is not a case of being trendy or fashionable. In caring for those whom others reject we are following Our Lord’s example and challenging false judgements being made about the worth of our fellow humans who are all God’s children, sick or well, handicapped or whole, sinners or righteous. The virtuous, excluded from heaven in another gospel passage, complained to Our Lord, “when did we see you sick and fail to help you?”

The Lord replied to them, “Truly I tell you, in as much as you did not do it to the least of my brothers, you did not do it to me.” Our Lord challenges us to see him in the most unlikely, unappealing, unlikeable, unacceptable and unlovable person we can possible conceive of meeting. Whoever you believe the lepers of our modern age to be, it is precisely those people to whom God calls us to bring the Gospel of the love of Christ, our healer and the one who forgives sins.

Fr Joseph Osho