Ordinary 6

The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

_{Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46; Psalm 32; 1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45}

The celebration of all the Sacraments involve physical touch: the laying on of hands, a holy kiss, aniontings, the signing of the cross on the forehead, the holding of hands, an embrace. Physical touch is an essential human expression that carries profound significance and conveys deep emotions and meanings. Thus, the Church has incorporated human touch to convey spiritual realities often beyond our understanding.

How uncomfortable I found it then having to don surgical gloves and garb as if for a moon landing during the COVID pandemic to pray the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. To lay hands on a person’s head and anoint their forehead and palms with a layer of rubber between us was clinical at best, inhuman a worst. Something was wrong.

How risky is it to identify with a person in their suffering? More so than we may realize. Yet Jesus took the risk. “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the man…” This unnoticed detail in the story – a touch – carries profound meaning for both the person who is ‘unclean’ and for Jesus.

Our contemporary Enlightenment culture has no parallel for the concept of ritual ‘uncleanness’. Ritual ‘uncleanness’ was considered a disruption of the divine order that God put into the world. It meant mixing things together that belonged apart. Shellfish are unclean because they live in the ocean but crawl like land animals. Lepers are unclean because they have two colours of skin from blemishes or disease. This religious state of ‘uncleanness’ was considered contagious. Therefore, to touch a person deemed ‘unclean’ or to encounter blood or a corpse made a person in turn ‘unclean’.

That unnoticed detail, Jesus…"touched the man…” made the leper clean but it also made Jesus ‘unclean’.

Another such reversal occurs in that Jesus instructed the man to go to the priest and offer the prescribed sacrifice but the man never does. Jesus, on the other hand, now himself ritually ‘unclean,’ remains outside the towns in deserted places as is prescribed in Leviticus: “They shall dwell apart, making their abode outside the camp”.

The leper becomes clean. The eternal high priest becomes ‘unclean’. A reversal Paul starkly declares: “For our sake God made Jesus to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ” [2 Corinthians 5:21].

How risky is it to identify with a person in their suffering, in their contagion, in their living apart from the rest of us? More so than we may realize. Jesus took the risk.

Saint Francis of Assisi kissed a person with leprosy. Saint Teresa of Kolkata, continuing today in her sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, embrace people with the many diseases that afflict humanity. Would you touch a person with AIDS? With COVID? Hold a person with Kaposi’s sarcoma? With Hansen’s disease, that is, leprosy?

Who today lives on the outskirts of society and church? Consider the people who are physically kept “outside the camp” in what we call reservations, jails, holding cells, detention centers, those certain neighborhoods of our cities, nursing homes, camps and death row. What peoples are kept “outside the camp” by our fear, judgement and bigotry.

It is to these people that Jesus goes out to the deserted places of our world and encounters them where they dwell.

For you see, there are many of us that the church and society hold ‘unclean’ – unacceptable. Jesus is with us “outside the camp”. Jesus takes the risk and becomes one with us. “I do will it. Be made clean.” And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched us.