Ordinary 6

The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2018 – Cycle B Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46; Psalm 32; 1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45

The term leprosy in the Bible refers to a cluster of symptoms which described skin infections that were highly infectious though often understood as temporary.

So did you notice the parallel situation between Jesus and a person deemed leprous?

The leprous person is required by Mosaic Law to live apart from the community, outside the camp.  They are contagious and thus dangerous to the health and well-being of the community.

Jesus is forced to remain in deserted places because he too is contagious.

We see this in the contrast of the two passages.  The word “unclean” appears six times in the passage from Leviticus.  “If a person is…unclean, the priest shall declare them unclean…they are to cry out “Unclean, unclean,”…they are to declare themselves unclean, since they are in fact unclean.”  The pounding repetition of the word leaves a person with no question as to their position in life or in regard to the community.

Consider what groups of people have been told over and over by society and the church that they are “unclean”, contagious, deemed a risk to the larger group, unwanted.

People divorced and remarried outside the church.  People who identify themselves as LGBTQ.  And if they are HIV positive!?  Refugees.  Young people, adolescents and college students. (Have the middle aged and senior members of this parish regularly welcomed and made contact with these younger members?)   People who are mourning.  (Death is contagious.  It reminds that we are going to die.  Thus being near death is contagious.)  The overweight, the ugly, and wrinkled who do not fit the American image of beauty spouted by the glamour magazines.  (Images that cause many of our young girls and woman to be anorexic or to commit suicide.)  The unborn to the incurably sick and people suffering from mental illnesses.  Women. (It is amazing how they have stuck it out in the church.)  Migrants.  How many parents with infants and toddlers have been given the “evil eye” in church because their child was being a child?   The the poor and the homeless.  As I look around the community, why aren’t their less people here?  So many of us can be, are, deemed “unclean” by someone else.

A lot of the people we complain about not being in our churches may be the very ones who have had it pounded into them subtly and not so subtly that they are “unclean”. 

How often have we experienced in modern times ethnic cleansing by governments throughout the world?  Our nation has done it from Native American Indians to the Mormons, from Negroes to our present day in regard to immigrants and refugees.  We Catholics have forgotten, we were not wanted by our nation.  And lest we forget the worldwide rise of anti-Semitism?  No one ever wants the Jews.

Leprosy, in its many guises is very much alive and well.  Leprosy is not a disease of the skin.  It is a disease in the mind of the person or group who considers someone else as unwanted, expendable, and unredeemable.

Now contrast the uncleans of Leviticus and our world with the Gospel of Mark: “you can make me clean…” “Be made clean”.  “and the leper was made clean.”  “offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed…”  Jesus offers another way of living with each other.

But how, you may ask as I mentioned in the beginning, is Jesus similar to the leprous person?   I said, Jesus is forced to remain in deserted places because he too is now contagious.   But he healed the leper, you may retort.  You would be correct.  But to touch a person deemed leprous is to yourself become considered leprous and therefore “unclean”.  “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched the leper and said “Be made clean.””  As Jesus makes the leprous person clean he himself become “unclean”.  He identifies with people who are unwanted, who are considered a risk to the group, who are considered contagious.

We are living in an era when so many of the present public and church issues revolve around competing beliefs and how we treat each other.  From a baker who does not want to create a wedding cake for a gay couple because he deems homosexuality sinful and does not want to show what might be approval to sharing more fully authority and power in the Catholic Church with laity; women in particular.   From the heated issue of legal vs illegal immigrants into our country to German bishops offering ideas in regard to how divorced Catholics married outside the church can receive the sacraments.  From the most divisive issues revolving around the beginning and end of human life to ethnic cleansing.  From the not so subtly judgmental remark offered by family, friends, or the stranger to the silent treatment, ignoring you as if you were not there.

Have you ever made another person know they were not wanted?

Have you been mistaken, identified with another group?  How did you feel?

Have you been made to feel like a leper – unwanted?

For those who are lepers among us, know that Jesus is in those deserted places with you.