Mark 1:40 - 45
We assume that Jesus did a lot of healing during his brief time in ministry. Last week we heard about him healing people on the front porch of Peter’s house. But now he heals a leper, and Mark goes into great detail about this. So why is that?
First of all the word “leprosy” is a poor translation of a Hebrew word, tsara’at, which in turn is translated into Greek as “lepra”. When we think about leprosy we think about something called “Hansen’s disease” which is what Father Damien took care of on the island of Molekai. We have drugs that treat it now, but a century ago if you got this disease there was no cure. It was known to be contagious, but not very. Typically in advanced stages you lost the feeling in your fingers, toes, nose, and ears, and if you cut yourself or got an insect bite, you’d probably lose the extremity because of infection. Leper colonies existed partly to keep healthy people from being infected, but also because it was easier to care for these people in a colony where those who were still healthy could look after the ones who couldn’t do anything for themselves.
But we know that the leprosy described in the Old Testament was any scaly skin disease -- even psoriasis. And the word tsara’at could also be applied to houses where the paint was peeling off, to animals, to trees -- it seemed to mean something like “scaly” but also something like “sick surface”. In the book of Leviticus lepers are enjoined to withdraw from the cities and towns until they no longer had the disease, then they could show themselves to a priest and if he agreed, they could return to society. So the Hebrews and early Christians fully expected that many of those lepers would get healed in the natural course of things.
But for the Jews someone with a skin disease was unclean, and could not participate in the rituals of the temple. And that was devastating. There were so many things you did in the temple; but the most important was that it was there that your sins were forgiven by means of a sacrifice. It was there that you came as close to God as you could during this life. It was there that you renewed your own covenant as part of the people chosen by God.
Our leper today doesn’t go up to Jesus and ask to be healed; he asks to be made clean. He wants the stigma that kept him from his religious exercises removed. And that is probably why Mark put this story here. Because a leper could not become clean by himself; and if the skin problem cleared up, he still had to be declared clean by a priest.
In our reading it says Jesus was moved with pity, but in some other translations Jesus was indignant. In either case, Jesus is reacting not to the disease, whatever it was, but the fact that the man could not by himself repair his relationship with God that was mediated through the temple ritual. And that is why Jesus wills to make him clean.
And in a way, Jesus trades places with the leper; he is now forced to live outside the city because wherever he goes his fame has preceded him.
So in this little story Mark wants us to see that Jesus is capable of repairing the breach between God and man, something man cannot do by himself.
You and I sometimes forget that we are like the leper. We are unclean because we are sinners, and while baptism restores our friendship with God, that friendship is often a one-way street. Because of the left-over effects of original sin, we still have the tendency to wander off, to be distracted by our pleasures, to glory in accumulating stuff, to put ourselves first in all of our relationships, even those with God himself. And when we try to shore up the relationship, if you are like me you get distracted in your prayer and when you resolve to change for the better, that resolution doesn’t last very long. So God is always offering his friendship, we are usually failing to hit the mark in terms of our response.
And that’s when we reach out to Jesus and beg him to touch us. And we say, “If you will it, Lord, you can make me clean”. And the beautiful thing is that our Savior, who has the power to repair our relationship with the Father, who offers himself as divine food that gives us a share in his own life and from which we get the power to share in his divinity, always answers us with those words: I do will it, be made clean”.
Jesus traded places with the leper, so that the leper could be restored to his relationships with God and his fellow men, and Jesus had to stay away from people as a result. Jesus became a human being so that we could become divine.
