Mk 1:40-45
Lev 13:1-2.44-46 1
Cor 10:31-11:1
focus: The story of the leper’s healing invites us to acknowledge our own sore spots and to hold our wounds in body and soul out to Jesus that he may touch and heal them.
function: So, we ourselves can become healers, wounded healers for others.
At the time of my missionary assignment to Tanzania, East Africa, in the 1990’s a leper colony was still in existence near Ndanda Abbey where I was stationed. I met the famous Missionary Benedictine Sr. Lia from Germany who was later, in 2001, honored for her outstanding work by then Prince Charles with the Order of the British Empire. When I got to know her, Sr. Lia was in her 90s and by then had cared for lepers with great dedication for over 50 years.
The lepers lived together in a separate camp between the towns of Ndanda and Mwena. Sr. Lia, lay helper Inge, and their co-workers provided the patients with medicine and other assistance, at the risk, especially during the early days, of being infected themselves.
Leprosy can be cured today. The people who continued to live there in the 1990s, the so-called burned out cases, were still marked by the illness; they had missing or deformed limbs. Their illness didn’t progress anymore, however, because of the medicine. Today leprosy can be treated early on in the hospital; and the buildings of the former leper camp are used for a different purpose. The memory however, of the lepers, living apart from the other villagers and being cared for lovingly and skillfully by Sr. Lia and her team, is unforgettable to me.
In Holy Scripture, the word leprosy refers to several different skin diseases, not only leprosy. And they were all viewed as contagious. Because of this danger of infection — we heard it in today’s first reading — as a leper you were isolated and alienated. The stigma of leprosy was public; you went around crying “unclean, unclean.” In effect you had to tell people to stay away. You can imagine the shame in that.
Over and above that, Jewish law added a further expulsion for the so-called leper: Because you were ritually unclean, you were forbidden to go to the synagogue and to the temple. Not only were you cut off from family and friends, but also from in communal worship. That gave you the impression that you were separated from God, too!
The leper in today’s gospel approaches Jesus as a man of power. You have the power, you can make me clean, he tells him. He also appeals to what Jesus wants to do: “If you wish you can…” Jesus does not recede, despite the potential for infection and for becoming unclean himself. He is moved with compassion. He touches the man. “I do will it. Be made clean,” Jesus says; and the leper is healed.
Now the man, healed and restored to community with God and with the people, “spreads the report abroad.” He becomes, as we would say today, a missionary disciple.
Jesus has come among us to show us God’s compassion for the outcast. His compassion and love were so deep that he even risked his own exclusion. “He remained outside in deserted places.” Ultimately, Jesus’ compassion brought him to the most serious isolation and exclusion of all: he was nailed to a cross between two thieves.
My sisters and brothers, Today’s gospel invites us to acknowledge our own sore spots, whatever they are, and to hold our wounds of body and soul out to Jesus that he may touch and heal them. So, we ourselves can become healers, wounded healers, for others.
Jesus is present here and now, with his power to heal. The first half of every Eucharist is about acknowledging and accepting: In the Penitential Act, we bring our shadow sides before God. In the Liturgy of the Word, the Scriptures proclaim to us our light, our greatness. We are God’s beloved; that makes us great and honored. Jesus reveals God’s powerful healing love to us today. We only have to accept it.
The Liturgy of the Eucharist then is about handing over and receiving. We hand over to God with the Eucharistic gifts whatever is going on in our lives. Jesus’ Last Supper and his death become present, a death moved by love. Here he stretches out his hand to feed us with the power of that love.
We are meant to let ourselves be touched and fed by him, so that we can stretch out our hand for the acceptance, understanding and healing of others. The power of love that moves us when Jesus touches us will find its expression in whom we touch. To whom are we meant to stretch out our helping hand this week? What we do may not be as heroic as what Sr. Lia and here team did in Tanzania. It may sometimes be as simple as writing a note, making a phone call or visiting an elderly person in a nursing home.
Today is the World Day of Prayer for the Sick. Not the least of what we can do for sick and suffering people is pray for them, for God’s healing touch, and that, in the midst of troubles, the Lord may fill them with joy, the joy of His presence
~Fr. Thomas Leitner, OSB