Sacred Heart Parish
6th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (B)
The Book of Leviticus – our first reading today – is the third of the five books that make up what we call the Pentateuch: our Jewish brothers and sisters often speak of the Pentateuch as the Torah. Leviticus is not particularly reader-friendly. It gets its name from the fact that in great measure it details all sorts of worship regulations and dietary laws and practices prescribed for the Jewish people ministered to by the Jewish priests, often called Levites, for they were chosen exclusively from the Tribe of Levi, hence the name Leviticus. These ceremonial laws served to teach God’s people that they should always keep themselves in the state of what was called "legal purity", a state of external holiness, a sign of the internal holiness that represented the true Israelite’s intimate union with God. Accordingly, the central idea of Leviticus is found in the familiar admonition from God to his people – "You shall be holy as I am holy". The notion of legal impurity rings strangely in our ears today. We should note that legal impurity does not equate with moral fault or moral culpability. Perhaps we should examine our first reading in detail.
Leprosy in the ancient world had a wider connation than we think of today. The leper, somebody with skin disease, was required to show leprous condition to the priest, not to get medical advice but to learn whether he or she were ritually clean or unclean according to the prescriptions written in the Book of Leviticus. It the person were found to be unclean, he or she was considered unfit to participate in the community’s worship. Until the condition improved, the leper was ostracized from life in the community. This certainly seems shocking to us today. However, we should not be overly hasty to make our judgments. In those days, when medicine was more primitive, the fear was such that a leper’s condition was seriously contagious and this is what called for the ostracizing of anyone so affected. Unfortunately, this practice sort of dovetailed with certain attitudes of the Pharisees who saw in external legal uncleanness the equivalent of internal moral uncleanness.
This brief reflection helps us to understand, I trust, the plight of the leper in our Gospel reading, the plight of any Israelite considered legally unclean in Jesus’ day. We can just imagine this one man’s desperate appeal to Jesus that he be healed. Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out his hand and said to him – "Be made clean". At Jesus’ word and touch, the leprosy yielded to divine power and the man was cured.
What does all this have to say to us here at worship today? The evangelist Mark as we know begins his Gospel with these words: "After John the Baptist had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God". This is the time of fulfillment," he said. "Repent and believe in the gospel." Putting our first and third readings together, the message seems clear. The sinner being invited to conversion can no more belong to God’s kingdom than the leper of old could belong to Israel’s public worship. Once healed, once reconciliation has been effected, the sinner once again truly belongs to God’s kingdom. Thanks to God’s mercy and love at work in Jesus, the sinner is made new and is once again restored to friendship with God.
We should note in our gospel story that the leper asked Jesus for healing by, saying to him – "if you will". I see in this remark an implied confession of faith in Jesus’ divinity, because only divine power could work such a miracle. At the same time, however, the leper gets a wonderful understanding of the truth of Jesus’ true humanity as well. Nobody had ever touched the leper until Jesus touched him, and thus the leper experienced deeply the power of Christ’s compassion.
After the Lord healed the leper, he said to him – "Not a word to anyone now". But the man went off and became an evangelizer. He went off to proclaim the matter publicly. As a result, people kept coming to Jesus from all sides. We too have come to the Lord from all sides with all our problems, with all our sins, with all our concerns. We too, as with the man in the gospel story, want to be loved and to be forgiven. We know about the teachings of Jesus, his command of love, his command of forgiveness, his admonition to be kind to one another, to get rid of all bitterness, all anger and harsh words, that we be mutually forgiving as God has forgiven us. We have experienced the Lord for he has touched us as he once touched the man in the Gospel, and he continues to touch us in so many ways, through the Holy Spirit, by his grace and through his sacraments. And we too must become evangelizers, that is, livers, lovers and tellers of the Good News to all. This does not entail standing on a soap box at Cold Springs Park. It means knowing the Gospel, loving the Gospel, living the Gospel, and then the telling of the Gospel will take care of itself. We are Christ’s witnesses in the world. If not we, who is to be witnesses of Christ? What then does it mean to be a witness? "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would make no sense whatsoever – if God did not exist."