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When he was asked which is the most important of the laws, Jesus said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang everything else in the Scriptures, all the Law and the Prophets." And when, in Mark's Gospel, Jesus reached out and touched the leper that day in Galilee, all the Law and the Prophets were fulfilled in that embrace. That embrace, that fulfillment, is what St. Paul had in mind when he later said that Jesus Christ, "being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a slave. Being made in human likeness, being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross." That embrace, that fulfillment, is also what Paul had in mind when he said that in Jesus Christ "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." When the leper walked up to Jesus, and knelt before him and begged Jesus for help, saying, "If only you will, Sir, you can make me clean," Jesus did it. Right then and there Jesus fulfilled all the Law and the Prophets by loving God by loving his neighbor as himself, by humbling himself even to death, by becoming sin for the man so that in him the man might know the righteousness of God. In the past few weeks we have seen that right in the beginning of his Gospel Mark identifies Jesus as one who has the power to heal, as one who has the power to make people whole. In his very first chapter Mark tells us that Jesus has already driven out an evil spirit, expelled the fever from Simon's mother-in-law, and "healed many who had various diseases." And today we hear that Jesus heals a leper. But in order to understand today's story, we must keep in mind that what was considered leprosy in Jesus' day was not limited to what we now know as Hansen's Disease. In the Bible, the term "leprosy" was not limited to that contagious disease that affects the skin and nerves caused by Mycobacterium leprae. "Lepra," in the Bible, referred to all kinds of skin diseases, to everything from what we know today as severe elephantiasis to ringworm and psoriasis. But the people in Elisha's day and in Jesus' day were not primarily concerned about the "heartbreak of psoriasis," or even about the severe disfiguration that Hansen's disease and other diseases can cause. What they were just as concerned about, even more concerned about, was what the law held to be true about people with various visible skin diseases. Torah, the religious law of Israel, prohibited the mixing of unlike things. And when the skin of people with skin diseases began to discolor in some places on their bodies but not in others, creating patches of skin of different colors, it was as if they had two different skins, an unclean skin mixed in with the clean. And because of this, not because of the disease itself, religious law declared the person with such skin unclean, unfit for association with society. While skin diseases, including what we know as Hansen's Disease, were most definitely medical problems in the ancient world, as they remain today, the more general issue for ancient Jews, the more general issue in Mark's story about Jesus today, was the religious and social issue. A person with skin disease, even a person with simple boils or other blemishes, was in violation of Jewish law. He was in violation of Jewish law because disease was a sign of sin. Such a person was therefore cut off from society, cut off from human fellowship, made to live "outside the camp" until such time as he should be declared clean once again by a priest. While he was "unclean" he could not, for example, share a park bench with another person for the purpose of simply enjoying that person's companionship, nor could he presume to touch another person. To the chronically diseased, like the leper, the person affected by Mycobacterium leprae, this amounted, of course, to lifelong exile, and to heal a leper was considered virtually impossible. After all, only God could forgive sin, of which leprosy was a sign. So to heal a leper was as difficult as raising a person from the dead, the rabbis said. In fact, that's what a leper was considered in the ancient world - a living corpse. And not only in ancient Israel. In the Middle Ages, too, in the Christian Church, a leper was given up for dead. A priest, wearing his stole and carrying a crucifix, would lead the leper into the church and there read the Burial Office over him. And that would be the last time the leper would enter the church. Thereafter, the leper could observe the mass, but only from the outside, by peering in through a slit in the wall called a "leper's window." Unclean he was! And "Unclean!" the leper shouted if he ever walked through a street or lane in ancient Galilee. "Unclean!" he shouted to warn the good and clean people of God to stay away from him, lest they touch him and therefore become unclean themselves, unfit for simple human fellowship, and unfit for the benefit of God's grace. On that day in Galilee it was just such a person who dared to walk up to Jesus. He was a person who had no right even to speak to Jesus, or to any other clean and righteous person. Perhaps he was a man who, like Naaman, was doubly unclean, not only a leper, but a foreign leper to boot. In any event, it was just such an unclean man who walked up to Jesus, and knelt before him and said, "If you will, Sir, you can make me clean." And Jesus' companions were utterly astonished when Jesus did not drive the man away, which is what everyone in Galilee would have expected him to do. But Jesus didn't do that. Instead, Mark says, Jesus became angry! The Greek verb here is splagnizomai, which means that Jesus' entrails boiled over. Now many English translations say that this means that Jesus had pity or compassion, because the splagna, the viscera, were considered the seat of such emotions. But many contemporary scholars insist that the most ancient texts of Mark are saying that Jesus became angry. Not angry with the leper, but angry the way Jesus was later angry with the moneychangers in the Temple - angry with sin, angry with disease, angry even with the religious laws of his own people, angry with anything, including religious law and custom, that reduces a person to a bundle of nerves and tissue, unaccepted and unloved and uncared for by those around him. So what did Jesus do in his anger? Or what, if you insist, did he do in his compassion, in his pity? Instead of casting the man aside, Jesus did the socially and religiously unthinkable. He reached out and touched the leper and said to him, "I will. Be clean!" And immediately, Mark tells us, the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. But this, of course, meant that Jesus himself was now unclean. Jesus himself became unclean because he had embraced the unclean. By becoming unclean for the sake of the leper, by humbling himself and becoming unclean himself in order that the leper might be cleansed, Jesus brought the unclean into fellowship with himself, and made him whole. "Master, which is the most important commandment?" we ask. And Jesus replies, "Love God. And love your neighbor as yourself." And then Jesus reaches out and embraces his unclean neighbor as he himself would be embraced, and brings him into fellowship with himself and with God. Personally, I take this healing by Jesus to be what the scholars call an acted parable, something that Jesus acted out sacramentally as a sign of what he would later do for all the world on a cross, what he would do on that cross "outside the camp" of Jerusalem where the unclean were sent to die and were sometimes executed, the place where Jesus became sin for us, so that we, too, might become the righteousness of God. In another place in the Scriptures, in Luke's Gospel, an expert in the law asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. It's another way of asking which is the most important of the laws. And there, too, Jesus responds similarly. When Jesus asks the expert in the law what the law says he must do to inherit eternal life, the man says, "Love God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind. And love your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus says, "That's right. Do this, and you will live." And when the expert in the law then asks, "But Jesus, who is my neighbor," Jesus goes on to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan, his story about the good foreigner, the story about the unclean one who risked his own life for the sake of one who had been left half dead by robbers, and left unclean also by the priest and levite who passed by on the other side of the road. And when, at the end of the story, Jesus asks the expert in the law who he thought had proved to be neighbor to the man left half dead, and when the expert in the law once again gets the answer right and says, "The one who showed mercy on him," Jesus tells him - and tells us, all of us experts in the law - to go and do it, and you will live. Week after week and year after year we hear all these stories about Jesus the healer, and we wonder just what it all has to do with us. Just who are we in Jesus' stories? Just who are we among all the people in the Bible who encounter Jesus? Are we the experts in the law, who know the law but just don't do it? Are we the priests and the levites who know what is necessary for eternal life, but who just walk by, eyes averted, on the other side of the road? Or is it possible we are someone else? Sometimes, it dawns on some of us that maybe it is we ourselves who are the leper, the one half dead, the one in need of healing. Maybe it's because we have AIDS, the leprosy of our day, and people pass by on the other side of the road because they fear catching what we have. Or maybe it's because we are sick of mind, or sick of heart, and people pass by on the other side for the same reason. Or maybe it's because we're just sick with more ordinary illnesses of life. Or maybe it's just that we are dying, and lonely, and people pass by on the other side because they fear death the way lepers are feared. Or maybe we're simply lost, lost in some fear of our own, lost in our anxiety or depression or sin, and we just don't know the way home. For whatever reason - maybe just because we somehow realize that we are the ones in need of healing, the ones in need of salvation - the words in the liturgy that we have heard for years begin to make personal sense: All glory be to thee, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for that thou, of they tender mercy, didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption.... Take, eat, this is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you, and for many. We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.... And then - then when, in our own uncleanness, in our own need, we dare to walk up to Jesus in our own lonely exile the way the leper dared to walk up to Jesus in his lonely exile, and when we presume to ask of Jesus what the leper asked, "Lord, if you will, you can make me clean" - then when we dare to ask of Jesus what the leper asked of Jesus, Jesus can say to us what he said to the leper, "I will! Be clean!" And then, when Jesus reaches out his hand to us - it may be Jesus in the person of some other human being in Galilee or Colorado Springs one day, or Jesus in the person of some foreigner on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho or on the road from Pueblo to Denver - whenever it is that we ask and Jesus reaches out and, with the grace of his touch, embraces us and brings us into fellowship with himself the way he embraced and restored the leper, then a story in the Bible becomes an experience for us. A story in the Bible becomes our story, and we can know for ourselves, and not from hearsay, why all the Law and the Prophets were fulfilled by that embrace in Galilee that day. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |