Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said, ‘If you wish, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him: ‘I will do it. Be made clean.’ The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean.” – Mark 1:40-43
Leprosy was the pandemic of the world Jesus inhabited.
It was so feared by the Jewish people at the time of the writing of Mark’s Gospel that it caused those contracting this dreaded disease to be forced to live outside the camps and the cities, to experience excruciating isolation, and to be treated as the ultimate outsiders.
Lepers became the symbols of those people whose deepest realization was:
No one cares.
And then a particular leper does the unthinkable. He calls out and begs Jesus to heal him. And Jesus, “moved with pity,” doesn’t just speak to the leper, doesn’t just tell him he would pray for him.
Jesus does the equally unthinkable. He “touched him.”
Touching lepers was not allowed. But Jesus’ sense of extreme compassion for this totally isolated human being welcomes him back into the circle of being human. His cleansing act to this outcast reveals the true nature of God – a God who wants to heal, to make whole, to reinvent, to cleanse. To even go so far as to touch!
St. Francis of Assisi, centuries later, has a similar experience. He, like the Jewish people in today’s gospel story, had a fear and an abhorrence of lepers.
One day, like Jesus, Francis met a man afflicted with leprosy while riding his horse near Assisi. As he later tells the story, the sight of the leper filled him with horror and disgust. Yet, he made himself get off his horse, go up to the leper, and not only touch him, but kiss him!
Francis then boldly went even further. The leper had put out his hand hoping to receive something. Out of utter compassion, Francis gave money to the impoverished leper.
Francis later wrote that, after he mounted his horse, he looked around and could not find the leper anywhere. Slowly, it dawned on him. Jesus was the leper! Jesus was the one whom he had just kissed!
Francis had experienced what Matthew’s Gospel reveals in the last judgment scene: “When you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.”
In his Testament, Francis wrote this: “When I was in sin, the sight of lepers nauseated me beyond measure. But then God himself led me into their company, and I had pity on them. When I became acquainted with them, what had previously nauseated me became the source of spiritual and physical consolation for me.”
This embrace of a leper radically altered Francis’ life. He developed an entire ministry to lepers that would expand significantly. In fact, this became a ministry of feeding and caring for them to the point of not only touching, but one of kissing their wounds!
The lesson for each of us is an obvious one. We too are called to reach out to the undesirables of our time, to all of those who are viewed as untouchable and unwanted, to all of those who are considered to be beneath us and undeserving: the mentally ill, the imprisoned, the addicted, the homeless, the impoverished, the forgotten.
During this raging pandemic we are experiencing, perhaps it is helpful for us to meditate on the reality that there is no wound or disease too great for Jesus to heal. None.
St. Francis, pray for us!
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
NOTE:
A Prayer of St. Francis: (my favorite of all written prayers!)
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred … Let me sow Love.
Where there is injury … pardon.
Where there is doubt … faith.
Where there is despair … hope.
Where there is darkness … light.
Where there is sadness … joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled … as to console,
To be understood … as to understand.
To be loved … as to love.
For
It is in giving … that we receive.
It is in pardoning … that we are pardoned.
It is in dying … that we are born to eternal life.”
SISTER RACHEL’S QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“If only our eyes saw souls instead of bodies. How different our ideals of beauty would be.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
