6th Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2018 

Today’s story presents problems for translators. It seems that Mark himself, or the tradition he was drawing on, had somehow mixed together two separate stories – one the healing of a leper and the other an exorcism. Most translators try to blend them seamlessly into one.

As a nation Jews had a strong sense of the holiness of God. For them holiness meant specialness. That God was holy meant that God was superspecial, totally different, separated from worldly things. They concluded that they, as the People of God, also needed to be a holy people, different, separate from, above, their pagan neighbours. To mark their difference, they considered certain things and events commanded or forbidden. Over time these things became sort of taboo – highly charged emotionally – rendering people what they called pure or impure, or clean or unclean. Men had to be circumcised. Food had to be kosher. Bleeding was taboo, as were physical disfigurements or disabilities. But worse: sickness or physical disability were seen as God’s punishment for sin. So sick or disabled persons carried the label “sinner” and were regarded as “unclean”. In addition, as we heard in today’s First Reading, lepers, with their clearly visible disfigurement ,were totally ostracized and excluded from community: they had to “live apart: .. live outside the camp”. Once excluded from family, village or whatever, the ritually unclean persons were unable to work, to earn a living, to enjoy others’ company. They had to rely precariously on the charity of others.

The priestly families policed the system. Impurity infringements had to be compensated for by sacrificial offerings, which only the priests could perform and which, once done, allowed them to declare the person ritually clean, or pure, once again.

The translation we heard today approached the incident as the simple curing of leprosy. It began with the leper saying, “If you want to, you can cure me”. Consistently with that translation, the story continued, “Jesus felt sorry for him”. He touched the unclean man and said, “ ‘Of course I want to .. Be cured’ ”. But then come a number of anomalies. The mood seemed inexplicably to change: Jesus “immediately sent the man away”; he spoke to him “sternly”; and commanded him to “say nothing to anyone”.

In fact, the translation can be rendered more strongly. The man’s request to Jesus could have been, “If you want to, you can make me [or declare me] clean”. Instead of “feeling sorry” for the man, Jesus “felt anger”. Instead of “sending him away”, he “cast him out”. Rather than “sternly ordering” him, he “angrily snorted”. Even the command to show himself to the policing priests “as evidence of his recovery” may rather have been “to get up their noses”. All this sounds more like an exorcism of an evil social and religious system than the cure of a man’s affliction.

According to this translation, Jesus was exorcising/casting out an evil spirit from the religious system that, under the mistaken pretext of protecting the holiness of God, tragically used God to exclude innocent people from their local village community and from society as a whole. No wonder Jesus was angry, not at the leper, but at the whole cruelly destructive system that tortured people in the name of God; no wonder he snorted; no wonder he forbade the evil spirit to speak to anyone. Too many religious leaders exclude “sinners” from respectable society in the name of God.

A similar irrationally cruel dynamic of exclusion can be at work in secular society. Over the last seventeen years, as the result of the “crusade against evil”, and in the name of God, millions of people have had to flee their homelands and become refugees. Some have arrived on our shores; and, in response, we have coldly chosen, in order to keep our nation pure, to imprison them, psychologically torture them in the process. We have shown no regret, rather patted ourselves on the back for the cruel effectiveness of our measures. Who needs exorcism?