6th Sunday Year B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2024 

God knows how many times I have read this Gospel, thought about it, prayed about it. But this week, once more, I needed to think about it again with the view to addressing you all today, and inviting you to think about it again..

I tried to imagine how it would have felt in that Jewish culture at that time for that man to have contacted leprosy. Not only was he immediately branded as ritually unclean. He was seen as dangerous. He was feared. He was meticulously avoided. He was abruptly excluded from continuing to live with his family or to be in contact with, or even to stand near, anyone. What would it have done to his own sense of himself? He would have believed it. He probably would himself, in earlier days, have felt that way about other lepers. In addition, he would probably have thought that even God himself had condemned him for some reason [or possibly even, for no reason].

The utter isolation! The total loss of hope! It did not arise from the experience of the disease itself, bad and all as that might have been. It was the merciless exclusion by others — the utter loneliness; and perhaps worst of all, the inner suffering, his rejection of himself.

I wonder what it was about Jesus that brought the leper to have hope once more. Perhaps a variation on the observation by so many that Jesus spoke with an undefined “authority”. Might that elusive [and attractive] effect that he had on many have also had something to do with an undefined sense of compassion, or solidarity even with the otherwise excluded.

Jesus was concerned with persons. He made a point of connecting with those whom the general culture avoided, excluded and identified as “sinners” — not just lepers on occasion, but the universally unpopular and shunned tax collectors, and apparently even prostitutes. Jesus, we are told, shared meals with such “sinners”, just as he shared them occasionally with Pharisees. It was not that he approved their behaviour — but because he saw in everyone the radical image of God in which we have all been created. It was to save us from ourselves and from each other that God, who loves everyone infinitely, sent Jesus among us. God loves us all; God forgives us all. Jesus is the one human to have understood this, and to have done likewise. Sometimes, God’s love for everyone truly puzzles us.

The leper hoped that Jesus would love him. He was not disappointed. Jesus not only healed him. Jesus did so with that profound love that Jesus has for everyone. Even though this man was a leper, Jesus went so far as actually, and unnecessarily, and at great subsequent inconvenience to himself, to touch him. Mark drew the attention of his readers to the fact that, as we heard today: “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside where nobody lived.”

He would do the same for me, for you. In fact, moved by his love for us all [no exceptions], he let himself be crucified.

That is what we come to remember every time we take part in the Mass.