6th Sunday in OT 2021
Leviticus 13:1-2; 45-46; 1Cor 10: 31-11:1; Mark 1: 40-45
Is it just me, or does the beginning of that Second Reading remind anyone else of the old Status Quo hit “Whatever you want”? “Whatever you eat, whatever you drink, whatever you do...” Whether it evokes musical nostalgia or not, the whole of that reading effectively encourages us to live the two great Commandments of love of God and love of neighbour.
First, St. Paul calls us to do everything for the glory of God. Straightaway, then, we have a challenge: am I conscious of the presence of God always in my life, and do I try to do His will in everything? Paul then continues his theme from last week’s reading, of seeking to be of service to all—for their advantage indeed, but also to draw them closer to Christ, to cause them to say “These Catholics/Christians are good eggs: they have something going for them.”
Moving from there to the First Reading and Gospel, I find nostalgia breaking out again. In the late fifties, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Black Arrow” appeared as a serial on children’s television, and I can still recall the sheer terror evoked by one scene in which a leper, hooded and cloaked, and ringing a bell to warn people away, turns and pursues the young hero and heroine. It turns out that he is not a leper at all, but the rather sinister Sir Daniel Brackley, but that episode captured the horror which lepers provoked, suffering from a highly contagious disease for which there was no cure.
Nor was it only the physical ravages of the disease which aroused such fear. There was also the knowledge that, once infected, you were literally an outcast, forced to live apart from society and, in the case of Jews, banned from playing any part in worship, and in any of the religious activities which formed the basis of community life. Hence, lepers were shunned, and for their part were desperate to find healing if Jesus could offer it.
This gives rise to an incidental question that you might wish to ponder. Is there anyone, or any group of people, whom I shun, from whom I shy away? You are probably familiar with some of the stories of St. Francis of Assisi and his encounters with lepers whom, as a particularly fastidious young man, he used to avoid, literally like the plague. One of the major stages in his conversion occurred when he saw a leper coming towards him. Overcoming by a huge effort his initial impulse to head off in the opposite direction, Francis leapt down from his horse, embraced the leper, and changed clothes with him.
We are probably not called to such dramatic gestures, but we are called to recognise the human being behind anything which we may find offputting, and to embrace that human being metaphorically, if not literally, though, in this context, I must recall another story of a literal embrace.
In Scorton, as some of you will be aware, there is no Catholic primary school, so I was always concerned to maintain an involvement with the Church of England school, and I would sometimes be invited to assembly. On one such occasion, the Headteacher devoted the whole assembly to an incident, considered newsworthy at the time, when Pope Francis embraced a man with a dreadfully disfigured face, the Head’s point being that this was an outstanding example of Christianity in action, and a lesson which the children should ponder—so we are actually brought back to St. Paul.
With all these considerations in mind, it is no surprise that the leper of today’s Gospel was so anxious to be cured by Our Lord. Along with that anxiety, he also had deep faith: “If you want to, you can cure me.” There may be a slight point of danger for us there. Some people will claim that, if we have faith, God will cure us of anything—therefore, if we are not cured, we don’t have enough faith. I can’t help feeling that this attitude confuses faith with magic: it also overlooks the leper’s opening words “If you want to”. It may not be God’s will that a particular prayer should be answered in a particular way at a particular time: God is not a slot-machine.
There is something else worth pondering, namely the difference between being cured and being healed. Diseases are cured: people are healed. Someone may be cured of a particular disease, but remain unhealed: they may be angry, selfish, unpleasant people, on whom the cure’s effect is purely physical. On the other hand, a person’s disease may not be cured, but s/he may still be healed—of inner hurts, of resentment, of anger, of dis-ease rather than disease. So there we have a final question: do I need to be cured, or do I need to be healed?
