ARE YOU WILLING? Psalm 30 I will exalt you, LORD, for you rescued me. You refused to let my enemies triumph over me. 2 O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you restored my health. 3 You brought me up from the grave, [a] O LORD. You kept me from falling into the pit of death. 4 Sing to the LORD, all you godly ones! Praise his holy name. 5 For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime! Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning. 6 When I was prosperous, I said, Nothing can stop me now! 7 Your favor, O LORD, made me as secure as a mountain. Then you turned away from me, and I was shattered. 8 I cried out to you, O LORD. I begged the Lord for mercy, saying, 9 What will you gain if I die, if I sink into the grave? Can my dust praise you? Can it tell of your faithfulness? 10 Hear me, LORD, and have mercy on me. Help me, O LORD. 11 You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy, 12 that I might sing praises to you and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give you thanks forever! 2 Kings 5:1-14 1 The king of Aram had great admiration for Naaman, the commander of his army, because through him the LORD had given Aram great victories. But though Naaman was a mighty warrior, he suffered from leprosy. 2 At this time Aramean raiders had invaded the land of Israel, and among their captives was a young girl who had been given to Naaman s wife as a maid. 3 One day the girl said to her mistress, I wish my master would go to see the prophet in Samaria. He would heal him of his leprosy. 4 So Naaman told the king what the young girl from Israel had said. 5 Go and visit the prophet, the king of Aram told him. I will send a letter of introduction for you to take to the king of Israel. So Naaman started out, carrying as gifts 750 pounds of silver, 150 pounds of gold, and ten sets of clothing. 6 The letter to the king of Israel said: With this letter I present my servant Naaman. I want you to heal him of his leprosy.
7 When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes in dismay and said, This man sends me a leper to heal! Am I God, that I can give life and take it away? I can see that he s just trying to pick a fight with me. 8 But when Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes in dismay, he sent this message to him: Why are you so upset? Send Naaman to me, and he will learn that there is a true prophet here in Israel. 9 So Naaman went with his horses and chariots and waited at the door of Elisha s house. 10 But Elisha sent a messenger out to him with this message: Go and wash yourself seven times in the Jordan River. Then your skin will be restored, and you will be healed of your leprosy. 11 But Naaman became angry and stalked away. I thought he would certainly come out to meet me! he said. I expected him to wave his hand over the leprosy and call on the name of the LORD his God and heal me! 12 Aren t the rivers of Damascus, the Abana and the Pharpar, better than any of the rivers of Israel? Why shouldn t I wash in them and be healed? So Naaman turned and went away in a rage. 13 But his officers tried to reason with him and said, Sir, [c] if the prophet had told you to do something very difficult, wouldn t you have done it? So you should certainly obey him when he says simply, Go and wash and be cured! 14 So Naaman went down to the Jordan River and dipped himself seven times, as the man of God had instructed him. And his skin became as healthy as the skin of a young child s, and he was healed! Mark 1:40-45 A man with leprosy came and knelt in front of Jesus, begging to be healed. If you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean, he said. 41 Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out and touched him. I am willing, he said. Be healed! 42 Instantly the leprosy disappeared, and the man was healed. 43 Then Jesus sent him on his way with a stern warning: 44 Don t tell anyone about this. Instead, go to the priest and let him examine you. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy. This will be a public testimony that you have been cleansed. 45 But the man went and spread the word, proclaiming to everyone what had happened. As a result, large crowds soon surrounded Jesus, and he couldn t
publicly enter a town anywhere. He had to stay out in the secluded places, but people from everywhere kept coming to him. ------------------------------------------- Today is the sixth Sunday of Epiphany, the season in which we are following Jesus through the gospel texts hoping for a little light to shine into the darkness of our world. We thought we knew Jesus well. Some of us have been studying him for YEARS decades even. Surely there s not too much about him we don t already know! But Epiphany is the season that should rock our comfortable life and shake the very foundations of what we thought we always knew about Jesus. Remember last week we saw the human side of Jesus, healing Simon Peter s mother-in-law, caring for a woman, making a life whole again. During all of this miraculous work, all around him people were murmuring and questioning. Who is this man? How does he have such power? Well, if his healing didn t get people attention and shake up the world, then today s gospel story surely will. In today s scripture, Jesus gets political. In today s gospel, we can begin to see the truly radical nature of Jesus message. This Jesus was no softhearted mediator whose goal it was to bring people together, to make people feel good about themselves, to live in peace and harmony. No, we can see starting right here in this story of the healing of the leper that Jesus came out swinging, with his goal being to turn upside-down life as we know it and challenging accepted understanding.
So, don t think that Jesus was preaching just a religious message. Oh no, today s gospel illustrates very clearly that Jesus was political and challenging the social structure in which he lived. Why did his ways and his message make so many upset, because of the harsh and revealing light of his message. It s hard for us to understand the full impact of today s gospel lesson without a little bit of background. First of all, we need to understand that in Jesus days there were people who were considered holy and people who were not. Within society there was an unspoken hierarchical system in which everyone fit somewhere. There were those who were always holy priests, Levites, church leaders. Then there were those in society who were basically holy but from time to time slipped into un-holiness lapses that could be fixed through sacrifices and ritual cleansings. Then there were those who were always unclean because of the nature of their work or the circumstances of who they were. People such as women, tax collectors and shepherds. Finally, there were those who were always unclean. They were not allowed participation in the community at all. This group includes people with chronic illness, people who were married to people outside of the Jewish faith, or people with physical or mental disabilities. There were perfectly good reasons for this to have been put into place, when Israel was first set-aside as God s chosen nation. Purity laws were established to protect the community from disease. But by the time Jesus showed up, these laws had morphed into a system that was being used by some to gain power and exercise control over others. It was the belief in Jesus day that purity was directly related to physical wholeness. And conversely, physical lack of wholeness
was equated with impurity or un-holiness. There was no differentiation. Therefore, people who were handicapped, chronically ill, etc., were considered impure. And furthermore, there was no concept of illness randomly afflicting people. If you got sick it was because God was striking you, which meant that there was something about you that somehow offended God. Also in Jesus day unholy was unholy; when you became unholy, then, you became unclean. While rich people were not guaranteed holiness, of course, it was likely that you d have a higher chance of being UN-holy if you were from a lower class, forced to work in an unclean or less highly-regarded profession or if you had inadequate food, shelter or medical care, the end result being illness. In ancient Jewish society, being unclean meant not just that you could not participate in worship in the synagogue, it also meant that you were excluded from all social interactions because nobody wanted to chance becoming unholy, therefore being isolated from the community. It was a vicious cycle and one that affected every part of a person s life. In the 1860s, a young Belgian Catholic priest was assigned to serve as a missionary in Hawaii. Father Damian de Veuster served as a parish priest for eight years in a populated area until he heard about a leprosy colony located on another of the Hawaiian islands, Molokai. After visiting the colony, named Kalaupapa, he was horrified at the state of this remote settlement, where people who contracted leprosy were sent away from the rest of society, to die. The conditions in which they lived were appalling. They were outcasts from society and had no options or hope for their lives.
Father Damian felt called to serve the lepers of Molokai so he moved to the settlement and lived out the remainder of his life working to create community there. He offered comfort to those who were suffering. He helped them to die with dignity. Father Damian lived out his life in the settlement, eventually contracting the disease himself and dying. His legacy is one of bravery and courage, of reading about how Jesus went against societal norms, and deciding to do exactly what he did. In 1946 a cure for leprosy was found, but as the disease is often spread in remote areas with poor hygiene and inadequate drinking water, there are still cases in which people contract the disease and suffer from it. While diagnosis and treatment are increasingly easy for modern medicine, last year there were still over 400,000 new cases of leprosy diagnosed 400,000 people facing physical disfigurement, societal rejection, and death. After being cured of the disease, the last residents of Kalaupapa tried to leave, to reassimilate into regular society since they were no longer contagious. But, there was still a stigma and curiosity surrounding them. Although no longer leprous, they were not fully accepted back into society. And, if it was difficult to move back into society in the 1940s, can you imagine what it was like back in Jesus day? And the disease had such a vast, far-reaching affect in someone s life. If you have ever read Leviticus chapters 13 and 14 and you know of the detailed process by which society dealt with lepers. For example, if a person even a child was found to have leprosy, he was put out of the community immediately. The law said he was required to wear his hair disheveled and clothes of rags. He could not come within 50 paces of any clean person and when he came near enough to be heard the law says he had to
cover his mouth with his hand and cry out loudly, Unclean, Unclean! A person in Jesus day who had the disease of leprosy was a social outcast with no means of survival, alienated from family and forced outside the community, and worse than all of those things put together, a person with leprosy was totally and completely unholy, separated from religious community and God. So all of this background is enough to give us the tools to see our gospel lesson this morning in a much clearer light. Jesus was heading out to interact with the people when a leper came up to him and begged him to heal him., asking Are you willing? We can understand that his begging was for more than just physical health, but was also for restoration to family, acceptance in society, as well as acceptance again by God. Getting back to our gospel lesson for today, we see this leprous man violating all of these Levitical laws. He was supposed to stay 50 paces away and yell, unclean! whenever someone came close enough. We know that he broke these laws for in our text, Mark reports that Jesus reached out a hand to touch the man he dared to come within arm s length of Jesus. Now Jesus grew up a good Jewish boy, a learned teacher and rabbi. There was no possible way that he did not know this man was violating the law; and there was no way he did not know that having any interaction with this man at all even talking with him would make Jesus and his disciples and his followers... unclean... unholy. There s a phrase in Mark s gospel that is the main point in this text. It s found in verse 41. It reads, Moved with pity [compassion,] Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the
man. There are two things to take away from this sentence this Epiphany Sunday. First, Jesus was moved with compassion/pity. This word in the Greek is the subject of some controversy with biblical scholars. Some scholars don t translate the word as compassion or pity, but rather, anger. These scholars think that this word is closer to its true meaning. So, if Jesus was angry, who was he angry at? The leprous man? No! I think as we read on in the text we see Jesus clearly show us his anger wasn t with the man, because he says to him, I do choose. Be healed! Then Jesus reaches out and touches and heals the man. Jesus was not angry at the leper. I think this is where the political radical Jesus comes out. Jesus was angry, at society and the structures that had been set up against such children of God. See, the way things stood in the society in which he lived, there was a certain standard of holiness and if you were going to err, to make a mistake in your actions, it was always better to err on the side of holiness. If you were not sure if eating a certain thing was okay? Don t eat it! If there were questions about doing an activity on the Sabbath? Don't do it! Not sure if talking to someone would be questioned? Then by all means, don t speak to them, just to be on the safe side. Jesus knew the law of holiness, but his message flew in the face of that kind of holiness. For in Jesus' message we begin to see that if we have to err, we willingly err on the side of compassion and love. It was a radical new standard. Jesus was now saying that compassion and mercy were now higher than the Levitical law. The structures of society had used the law of God to create a system that excluded people, when God s intent all along was INCLUSION.
It was then that the second part of this radical phrase hits home. Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the man. In so doing he did not just express his anger at injustice, he took it one step further, risked the disapproval of his community and the possibility that they might very well consider him, not just radical but also unclean, unholy. Jesus identified a circle that surrounded him, a circle of holiness and acceptance, of societal approval and religious standing, and he reached right outside that circle to pull someone from the outside in. What happened when Jesus made that bold move? Well, a lot more happened than just a few people sucking in their breaths in disbelief. Jesus action started a ball rolling that has yet to stop, a ball that pushes us from our positions of comfort and favor with God, into a circle much, much bigger than the one we d like to draw around ourselves. Jesus anger and Jesus reaching out to touch someone who was left out, changed everything about who we know God to be. It s easy, for us to play down this passage of scripture, to gloss over it. Back then, after all, people didn t understand about illness. They didn t have antibiotics or penicillin. They didn t know that if you caught a disease it had nothing to do with your personal level of holiness. We know all of that. Or do we? Who are the people outside OUR circles? Think about it. There are many in our society whom we dismiss and wish to exclude. But Jesus says no! The person who you might consider to be the most unholy, unclean outsider, that is the one Jesus reaches out and welcomes into the circle. Jesus reaches out of the circles we draw and reminds us this Epiphany season that the law of compassion is the highest law of
all, that grace and love and inclusion are the real evidence of a true relationship with God. This part of Jesus message is the part that made everyone mad. By inviting outsiders in, Jesus was turning societal structures on their heads, changing everything, introducing a way that was different trying something new. These things are hard... and for some even offensive. This holy anger and radical compassion, remember, led Jesus straight to the cross. The light of Epiphany is showing us that the message of Jesus is a hard message unpopular. As the light of Epiphany clarifies our vision, you and I are going to have a choice: will we draw the circle tighter... or will we reach outside the circles to bring others in? ARE YOU WILLING? PRAYER