CHOOSING Mark 1:40-45 Lepers, people suffering from the disease of leprosy, crop up in the Bible on several occasions but most notably in stories about Jesus in the New Testament. Leprosy, sometimes referred to as the disease of the Bible, in modern medicine known as Hansen s Disease, is a horrific condition that disfigures the person suffering from it and can lead in some cases to death. Today, in most instances it is treatable. In the world of the New Testament, not only was leprosy an awful physical condition but it also carried the stigma of some spiritual uncleanness that was thought to be the underlying cause of the physical disease. Why would God permit so terrible an affliction if the person afflicted were not somehow a bad person, spiritually corrupt in some way? On top of this, the sufferer had open sores, and ancient taboos about blood and other bodily fluids made the sufferer a spiritual threat and a pariah, the carrier of a spiritual disease as contagious as the physical disease. Jesus, of course, broke the taboo, reached out and touched and, we are told, healed lepers. As I have said to you before on numerous occasions, I think we can and should dispense with the part of the leper stories that suggest a miraculous cure by Jesus. The ancient world did not understand disease as we do and had no science as we understand it, and miraculous cures were a dime-a-dozen, since people didn t know enough about causes and cures to understand what was happening when someone got sick or got better. The portrayal of Jesus as a miracle worker always begs the question of why he would not have healed all of the lepers if he could heal some of the lepers or why, if this is the way
God works in the world, human misery is permitted at all? Generally speaking, miracle stories in the Bible raise more questions than they answer, and taken literally are a problem for faith. Better we should find their significance in providing illustrations of teachings that Jesus offers to heal us spiritually and give us our direction in life than as tales of the workings of certain magic powers of Jesus. As I suggested a couple of weeks ago, the leper stories are intended to teach us that no one is beyond the love of God. In the particular story that is our Gospel today, Jesus is moved by pity to reach out and touch the leper and make him clean. Our faith teaches us that Jesus is God s Word in the flesh. When Jesus heals the leper, it is God healing the leper, but the point of the story is not a miraculous cure but the message that no one is excluded from the love of God. Leprosy is not here a physical disease so much as it is the social condition of those who are not recognized, not welcomed, who are ostracized, even despised by society. In our day, we have seen this condition played out in terms of race black people excluded from the benefits of society dominated by whites and treated as unclean. We have seen it played out in terms of gender so that women are considered unfit for full participation in the world dominated by men. We have seen it played out in terms of sexual orientation so that gay and lesbian people are declared perverts by church and society, the very embodiment of sin, cast out, kept out, or perhaps it would be better to say, kept in the closet. We have seen it and see it played out on playgrounds everywhere when a child or children are different in one way or another and are mocked or abused or denigrated for their differences by the children who conform. I could go on but you see the point: the leprosy that Jesus heals is the disease of exclusion by those who have the power of those who don t. Jesus has pity on all such
people in reaching out to the lepers in the stories and thereby shows us the action we must take if society is to be healed of its divisions into have s and have-not s, and indeed if we are to be healed spiritually of our estrangement from one another. Is it not curious that the first thing Jesus does after the healing in Mark s story is tell the one-time leper, See that you say nothing to anyone This is a common occurrence in Mark s Gospel. Jesus will instruct those for whom he has performed miracles to keep the story under wraps and not tell anybody. Strange. But as we see, regardless of what Jesus has told the leper-no-more, the man is understandably excited and runs out immediately to spread the word of what Jesus has done to anyone who will listen to him. The result of his blabbing is what we would expect. We read in Mark, Jesus could no longer go into town openly but stayed out in the country In other words, Jesus was made into a celebrity; he became a phenom. The Epiphany season is that time in the Church Year when in the church we read Gospel stories about the revealing of who Jesus is, how people came to notice him and know him and even to follow him. Right after Christmas we read about the star of Bethlehem leading the wise ones to Jesus. Then there are stories of Jesus baptism when the Holy Spirit declares him the beloved of God as he comes up out of the water. And there are stories of turning water into wine at a wedding and calling disciples who at a word from Jesus are on their feet to give up their livelihood and follow him wherever he will lead them. All these stories, including the Gospel lesson for today, are selected to reveal the identity and authority of Jesus to his followers, which would include us. But then there is this curiosity of Jesus telling the cured leper to keep the healing to himself, a secret.
All sorts of theories have been advanced to explain this curiosity, but I wonder if the reason for Jesus secrecy in Mark s Gospel might be to teach us something about the nature of Christian faith: viz., that it is not based on miraculous events and super powers of Jesus, but that the Christian faith is the life of compassion, a life open to the lives of others and willing to respond to others with love. The power of Jesus is love, nothing more, nothing less. The power of Jesus is shown in his reaching out to touch the untouchable and thereby to dissolve those barriers that separate, and thereby to make possible our community with one another. The Christian faith is shown in choosing to extend ourselves in love to our neighbors. This is how we commune with one another and with God. In a famous passage from Dostoevsky s great novel The Brothers Karamazov, Jesus is interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor, the priest charged with carrying out the search for enemies of the Christian faith during the Spanish Inquisition when the Roman Catholic Church burned as heretics those who did not believe what the Church wanted them to believe. Jesus is the Inquisitor s prisoner, and the Inquisitor says to Jesus: Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracles he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracles. I trust you see the point. The Inquisitor represents the religion that enslaves the spirit with tales of miracles and wonders, which is all that we, weak and foolish creatures, can understand. The Inquisitor accuses Jesus of setting us free to respond to God s love
with love and making this freedom the purpose and meaning of our faith. But according to the Inquisitor, this freedom is too much for us. We need the Church to tell us what to believe and how to behave, and for this the Church gives us miracles and mysteries and its authority in exchange for our freedom. I have joked at times that the answer to our problem attracting members to Emanuel could be solved if we could get the picture of Jesus above the altar to begin to weep or to bleed or maybe even just to wink at us once in awhile. Word would get out that there was a miracle in process at the Lutheran church on the corner of New and Kirkpatrick, at which point we wouldn t be able to control the crowds and, if we played our cards right, we d be rolling in dough. None of this, of course, would have anything to do with the Christian faith, which is a matter of living as Christ to our neighbors, nor would it have anything to do with what it means to be the church, which is to be a community of people who nurture and encourage one another to live as Christ to their neighbors. And then there would be the disappointment when the tears dried up or the blood stopped flowing or there were no more winks. The people who came to see a miracle would go away, leaving us to go back to the life of faith active in love which is the real work of the Church and the teaching of Jesus and what it means to be the people of God.. Amen. The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany Emanuel Lutheran Church