Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B
Readings: Leviticus 13:1-2,45-46; 1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45
If you want to
The person suffering with leprosy, in today’s Gospel, puts the ball in Jesus’ court and says, “If you want to, you can cure me.” It must have taken an enormous leap of faith for this person to, first, come into the community, from which he is banished due to his sickness (today’s first reading from the book of Leviticus (13:1ff) talks about how the person with leprosy should be treated). Second, he must make sure that Jesus can heal him, not just heal him from his physical ailment, but also from the emotional and physical abuse he has suffered due to the illness.
Jesus, on the other hand, ‘feels sorry’ for him, the other way of saying it would be, he feels compassion for him and wants him cured. Wants him to become whole again and wants him to be accepted back into the community, so he says, “Of course I want to! Be cured.” And he does this by touching the person. Strong and clear words of healing and a gentle gesture of assurance; ‘I want you to be cured, I want you to be accepted back, I want you to become whole again and I want you to be brought back into your family and loved ones.’
The healing of the person with leprosy has a lot of symbolism for us in our modern day living. We all know that the leprosy is curable with the modern medicine and luckily, not many leprosy patients are ostracised in today’s society. Leprosy is not something to be afraid of and no person need to be banished from the community. On the other hand, do we have people banished from our society because they are different from us? Have we banished someone because they have different approach to life than we have? Have we banished people from fully participating in the Church’s life because they are ‘living in sin’? Aren’t we still ostracising people because of their colour, sex, sexual orientation, beliefs, ethnicity, sickness and so on? It is not just the physical disease that needs to be cured but also the emotional, psychological and spiritual ailments need to be addressed, and that is what Jesus does today to the person with leprosy.
How can we be also healers in our society? How can we stop being ‘banishers’ and become ‘uniters’? How can we reach out and touch people in their disabilities and try to make them whole again? It is work in progress, dear friends, and the underlying principle is to feel ‘compassion’ as Jesus felt towards the person with leprosy.
Let us, then, pledge today to walk in the path of Jesus. Let us look around us and see if we, as a community, are ostracising anyone. Let us reach out to them and gently touch them in their situation. Let us raise them up and work towards bringing them back into the community. Let us work towards making them whole again and in the process, we ourselves, become whole in the presence of God. Amen.