Thursday in the First Week of Ordinary Time, January 13, 2021

Thanks everyone for your prayers!  While I am still struggling a bit in terms of weakness, I feel well enough to resume offering reflections on the Scriptures.  Months ago I had planned to take next week off to visit my sister.  I’m not sure between my health and the threat of blizzards whether I will still be able to do this, but at any rate I will take the week off, so no Bible Study next week.  I really do want to start Bible Study the week after that, though.  I am always glad to hear suggestions for it, so please feel free to offer any.  You can reach me through the blog comments and also through my email, which is: mfcaime@cs.com.  

Mark 1:40-45

A leper came to him and kneeling down begged him and said, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched the leper, and said to him, “I do will it. Be made clean.” The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean. Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once. Then he said to him, “See that you tell no one anything, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed; that will be proof for them.” The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere.

“If you wish, you can make me clean.”  We ought to imagine for ourselves the horror inspired by the appearance of the leper, here.  Not only by his dreadful physical aspect, his reek, the creak of his voice, his ragged attire, but by the panic others would have felt in the possibility of their becoming infected by him.  We might think of how people were thrown out of their homes by their own family members in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  I knew of men who were thrown out of hospitals onto the street after lying untouched and uncared for in their beds for weeks.  And so this leper comes before the Lord, having heard of the cures he was worked for so many others.  The others around the Lord would have drawn back or walked away.  Jesus alone would have stood before him, the Creator before his needy creature.  The creature says an interesting thing to his Creator: “If you wish, you can make me clean.”  A better translation is: “If you will it, you are able to make me clean.”  First, this is more than Jesus having a preference for doing something.  It is a matter of his will.  Second, the leper acknowledges that Jesus has the power to do what he wills to do.  The leper, then, is not merely making a request, however earnest, but an act of faith.  It is a quite extraordinary act on the leper’s part.  He does this, of course, not absolutely on his own but prompted by the Holy Spirit.  

“Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched the leper, and said to him, ‘I do will it. Be made clean.’ ”  Jesus is “moved with pity”.  At what?  At the leper’s appearance?  His knowledge of what he had suffered?  Or at something deeper?  For, before the Lord kneels the human race, horribly disfigured by sin and unable to do anything about it, doomed to a lonely, miserable death.  The repentance itself is piteous, for though the punishment is fearful, the sin which resulted in it is far worse.  And as the Lord looks into the leper’s eyes back through human history to the first sin, he also looks ahead to that terrible, dark night when he will pray alone in a garden, awaiting his own Death.  Having taken on the sins of the world, he will look into the Father’s face and speak as the leper — humanity — has just spoken to him: “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will but as you will” (Matthew 26, 39).  The Lord, who will not save himself, saves the leper and makes him clean “immediately”, just as the penitent’s sins, whatever they may be, are forgiven immediately by the absolution in the confessional.

“Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once.”  Jesus commanded the man whom he had healed to offer the proper thanksgivings to God in the Temple to fulfill his religious obligation and also to show himself as a sign to the Temple authorities.  It should seem odd that the Lord feels he must tell him something that he should know to do, and rejoice to have the opportunity to do, but “the man went away and began to publicize the whole matter”.  Jesus, knowing that the man would disobey him, he healed him anyway.  It is enough for us to pity our God.