Thursday in the First Week of Ordinary Time, January 12, 2023

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.

“A leper came to him and kneeling down begged him.”  The way this reads, the leper presented himself very near to Jesus, as he “came to him”, but the Greek allows us to read this as “a leper came towards him”, which makes better sense, as a leper would not dare to approach too closely a non-leper.  The leper may then have seen the Lord from the wayside outside a town and then hurried and presented himself before him a little distance off.  On the other hand, since Jesus stretched out his hand to physically touch him, either he did come right up to the Lord, in contradiction to the Mosaic Law, or the Lord went right up to the man.  I would suggest the latter, as it allows us to see this story as a miniature picture of what our Lord did in our world, which seems to be what Mark intended.  First, there is a leper, a man once free and clean, but who contracts this dread disease and is put outside the community.  Unable to aid himself in his desperate situation, he places himself before the Lord.  He goes as near as he is able. But he cannot go very close.  He stands afar off.  The Lord might approach him, but he cannot go to the Lord.  But why the Lord go to him, a leper to whom he owes nothing?  Yet, moved with pity at the man at his predicament, the Lord of his own free will does go to him.  He crosses a guild only he can cross, though at a cost.  He then touches the man.  He could heal him without touching him, yet he touches him with his own hand, rendering himself unclean in the process.  He goes beyond what is necessary in order to assure the leper of his love for him.  Then the leper is healed.  Though the Lord orders him not to make this cure known to others, the leper does so.  The Lord, of course, knew that the leper would do this and yet cured him despite knowing his lack of obedience after the cure.  

Just so, man, afflicted with the sin of Adam and Eve as well as his own personal sins, cannot help himself, cannot cure himself.  His sins have forced him from the fellowship of God and the angels and left him to wander, friendless and defenseless, the wastes outside God’s city.  Still, crying out to God for mercy, his cry is heard, and out of pity the Son of God approaches the man, that is, he becomes man himself.  He does this both in order to heal the man and also to assure him of his love.  He did not need to do this.  The man had brought his own doom upon himself by willfully sinning.  If God indeed willed to heal him in his mercy, he could have done so from heaven, yet in some way still fulfilling the requirements of justice that the man himself could not do.  Yet God’s Son desired to show the man his love, wanted the man to experience his love, and so he joined himself to a human nature so that he could be seen, heard, and touched, and then came to the man, trembling in his illness, and touched him, as it were, absorbing it from him.  The Son incurred uncleanness by doing this and made himself an outsider to God’s City, but the Father forgave the uncleanness the Son took on himself in the instant that the Son died of it.  Now, the love and mercy of the Son was this: that he did all of this for man in spite of the fact that the man would promptly go out and ungratefully disobey the simple command that he gave him. 

Let us consider all that the Lord has suffered so that we might be free, and how much he loves us, so that we might remain free from sin simply out of gratitude.