6th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Peter

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
If I were to write a book about Mark rather than preach a homily I would entitle it, “God in Human Flesh: the Good News of Jesus Christ.” This title is purposely provocative. Most commentators would disagree that Mark presents Jesus as God. Indeed, it is in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus responds most clearly to the rich young man, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Most commentators assume that Jesus is saying that He is not God. But He doesn’t say that at all. Rather, He is challenging the rich young man to put two and two together. As we know, the young man lacks the faith to go all the way, shown most plainly by his unwillingness to give up his wealth to the poor. This is because he is unable to recognize that God has come to earth, and as a result of this everything has changed. Mark throws each of us this same challenge: repent and believe in the Good News: God has come in human flesh. Will we recognize this and therefore change our lives? Or will we stick to safe formulas such as one I found yesterday in an otherwise excellent book on Mark: “Jesus is neither God nor a divine being, but a human.”[i] This of course is not the Church’s teaching, and so this kind of thinking perpetuates the suspicion that the Church and Scripture say different things.

I say that everything has changed, but this is not exactly true. Indeed, one of the reasons that we recognize that Jesus is God is that He acts like God has always acted. More on that in a moment; for now, let us dwell a bit more on the fact that people don’t recognize God when He comes. This happens because He also acts in ways that they don’t expect of God, in ways that seem to compromise God’s holiness and purity.

We live in an antiseptic culture. Touching one another has become risky. When the monks prepare breakfast for our guests each morning, we are required to wear latex gloves. So not only touching one another is risky, but touching what other people touch is risky. For this reason, many of us are reluctant to share the Cup at Mass. Throughout the Old Testament, there is a similar concern for God’s holiness. God teaches in the Torah that His Chosen People must distinguish between what is holy and profane, what is clean and unclean. Things that are unclean are not so, however, because they contain germs. Rather, because God has come to dwell on earth within the temple, things that are unworthy of His presence are endangered. Contact between God’s presence and uncleanness causes the improperly cleansed person to be consumed in God’s wrath. In fact, in two Old Testament stories, leprosy is precisely the result of presumption, once by Miriam claiming to be a prophetess on the same level as Moses, and once by King Uzziah presuming to take the priests’ role in burning incense.

When God’s wrath breaks out against impurity, the imagery used is often that of an angry horse. Animals have very sensitive noses, and if you hold something near them that stinks, they snort, shake their heads and stamp their feet. They may even charge at the offending object and destroy it. This is an image of God common in the Old Testament. The very word for anger in Hebrew is related to the word for ‘nose’. In a corresponding way, one may appease God’s anger by burning incense or holocausts. These raise a pleasing odor and cover over the stink of impurity.

This, of course, is hardly a complete or sufficient image. God also purifies His People, forgives sin, heals the sick and teaches wisdom.

Still, it is hard to prepare oneself for the shock of Jesus, even if He were a mere prophet and not God, reaching out and laying hands on a leper. The touch of a leper defiles and nullifies one’s privilege of appearing in God’s presence.

Leprosy is displeasing to God, however, not simply because it is unworthy of His holiness, but precisely because is an affront to human dignity. God loves His People and is grieved to be separated from any of us. This separation is the consequence of our sin, symbolized by the bodily impurity of leprosy. God is so eager to rescue us and restore friendship with us that He enters the world as a man. He demonstrates His love not writing a prescription for the leper, but by the loving gesture of a touch. How many years had it been since this man with leprosy was touched? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Can you imagine being without human touch for that long and what it would mean to have Jesus touch you? To have God touch you?

It is noteworthy that Jesus, by working this cure, can Himself no longer enter into the towns but must travel in desert places. By touching this leper, He has taken upon Himself the consequences of leprosy which we heard about in the first reading. He and the leper have changed places: the leper can now return to the city and Jesus cannot. Thus has He taken upon us our sins and alienation, to bring them to the cross where they will be destroyed.

Why then does Jesus suddenly speak sternly to the man? The language of the cure in today’s Gospel echoes in many ways the exorcisms that we have seen so far. Jesus does not merely heal the leprosy; He drives it out. In fact, the language goes a bit further. Jesus is not merely warning the man; the Greek term used here is embrimēsamenos, which normally means ‘to snort with rage’: that is, like a horse in the presence of a foul smell. John the Evangelist uses the same term when Jesus arrives at the tomb of Lazarus to confront the evil stench of death. This depiction is part of Mark’s signal that this is no mere man. This is our God, locked in the primeval battle with the foulness of darkness and death. Our God is a jealous God and countenances no rivals. God is angry battling leprosy and evil. The miracle here is not simply the trick of wiping away leprosy, it is the freeing of man from sin, sickness and death, restoring him not simply to a fulfilling life, but to a loving friendship with God, for Whom we were made. God’s anger blazes against whatever would come between Him and His beloved creation.

I began by proposing that Mark writes so as to provoke the hearer to repentance. We are in no way different from those characters in the story we hear today. Indeed, Jesus Christ, our God, is coming into our midst. He will come forth from heaven and touch of lovingly as we stretch out our hands and tongues to receive him. If this is so, we must leave off and renounce whatever impurity that we cling to so that as Jesus consumes it, we are not lost along with it. We must separate ourselves from our sin and give it to Jesus to be destroyed, whatever that sin is: anger, gluttony, envy, gossip, flattery, self-will, vainglory.

But more than that: we must recognize that God is coming to touch not only me, but my brother and my sister here with me today. If this is so, we cannot imagine these persons unworthy of God’s love. If that is so, we must also leave off considering others outside the pale of God’s redemption. We must not be scandalized that Jesus touches a leper and we must not be scandalized that God loves the sinner, among whom I number myself. Let us rededicate ourselves to purifying our hearts to God and toward others and so make a fitting dwelling place for Him Who comes to take up His dwelling there, our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be power and glory forever. Amen.

[i] Rhoads, David, Joanna Dewey, Donald Michie. Mark as Story: An Introduction to the narrative of a Gospel, Second Edition, Fortress 1999, 104.