February 11, 2018
Lev 13:1-2, 44-46; 1 Cor 10:31—11:1; Mark 1:40-45
Brookdale

Sometimes I read or hear a biblical passage and wonder, “Why is that in the Bible?”  Today’s first reading is like that.  Is this what God wants to reveal to us?  Well, I have no idea why the Bible devotes two chapters of Leviticus to leprosy, but historians are glad it does, because it tells them something about biblical times.

What our Bible translations call leprosy was not today’s leprosy, now called Hansen’s disease, which is caused by a bacterium and treatable with antibiotics.  The term translated as leprosy in the Bible referred to persistent skin rashes, so it would have included eczema, psoriasis, and various fungal infections, maybe even poison ivy and shingles, but not true leprosy.

Some skin rashes are contagious, so there may have been a utilitarian rationale for quarantining people with such diseases. But the priestly authors of Leviticus seem more concerned with appearance than contagion.  The sore on your head makes you not ill but unclean, and cleanliness is next to godliness.  The problem is not contagion; it’s stigma.  Maybe people are marked like this because they offended God, but in any case, they are unclean.  Lepers are cut off from the community, and everybody avoids them.  Who knows how they live?  Who cares?  This is the kind of passage that makes me wonder, “Why is this in the Bible?”

Now let’s fast forward to today’s Gospel story. Mark’s Gospel is action-packed.  In the first chapter, Jesus is baptized, undergoes temptation in the desert, declares his mission, calls his disciples, casts out demons, teaches in Capernaum and other towns, and heals Peter’s mother-in-law and other sick people.  At the end of the chapter, a leper comes up to him and asks to be made clean: “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”

One thing that strikes me about this passage is the way Jesus heals him.  “I am willing,” he says.  Now, he could heal the leper simply by saying, “Be made clean.”  But he doesn’t.  Instead, he reaches out with his hand and touches the leper, and then he says, “Be made clean.”  Touching dirty things makes us dirty, and we fear that touching unclean things makes us unclean.  Lepers were banished from the community so that they could not contaminate other people.  Jesus breaks through that taboo.  In effect, he is saying, “When I touch you, you do not make me unclean.  I make you clean again.”  He healed the leper’s isolation by crossing the barrier of uncleanness and becoming his brother.  Then he healed his skin.

Many of us have heard the story of Damien the leper.  Leprosy—Hansen’s disease—was a serious problem on Hawaii before antibiotics.  Lepers were banished to the island of Molokai, and the church sent priests there to tend to them.  But the priests kept their distance, because they didn’t want to catch the disease.  The lepers felt bitter that nobody would come near them.  When a priest was sent to the leper colony, a badly disfigured leper would run up and embrace him in order to expose his hypocrisy.  When a leper embraced Fr. Damien on his arrival, Damien hugged him back. Gradually the lepers realized that Fr. Damien truly cared about them and they weren’t abandoned any longer.  Fr. Damien spent the rest of his life on Molokai, providing medical and emotional support to the lepers and burying the dead.  After eleven years, he caught the disease, and eventually died of it in 1889, at age 49.

A few years ago, an Italian man named Vinicio Riva attended a public audience with Pope Francis.  Riva suffers from neurofibromatosis, a non-infectious genetic disease that leaves him entirely covered with disfiguring growths, swellings and itchy sores.  On the bus on his way to the audience, he headed toward a vacant seat, but the man in the next seat said, “Go away!  Don’t sit next to me!”  At the audience, somehow Riva ended up in one of the front rows.  Pope Francis went right up to him, kissed his disfigured face, and prayed with him.  Pictures of the pope kissing Riva’s face appeared in newspapers around the world.

Fr. Damien couldn’t heal leprosy, and the pope can’t heal neurofibromatosis, but they could have compassion with the isolation of the sufferers, as Jesus did, and share God’s love with them.

And so can we.  We can allow ourselves to be moved with compassion, as Jesus was.  He thought about how it would feel to be that man, and he touched him.  We can do that too.