The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin's Church
February 15, 2009
Epiphany VI B
"Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, and touched him."
Jesus keeps touching the wrong people. He keeps touching icky people, unclean people - people no devout, observant Jewish man should ever allow himself to touch. Remember - this is still the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark and we are still being introduced to who Jesus is and to the work he has been given to do.
And the first thing Jesus does is touch the wrong people. In last week's Gospel story, Jesus healed Peter's wife - they told him she was sick with a fever and he took her by the hand and lifted her up. Now it wasn't the fever that made her icky, it was because she was a woman and not related to Jesus. The law prohibited men from touching women who were not members of their family.
That was bad enough - and someone in that first gathering of Christians listening to Mark's story unfold might have shifted a little uncomfortably. That person had been told this would be story about the mighty acts of God - which should not include stories about men touching women. But now - now - a leper enters the scene and things are about to get even ickier.
In both the Old and New Testaments, the word "leprosy" is not referring to what we now call Hansen's disease. It seems to include an array of skin abnormalities; the description in the book of Leviticus sounds an awful lot like psoraisis. Skin that was ulcerated, irritated, oozing, peeling, discolored - anyone who saw anything like that on his own body had to go to the priest and if the priest found indeed that the skin was disfigured, there was only one choice to be made. Leviticus instructs: "The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, "Unclean, unclean." he shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp."
Unclean and alone. What a miserable way to live. It’s awfully important to notice that the leper must really believe that he has nothing to lose. He is not obeying the Law – he’s not crying out “Unclean – unclean…” and he’s not staying away from people. He comes right up to Jesus and kneels before him and says “You can make me well. If you choose to do it (he knows that he’s asking Jesus to break the Law) – you can make me well.”
Now that poor person hearing Mark’s Gospel for the first time is really getting uncomfortable. Just having that leper come so close to Jesus is bad enough – an accidental touch would make Jesus unclean himself, unfit to pray in the synagogue, unfit for ritual life until he’d undergone the appropriate cleansing rites. But it gets much worse – Jesus not only doesn’t send the man away, or remind the leper what God requires in the Law – no, Jesus stretches out his hand and touches him. Touches him!
I imagine that Mr. Hearing-this-for-the-first-time is too shocked to pay much attention to what happens next. Jesus has just ignored the most basic rule of a culture that defines itself with rigid boundaries – never cross that line. Once you cross that line, you no longer know who you are, and you are no longer part of your community. You put yourself in the same position as the leper – you become unclean and alone.
But Jesus just doesn’t seem to be on the same page. He heals the leper and he tells the man to go and perform what the law requires. He sends him to see the priest, to do the rituals that will restore the former non-pariah to life in the community. Jesus gives back to the man what he had lost – he not only gives him his health, Jesus gives him back his identity. And Jesus doesn’t appear to be the least bit worried about whether or not he’s been contaminated by their contact. Icky isn’t a problem for him.
The healing miracles of Jesus have been bothering people at least since the Enlightenment, and those miracles have become more and more bothersome the more and more we know about biology. How can we take these stories of miraculous healings seriously when we know so much more than our credulous ancestors did?
Well – there are a couple of things to say about that. First of all, instantaneous healings weren’t a normal occurrence in the ancient world either. Leviticus instructs a leprous person to show himself to the priest every seven days, to check on the progress or the remission of the disease. No one would expect a leper to be healed instantly. So – the fact that the disease disappears the moment Jesus touches the man would be just as surprising to a first century Jew as it is to us.
And secondly – when we look at the miracles, we tend to look at the wrong thing. A parishioner in Blacksburg was a New Testament professor, and her scholarly specialty was the Gospel of Mark. She used to say that we focus on the miracles of Jesus, but that an ancient audience would focus instead on the Jesus of the miracles. In other words – what does the healing of this leper reveal to us about Jesus? What does it tell us about who he is? What does it tell us about what he has come to do?
So – right here at the beginning of the Gospel – Jesus is doing surprising and shocking things. He is crossing boundaries – acting indeed as if those boundaries don’t even exist. And he is crossing those boundaries for a reason.
If we don’t dismiss the healing miracles as ignorant nonsense, then I think most of us like to see the healing stories as signs of Jesus’ love and compassion. He feels sorry for people and he wants to make them well.
That’s not a wrong answer – but it’s incomplete. In this morning’s passage, our translation says that Jesus is “moved with pity” by the leper. But there are other manuscript copies that say that Jesus was “moved with anger”. Now scholars debate which one of those is right, but I don’t think Jesus reaches out and touches the leper just because he feels sorry for him. I think he’s angry, too – angry at a system that separates people from their community and angry at interpretations of the Law that bind heavy burdens on faithful people.
But even more important than what emotion Jesus is feeling at this moment is what this miracle represents as Mark’s Gospel gets going. “The time is fulfilled,” Jesus says as his ministry begins, “The Kingdom of God has come near.”
These healing miracles are signs of the inbreaking of the Kingdom. And as the Kingdom of God comes near, things change. A man can touch a leper and not be contaminated – instead, healing power flows from him and makes the leper clean. That same man has been given authority over unclean spirits, authority to heal on the Sabbath, even authority over the wind and the waves. And this man will speak, out of this authority, words that challenge the authority of others. He will threaten the authority of both religious and political leaders – he will signal to them that the coming of the Kingdom of God means the end of their earthly power.
And that’s what gets him into trouble. Jesus isn’t crucified because he feels sorry for sick people and makes them well. Jesus is crucified because he announces the Kingdom of God – and in the Kingdom, the first are last – and the last are first – and scribes and Pharisees, governors and emperors are stripped of their power over others.
And it all starts with touching icky people.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this text without making much effort to connect it with our daily lives – I guess, I’m leaving it up to you to make most of those connections.
Jesus does shocking and surprising things – he touches the unclean, breaks Sabbath laws, eats with tax collectors and prostitutes – and sometimes progressive-minded Christians think that therefore anything shocking and surprising thing is something that Jesus would do. Even I know that’s not very good logic.
If the Church is going to do a shocking and surprising things, we can’t just assume that those shocking and surprising things represent the heart and mind of God. And in spite of our reputation for stodigness and caution, over the years the Episcopal church has shocked and surprised people again and again; first, by giving lay people more power and authority than they had ever experienced in an English church. And then, as early as 1794, a church for African Americans, with their own priest, was established in Philadelphia. The Episcopal Church still struggles with racism, but in 1794, that was a shocking and surprising thing. We began ordaining women in 1977 – which still strikes some people as shocking and surprising, and now the Church is wrestling with the full incorporation of gay and lesbian persons.
So how can we evaluate these shocking and surprising things, and discern whether or not they imitate what Jesus does, or whether they simply reflect the cultural trends of our own age.
I think it has to go to back to unclean and alone. I think we have a basic human need to feel clean – to feel whole and worthy and precious – and we have a basic human need to feel that we belong to a community – that we are a part of something larger than ourselves – that someone will notice when we aren’t there.
The leper is condemned, by strict interpretation of the Torah, to live unclean and alone until his disease disappears. He is cut off from family and friends, from his religious rituals, and he is made to feel that he is filthy, dangerous and disgusting. He is unclean and alone – and Jesus reaches out a hand and touches him and restores him both to health and to belonging.
Jesus touches the wrong people to show us that God’s Kingdom is going to break down the barriers we put up to keep the wrong people out and make us feel safe inside. He touches the wrong people to show us that those we might judge unclean, have value and are made in God’s image and are precious.
If you want to do something shocking and surprising, then in these hard and scary economic times, when people who lose their jobs feel just as unclean and alone as that leper, or when people retreat because they want to shore themselves up against disaster, then reach out – as Jesus reached out to the leper – and proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come near.
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