BIBLE READINGS:
Lv 13:1-2, 44-46 // I Cor 10:31 – 11:1 // Mk 1:40-45

I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS

It was in 1984 when I visited the PDDM Sisters in Nellore, India. To give me a chance to know more about the local Church, they invited me to visit the diocesan leper colony. It was situated in a vast isolated farmland, dotted with the humble abodes of the lepers. The sun was scorching as we plodded through the dusty roads. The inhabitants were gentle and hospitable. We were conversing with them from a safe distance, when one elderly disease-afflicted lady thoughtfully opened a battered umbrella and came near me to shield my body from the intense heat of the noonday sun. I politely rejected the proffered kindness, explaining that my sallow skin needed the therapeutic warmth of the sun. I did not want to hurt her feelings, but I was afraid to stay close to a leper. I dreaded to touch a leper!

Leprosy is a terrible disease, not only for the physical corruption it brings, but more so, for the brutal alienation it engenders. The presence of the evil force of corruption and contamination in leprosy necessitated protective and hygienic legislations, such as those contained in the Book of Leviticus. According to Lev 13:45-46, during the time of his uncleanness, the diseased person has to remain outside the city, giving notice of his condition to the unsuspecting through the customary signs indicative of his state: torn garments, flowing hair, covered beard, and the repeated warning cry, “Unclean! Unclean!” Marginalized from the society, lepers are bereft of love, comfort, hope and human dignity. Their misery is boundless. The horrendous ulcerous growths in their bodies are loathsome. Outcast from ordinary human companionship, lepers are literally “untouchables”. They are the “living dead”.

In today’s Gospel reading Mk 1:40-45), the evangelist Mark depicts one of the most beautiful pictures of Christian compassion. In this narrative, he portrays Jesus as offering a completely new and radical response to the unmitigated human suffering personified by a leper. Breaking down the barriers of hygiene and ritual purity, Jesus did what was unimaginable. Responding with compassion to the leper’s faith invocation, “If you wish, you can make me clean”, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him saying, “I do will it. Be made clean.” He touched the “untouchable” with his healing hand. He comforted the outcast with an authoritative cleansing word that would bring him wholeness. Indeed, in the Gospel accounts, the cleansing of lepers is a victorious messianic sign that the Kingdom of God has come. Pope Paul VI comments on Jesus’ healing encounters with lepers: “Jesus’ meeting with lepers is the type and model of his meeting with every person who is restored to health and to the perfection of the original image, and admitted again to the communion of the people of God. In these meetings, Jesus showed himself as the bearer of a new life, of a fullness of humanity that had long been lost … ‘Lepers are cleansed!’ This is the sign of his Messiahship that Jesus gives to John the Baptist’s disciples who had come to question him.”

The healing ministry of Jesus, moreover, is always linked with his paschal victory on the cross. The great healer restored our wholeness, totally and radically, at the moment he surrendered his life on the cross. Pope Paul VI underlines the relationship between the passion of Christ and the healing of our infirmities: “The loving gesture of Christ, who approaches lepers comforting them and curing them, has its full and mysterious expression in the passion. Tortured and disfigured by the sweat of blood, the flagellation, the crowning with thorns, the crucifixion, the rejection by the people he had helped, he identifies himself with lepers, becomes the image and symbol of them, as the prophet Isaiah had foreseen, contemplating the mystery of the Servant of the Lord: ‘He had no form or comeliness … He was despised and rejected by men …as one from whom men hide their faces … we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.’ But it is just from the wounds in Jesus’ tortured body and from the power of his resurrection that life and hope gushes for all men stricken by evil and infirmity.” Indeed, in his suffering and death on the cross, Jesus assumed in himself the human misery symbolized in the afflictions of a leprous victim. In his compassionate acts of healing and in his paschal victory on the cross, Jesus was truly “the fellow sufferer who understands” and strengthens us.

One of the exigencies of Christian life is to bring the healing ministry of Jesus to the many “lepers” of today, especially the millions of victims of Hansen’s disease all over the world who, more than all others, fit the description “the poorest of the poor”. Mother Teresa of Calcutta dedicated her ministry of charity in a special way to these lepers, impelled by the slogan that was a rewording of the ancient taboo. “Touch a leper with your compassion.” Mother Teresa, moreover, spoke of the “leprosy of the Western world”, which is, the leprosy of loneliness. In her ministry to the lonely, the unwanted, the marginalized, the rejected, the AIDS victim, etc. she had given witness that with the love of Christ, there is healing for the leprosy of our modern times. Indeed, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, together with St. Francis of Assisi, Blessed Damien of Molokai, and many other Christian disciples, had shown that it is possible to respond to the Christian missionary imperative: “Cure the sick … cleanse the lepers!” (Mt 10:8) and that it is necessary to replicate the healing gesture of Christ: “Touch a leper with your compassion.”

II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART

Prepared by: Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang, PDDM