Mark 1:40-45

I hear two main characters in this reading from Mark: First, Jesus who chooses to heal/cleanse and then, second, the leper who chooses to ignore Jesus’ wishes and goes running off telling everyone of his healing. Granted, there are a couple of additional characters/groups of folks who perhaps play an important role shaping how Jesus and the leper act: the Jewish faith leaders, that is, the priests and rabbis of the faith; and the other character is the swelling crowds of Jesus followers, the folks who are not always bound by the strictures of Mosaic Law.

So we have Jesus and we have the leper: two folk who make choices and cause us to ask: if we have a choice, what do we choose?

Hear a little bit more about this story of Jesus and the Leper. Disease in Jesus’ time is not a matter of someone with a medical degree to attend to it; it’s a matter of following Mosaic Law and a matter for the priests to handle. From Leviticus we hear what Jesus and every person meets in someone who has what we know as Hansen’s disease or other possible skin disorders.

Boundaries are established between those with leprosy, or other skin diseases. The priest is the one who determines when someone is ill or otherwise labeled as unclean; a priest also determines when that person is no longer unclean. Torn clothing, a covered lip, and the words, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ signal the keeping of boundaries, keep away, so otherwise unsuspecting folk stay at a safe distance. Clearly, these folks are regulated and told: keep away! Live outside/away from the community.

On one level, as Jesus chooses/reaches out to cleanse this one, Jesus reaches out as the great Physician to heal this man. In some readings/translations we hear that he is moved with pity or compassion. In other translations, due to pressure of the growing crowds of followers, perhaps, we hear he is moved not by compassion but by anger to heal this one.

I’d like us to consider another level, where Jesus reaches out not just to cleanse but he reaches across very clear cut boundaries. With his healing hand, he moves into the arena of priestly work AND on top of that he says to one otherwise treated as a dog, you, my fellow human being, are no longer in isolation. Jesus defies what the Law has established; by touching an untouchable, Jesus risks his own well-being in order to include this ostracized one. Jesus defies what common sense would dictate; Jesus risks his own health. By touching/healing/cleansing this man, Jesus, in turn, would become unclean. (And, he probably made a lot of people who thought they had authority angry!)
It’s hard for us to understand perhaps how a people could be so shunned and put outside of the circle of society. We know more about leprosy than was known 2000 years ago; in fact, the last vestiges of communities here in the continental US in Carville, Louisiana and in Texas; and in Hawaii that were set apart for those with Hansen’s disease are dwindling. In fact, there’s a movement to get rid of the name leprosy altogether and use Hansen’s disease instead. Perhaps the last known case of real shunning for New Yorkers when we consider disease is Typhoid Mary who was isolated by putting her on an island off of New York City.

But we do our share of setting people aside whether they have a wildly contagious, dangerous, short or long-term illness or not. I remember, perhaps, you do, too, when one whispered the word cancer in fear perhaps of what? That it would spread? That saying it aloud would make it a death-sentence? That somehow it was a moral issue? I can see Jesus reaching out across that barrier of silence. Can’t you?

I remember how young teenage girls would disappear for months (we would learn they went to homes for wayward ones) and return changed but the words of pregnancy were never uttered aloud of in public. The words were tsk-tsks spoken under one’s breath just loud enough to be felt by others in the vicinity. Parents would keep their daughters and sons at a safe distance from that one. When a teenager could not be sent away to have the ‘problem’ taken care of, whispers of denigration and separation – nice girls wouldn’t do that – would follow that youngster and her family, and negatively impact that youngster for life. I know Jesus would have reached out across that barrier of judgment and offered more than criticism; surely there would be forgiveness, healing and love offered, too.

Today, in a similar way, we shy away from HIV/AIDS patients. We keep a safe distance so we won’t catch the virus. Oh, it’s not quite what it was when we first learned of HIV/AIDS but our reticence and distancing still play not too far beneath the surface. Jesus would choose otherwise.

I also think of the isolating power of secrecy that families hold onto when there is mental disease within a family. Somehow in my greater family, there was this thing of keeping secrets about certain things. Never did we as a family feel it okay to speak of our uncle who came to his wits end and could only see suicide as the answer. We heard, as a secret, that he had tried to commit suicide but we could never be open about it. And in that same family of uncle, aunt and two cousins, it took forty years before they dared to share with relatives that my adult cousin suffered from schizophrenia. The isolation they must have lived. The fear of being open and honest must have been a burden. Jesus would have reached out in compassion, opening up the space for making connection.
I think sometimes that we also distance ourselves from folks who are older, and those who are dying. I hear chaplains of Nursing Care facilities say some have no visitors. It’s almost as if we are afraid of – what? Finding they are real folks? We’re afraid of seeing a real person in a frame of frailty? Perhaps the fear is the facing of our own mortality? But the oldest generation and dying folks are some of the most isolated people in our society. Jesus would choose otherwise, to be with them.

So many of the barriers that keep us from being in contact with folks, that keep us from interacting with people who are in a different place than we; so many folks who are isolated from the mainstream of life, still hunger for what this man – the leper - hungered – to be healed. So many today who are isolated by making a wrong choice or through illness or in old age, hunger to be touched, hunger to have human contact, to be hugged, to have a hand held, or a pat on the back, to be in conversation or receive a smile of recognition, or be engaged in conversation. When they need it the most, folks become hesitant to stay in contact; we tend to draw back using busyness as the superficial reason.

We might not confine or isolate people with highly communicable diseases as once practiced with leprosy, but we practice a more subtle, just as devastating, form of social isolation.

You might not know someone with leprosy. Most likely you know someone in one of the kinds of situations I described. What would it be like to cross that boundary of separation? Perhaps you don’t know anyone in the kinds of situations I have described. But you probably do know someone who has been set off to the side of your attention. Someone who would appreciate being included, someone who being greeted with, ‘tell me, how are you (and really mean it)’ would be changed by that exchange, by that reaching out. What would it be like to make that choice, to include that within your radar screen of attention?

Do you know that Leper’s life was so changed for the better that he could not possibly take in what Jesus inexplicably was saying when Jesus suggested he, the once leper, keep quiet about what just occurred (as if people couldn’t see what had happened). He naturally, exuberantly ran out, smiling, kicking his heels, I imagine. How could he keep quiet about his changed condition? No longer obliged to live in the outlying region, he was re-engaged! He could exchange with others; he could love and be loved.
That’s what Jesus brought about and that’s what we can bring about when we but make that choice to engage those who have been isolated through our hesitations and fears.
SO what’s it going to be? What do you choose?