Robert Barron - Reaching Out to the Lepers
Peace be with you. Friends, we continue reading from the marvelous Gospel of Mark. We're still in chapter 1 as we make our way through it. And this is that marvelous passage about Jesus curing a leper. Listen: "A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said, 'If you wish, you can make me clean.' Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, 'I do will it. Be made clean.' The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean". Stayed so deeply in the imaginations of the first Christians. These moments of healing. It's one of the clearest things we know about Jesus is that he engaged in this kind of work, and they're so vividly remembered and so vividly told in the Gospels. What do we make of this?
Well, look at it from three angles now. The first one is reaching out to the leper. I mentioned last week how the Church as the Mystical Body of Jesus is the continuation of Jesus' work and presence down through the ages. We do what he did. So last week we heard about praying, and about evangelizing, and caring for the poor. That's what Jesus does. But now, in this specific case, he reaches out to a leper. Now, we know what that meant in the culture of Jesus' time. That meant someone who was, in every sense, an outsider. He was a dangerous figure. There's this contagious figure, excluded from the community, excluded from the life of worship. We hear from the book of Leviticus that the leper had to keep his clothes rent as a sign of mourning and had to call out "Unclean, unclean".
Can you imagine? I mean, how humiliated, how degradated that must have been for the leper. So Jesus reaching out to the leper, and mind you, this would've made him ritually unclean. I mean susceptible to the disease, yeah. But more to it, ritually unclean. That's how radical, how extraordinary this outreach is. What's the Church do up and down the ages? It reaches out. Now, we've largely dealt, with our modern medicine, with the problem of leprosy. But as you've probably heard in the hundred other homilies, there are lots of other forms of leprosy today.
People who, for whatever reason, find themselves, to use Pope Francis' language, on the margins of society, not included, suspect, dangerous, best kept out of sight, out of mind. The Church's instinct must be, following its master, to reach out, look, even when that reaching out is dangerous. Even when that reaching out might make us unclean. You know what I mean? In the cultural sense, there are certain groups of people, if you reach out, you'll be seen by polite society as kind of a suspect figure yourself.
So a good question this Gospel raises, and again, you've probably heard this a hundred times, but it's worth hearing again, Who are the lepers in our society? Who are those now who are compelled in different ways to say "Unclean, unclean"? That we would rather keep at bay. That are dangerous, contagious people. They're the ones that we should reach out to especially. When I was teaching at the seminary years ago, I used to tell the students, "When you get to your first parish, one of your first questions should be, 'Who are the poor here?'"
Now, some of the fellows I taught did indeed go into economically poor areas. So some in the inner cities of Chicago and so on but others in other parts of the country that were economically poor, easy enough to identify. But it's the subtler forms of poverty I was kind of driving at. Who are the people who are on the margins, who feel excluded? Find them. Find them. Reach out to them even when it's dangerous to you, even when maybe it's a threat to your reputation, even when you might get the contagion yourself. No, no. They're the very people the Church should reach out to. So there's, I think, a first great lesson.
Again, I mentioned Pope Francis, again and again has been saying this to us. I love the image he used one time speaking to priests. He said the oil of your ordination has to run down your head and then onto your garments, into the very edge of your garments and then out into the world. Otherwise, it becomes rancid. From the moment I read that image, it stayed in my mind that, as a priest, I've been anointed for service. And that oil of anointing is not meant to stay on me as a sign of my privilege, but it's meant to go through me out into the world.
Who are the lepers, who are the poor? Find them, reach out to them. Okay, here's a second take on this thing. Feeling like a leper. Sometimes, we, in our sin, feel exactly like the leper in Jesus' time. Oh, the things that I've done, they're so embarrassing to me. It's such a source of shame. The addictions I have or the things that I've done or the relationships I've had, they keep me away from the Lord. It's as though when the Lord comes close, there's some instinct in me as a sinner that says "Unclean, unclean". "No, no, stay away from me".
I'll tell you this now, based on almost 38 years of hearing confessions. The very saddest things I'll hear, when someone says: "Ah, Father, look, I'm not even going to bother going to confession. No, no. The things I've done, there's no way the Lord will forgive me. No, no, I'm too far gone. I'm too far under. I'm too far away". My own sin, my own unworthiness has turned me into a kind of leper. The incomparable good news here, everybody, is, just as Jesus, long ago, violating all the social and religious conventions of his own time, reached out to those who were compelled to say "Unclean, unclean," so now, now, in the life of the Church, he reaches out still to us.
So people listening to me right now. I know there are people right now hearing me who feel exactly in that situation. "No, I don't know. I'm beyond the pale. I'm beyond hope". No one's beyond hope. Why? Because we're not relying on our accomplishments, not relying on my ability to turn my life around. That's not what Christianity is about at all. It's about opening oneself to the mercy that's coming our way. That Jesus has a special heart for those who feel like lepers. Let him in.
And maybe there's someone, again, right now who's feeling, "I'm at the bottom here. I'm at the bottom. There's no hope for me". No, no. You're the one he's reaching out to right now. Can we accept that? In some ways, everybody, that's the greatest challenge in the spiritual life is can I open myself to grace? Remember that line from the Lord when he says to the woman, "Do you want to be healed"? It's a curious question, but boy, the more you deal with people in the psychological order, in the spiritual order, you realize that's not a peculiar question at all. That's the question in some ways.
Do you want to be healed? Open yourself. I don't care how leprous you feel, how unworthy you feel. Open yourself, he's reaching out to you now. Okay, here's the third perspective on this. And the one I think that we're most likely to miss, but they wouldn't have missed it in Jesus' own audience. So think of the woman with the hemorrhage, think of the leper here, think of the man bent over. These were physical ailments to be sure. But in the religious context of the time, they were also ailments that kept somebody from worship.
That rendered somebody unclean in some way, so they were excluded not just from the social company of the community; they were excluded from the temple, they were excluded from the worship of the Church. And so in restoring these people to physical health, Jesus is also restoring them to spiritual health. The case of the man who's bent over is interesting because the attitude of worship was standing up straight. And so it's as though Israel had been bent over and now is being straightened up to offer God right praise.
So here's my third perspective on this story. Can we read the leper here as someone who has become deformed through lack of worship. What makes our lives properly ordered is the worship of God. When we honor God, we worship God, then our lives become rightly ordered. We become healthy spiritually. What makes us sick is precisely absence from right worship. I'm running off, think of the prodigal son, I'm running off seeking all kinds of created goods. I'm worshiping at all kinds of false altars. Is Jesus now, in curing the leper, bringing him back to right praise? In fact, doesn't he say, "Go tell the priest"? In other words, it's time to go back to the temple.
Now, think of our time everybody, in the West anyway. Not true in Nigeria, thank God, where something like 94% of Catholics go to Mass. There's a healthy country spiritually. But in the West, people in droves are staying away from Mass, staying away from right worship, staying away from the praise of God. What happens? They become lepers, they become distorted, deformed. They become marginalized. Why? Their own lack of worship. We look at those statistics and say, "Oh, well, yeah, so it goes".
Well, it's not so it goes. That's very, very dangerous stuff when now armies of especially young people are staying away from church. And then we wonder, "I wonder why numbers of young people spiking suicidal tendencies, and anxiety, and depression"? There's no wonder. It's lack of praise, lack of right worship that distorts us. Bottom line, and no matter how you read this story, at the heart of it is Jesus who reaches out. You feel like a leper, he's reaching out to you. You've been away from church for too long, he's reaching out to you. You want to know what to do in your life as a Christian. Well, imitate him, reach out to those on the margins. This story, this, again, simply told but powerfully concentrated story tells us what Jesus is all about then and now. And God bless you.