NewCreation

Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time. And here we have rather a mysterious Gospel, as I hope you'll see. It's the direct continuation of where we were last time. Jesus had moved from the synagogue to a home, where he was healing people who were cured outside the home. Then he rises up early in the morning and he goes out. The disciples find him, and they start to preach amongst the small towns in and around Galilee. So from the synagogue, to the home, to outside, to synagogues around Galilee, and now in the open country. And in the open country, a leper comes to Jesus, begging him and kneeling. He said to him: "If you choose, you can make me clean." Okay, what was meant at that time by a leper? It does not refer to the disease which we call leprosy, Hansen's disease. It refers to a particular — because Hansen's disease was not known in the ancient world at that time — it refers to a particular form of white, scaly affliction that gave the person the impression of being white and covered with scales, and was considered to be something that looked like death. It looked as though the person was walking dead. And it was particularly associated, therefore, with matters of purity, because the ultimate purity taboo was death — was being dead, was a corpse. That was what was not allowed anywhere near the Most High. So one of the ways of being away from the presence of the Most High was in something that looked like death. But it was probably what we would know as some sort of fungal skin infection, which is why people talked about it not in terms of a disease but in terms of a matter of purity. Which is why the person doesn't ask to be healed — he asks to be made clean. And that's going to be important. Because you remember that what we have from the beginning of Mark's Gospel is the coming into the world of the Holy One of God, the Deathless One himself, the one whose journey into and through from Galilee to Jerusalem and up to his crucifixion is going to be taking on board and living into ultimately death, so that even that becomes detoxified, and his holiness is therefore able to be received out in the form of the Holy Spirit and spread and lived amongst us. So this is the ongoing march, if you like, of the Holy One coming in. Now here's where this Gospel becomes curious. In the translation which I have given you, it says "moved with pity." But that word, which we get in this story in Matthew and Luke, is only one of the two words in Mark's Gospel. And in the ancient texts of Mark's Gospel, the most probable word is "becoming angry" — or orgistheis. Why is it more probable? Well, it's more likely that a scribe would have changed "becoming angry" to "moved with compassion" than the other way around. So it's Probable that the ancient phrase was "moved with anger": Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him. What's going on here? Well, we have something like Jesus showing that he is the fulfillment of the Lord, and more than Moses. Moses's first two signs were the ability to make someone leprous and to make his hand leprous, and then make it unleprous. These were, if you like, tricks that God taught him in Exodus 4, so that he would have something to show his people, to show that he was the real thing. He had to convince first Aaron — and then he did convince Aaron — then they went and they showed these tricks to the people. There were two. One was turning his rod into a snake and then back again, and the other was making his hand leprous and then healing it again. So we have the leper coming in and kneeling. Never a good idea. Jesus doesn't seem to like people kneeling in front of him. It happens again with the rich young man who comes in Mark's Gospel to ask what he must do to inherit eternal life. He falls to his feet and kneels, and Jesus gives him rather a stern answer. So here we have Jesus apparently reacting with anger — or with tender compassion, depending on your translation — and touching him and saying to him, "I choose," effectively saying, "Why on earth might you think that I would have anything other than the desire for you to be whole and able to be integrated into the life of the community?" It's almost as though he's angry with this person for suggesting otherwise. Difficult to know, because then it says immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean. So here he's been purified. The holy one has created holiness. He's the active agent. He's not, if you like, God hidden away behind the Temple veil in case impure things come close. He's actually the Holy One of God moving out to create holiness. But then it says, "After sternly warning him" — actually, again, it's "upbraiding him"; it's a stronger word in Greek — "upbraiding him, he threw him out." He sent him away at once. He threw him out at once. It's the same word as has just been used in relation to casting out demons. So you have this very, very odd sense of Jesus being angry with the person who has come to him, healing him, upbraiding him, and throwing him out, saying to him: "See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priests, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." What's he doing? This is really very, very odd. What I'd like to suggest — and it's the best I can do; I mean, there are so many different interpreters' attempts to try and work out what this very odd language is doing — why is Jesus using... This really rather violent language at this point in his Gospel. What I suggest is this is to do with him bearing witness to the priests that one who is more than Moses is here, and that means that he's treating this former leper as if he were Miriam — that's Moses's sister — because the beginning of the instructions for what to do with leprosy, even to the priests, which are produced in Leviticus, are based on what happened to Miriam. Because in Numbers 12 there is a row between Miriam and Aaron and Moses as to who gets to speak for God. And Miriam and Aaron don't think that only Moses should be allowed to speak for God. And God gets involved in the matter and ticks them off royally, and gets very angry with both Miriam and Aaron — more with Miriam than with Aaron, which is, I guess, unsurprising: these are male-written texts. And the Lord says, "Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?" And the anger of the Lord was kindled against them and he departed. So in other words, the Lord gets angry, and then when they see Miriam, she has turned as white as snow; she has become leprous. And Aaron her brother cries out, "Do not let her be like one stillborn, whose flesh is half consumed when it comes out of its mother's womb" — in other words, he appreciates this makes her a living dead; that's the ultimate impurity. And Moses cries out to God, "O God, please heal her." The Lord said to Moses, "If her father had but spat in her face, would she not bear her shame for seven days? Let her be shut out of the camp for seven days, and after that she may be brought in again." I wonder whether Jesus isn't asking this former leper to reenact Miriam going back into the camp after she's been cured, and showing the priests that the Lord is here. Because the priests' job was not to kill people from leprosy — no one expected priests to kill people from leprosy — their job was to diagnose whether leprosy was present or not. So making a witness was to show, not only that this person was now free from leprosy, but in a sense that what had happened to Miriam had happened to him, which means that the power behind Moses was here. And it would be good for Moses's priests to begin to get a sense of what was coming. Amongst them the holy one has appeared in their midst. But in fact this former leper, not surprisingly perhaps, doesn't obey Jesus's command — or rather his upbraidings — but goes out and begins to proclaim it freely and to spread the word. I mean, he's just delighted to be set free from leprosy, from his impurity. He can now be integrated into people. But of course this has exactly the reverse effect than what you expect. It means that Jesus now becomes cast out, because after all he's touched the man, so he becomes impure. For some time, it says, Jesus could no longer go into a town openly but stayed in the country, and people came to him from every quarter. In other words, strangely, by having healed this person, and by that person not going into the camp and going through the witness procedure, he actually puts Jesus into the difficult position of being the outsider who has to remain in the open countryside and is not able to go into places. If you like, it's the old violent sacred doubling back on itself. Jesus occupies this place and continues to do his work from there — works in the wilderness, as it were. There is a tiny little note towards the end of the Gospel: Jesus spends a meal in the house of Simon the leper, close to Jerusalem. And interestingly enough, the same verb, upbraiding, comes there. But that time it's not Jesus who's upbraiding anybody. Presumably Simon the leper has long been healed, if he's able to have a dinner in his house. It's the people who are present who are upbraiding those who were pouring precious oil — ointment on Jesus, using precious things for him. Very odd that Mark uses upbraiding and leper twice, with quite different meanings. Something's going on there. Anyhow, the mystery of the Holy One coming into our midst, reenacting Moses and showing what his power looks like, and having to deal with all the perhaps unexpected, quite violent reactions that this is going to produce. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.