6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 11 February 2024 Lunar New Year
It was Teresa of Avila, writing in the 16th century, who remarked that we should all learn how to read the texts of the gospels in their original language. Well, I doubt that many of us will be able to fulfil her challenge, including me. However, one of the things we begin to recognise about Scripture is that often enough the translation we are used to sometimes fails to convey the meaning of the original Greek, the language in which the gospels were written. The use of the phrase, “feeling sorry” in this account of Jesus’ encounter with a leper is a case in point. The original Greek illustrates that Jesus did not feel sorry for the leper at all. Rather, he got angry with the leper – or more accurately, it seems, with the leprosy itself. Nor, in the original Greek, did Jesus give a stern warning to the leper. Rather, he “terrified” him. Then, instead of “sending him on his way,” Jesus “casts him out” after healing him. All in all, the English translation of the Greek is very tame.
What is the strength of the original Greek seeking to communicate? The terms and words in the original Greek are presenting a Jesus who is not somehow above what he experiences, but rather a Jesus who is passionately involved, someone who feels within himself the threat, who stands his ground and enters a kind of battle with what he experiences. The language of the text speaks of Jesus’ passionate involvement with the leper. Jesus does not remain unaffected by the encounter.
However, not only does the language of the story indicate this. Even more powerfully, the account of Jesus’ gesture towards the leper signals the depth of his involvement. The leper comes to Jesus. But for this to have occurred Jesus himself must have gone to the area where the lepers lived, for there is no way a leper could come into a town or to those places where people were gathered. Jesus goes to the place where no other would go. It is an unthinkable action on his part. And yet, not only this – he touches the leper. For the ancient Palestinian community leprosy was the supreme symbol of the dangerous. It was a symbol of alienation. Lepers were outside the community and the Law: they were beyond the pale of humanity and of God’s dealings. Once his disease was detected or suspected, the leper wandered in the caves in the wilderness until he died. Further, to touch a leper in ancient Jewish law, to come in contact with a leper, was to become one, and subsequently to be treated as one. By touching the leper, by immersing himself so much into the battle, Jesus risks becoming suspect of leprosy himself – with all its social implications. The text itself highlights this when it states that, “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside in places that nobody lived.” This was the price not of popularity; it is the price of being thought of as a leper.
We can only wonder, then, at Jesus’ feelings when he enters the leper zone, and when the leper approaches him. All Jesus’ social conditioning would have urged him not to be there, and to ‘run.’ Yet, he has chosen to come to this place. And beyond his own revulsion and fear he stays, and he enters an exchange with this person. In so doing, Jesus is revealing a God who is prepared even to become covered in sores, who is prepared to be caste out and thought of as rubbish, who is prepared to wander in the wilderness and die there for the sake of reaching out to us. It is one thing for us as Christians to affirm that God has become man. However, what makes this affirmation even more peculiar, and more dangerous, is where this God-become-man is to be found. He is to be found not in the place known for its sacredness. He is to be found in the place known to be grotesque.
God has become even a leper so that the leprosy of our own isolation, our own brokenness, our own confusion, and questioning, might be taken away. God touches the anxiety and the anguish that eat away at us from inside of us and takes them into himself. He comes to us, calling forth the question, “What is eating away at you? This is what I want to touch.” And so, with the leper of today’s story, each of us cries out, “If you want to you can cure me!” Yes, we want to be cured from what makes us fearful, from what paralyses us, from what numbs us, from what eats away at us. We want to be made whole again, to gather the fragments of our life together again so that we might live with acceptance, with dignity, with purpose.
Let us pray this new year, and indeed as we enter the season of Lent through this week, that
the crust of our complacency will be broken up, that will see our needs, our hungers, are anxieties, our limitations, just as they are.
And what gives us a sense of hope in the midst of such personal acknowledgement is the figure of the Jesus whom we meet in the gospel today – the Jesus who is prepared to become passionately involved with us, who reaches out to touch that place in us that eats away at us.
