Sixth Sunday In Ordinary Time
MARK 1:40-45 (Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46; Psalm 32:1-2, 5, 11; 1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1)
The final story of Mark’s chapter one is the curing of a leper. The leper approaches Jesus and kneels before him. He says, “If you will, you can make me clean.” For a leper to approach any-one who was not a leper was contrary to the Law of Moses (the Torah). Laws concerning leprosy and other diseases of the skin, (including mold in or on a house), are found in Leviticus 13 and 14. In Leviticus 13:45 we read, “The leper who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, (if anyone approaches), ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp.” “Outside the camp” indicates the antiquity of this legislation, when the Israelites were still living as nomads.
The laws of exclusion could be quite cruel. Numbers 5:2, “Command the people of Israel that they put out of the camp every leper…that they may not defile their camp, in the midst of which I dwell. And the people of Israel did so, and drove them outside the camp….” What today is called “quarantine,” was already practiced by ancient peoples, though perhaps for reasons diff-erent than hygiene or fear of contracting the disease. “Unclean” could mean that the diseased person was excluded from participation in religious and civil rites of a community. This leper may not even be aware of the Torah laws concerning leprosy, since we do not know how well these ancient laws were observed in the time of Jesus. Jesus certainly does not observe the law of no contact with the unclean. Leviticus 22:4-6, “Whoever touches anything that is unclean…shall be unclean until evening….” But Mark writes, “Moved with compassion, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I will. Be clean!’”
The leper kneeling before Jesus is a picture of total helplessness and dependence. The man’s faith in Jesus is not mentioned but it is surely implied. Mark’s Greek expresses the compassion of Jesus with a verb derived from the Greek noun for the intestines, the innards of a person, the gut. Therefore Jesus is said to have had a “gut-feeling” for this suffering victim of a dreaded disease. To touch an outcast who has been deprived of all human contact and comfort is an act of courage, a protest against the laws and conventions of society. There is an alternate reading in some important ancient manuscripts which expresses Jesus’ reaction to the leper as passionate anger. But anger at whom or what? If anger is the original reading of Mark’s text it should be understood as angry sadness at human misfortune, sickness, alienation. As Jesus worked his first miracle, the exorcism of a man in a synagogue, with a few simple words instead of the accepted lengthy ritual, so here too a sovereign Jesus gives a simple command, “I will. Be clean!”
As with the cure of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law in a previous story, so here also the cure is instantaneous, “…and immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean.” Mark’s next sentence is another surprise, which may well incline us to accept Jesus’ previous emotional response as anger instead of just compassion. Mark writes of Jesus, “And angrily groaning, he immediately cast him out.” Strange indeed! Mark’s expressions can be brutal. Matthew and Luke, in copying this story from Mark, usually omit or soften harsh emotions and statements Mark attributes to Jesus. They do this softening and omitting not only for harsh and tough love reactions of Jesus, but even for his tender reactions. Luke and Matthew are not as inclined to show human emotions of Jesus as they are depicted in the Gospel of Mark.
Why is Jesus so rough on this former leper? The Greek verb translated here as “angrily groan-ing” is used in classical Greek for the snorting of horses. It is also used in a Greek version of the Old Testament, Lamentations 2:6, to express the fury of the Lord God against kings, priests, and princes of Judah who brought on the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Babylonian army in 587 B.C. Mark 14:5 uses the same verb for the bystanders’ scolding of the woman who poured precious ointment over the head of Jesus. Matthew 9:10 uses this verb to express Jesus’ threat to the formerly two blind men not to tell anyone of their cure. John 11:33, 38 uses this verb to express Jesus (angry?) reaction to the death of his friend Lazarus. Matthew and Luke seem so puzzled by Mark’s statement, that they delete it from their version of this story. We can resort to Augustine’s reaction to another passage too difficult for him. He noted that greater men than himself had not adequately interpreted the passage, so he would not try.
It was too early in the ministry of Jesus to arouse the opposition of the priestly hierarchy. Thus Jesus said to the cured man, “Say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed.” What Moses prescribed is found in Leviticus 14, a long, expensive, and elaborate ritual. The expensive offerings or sacrifices required were some-what mitigated for the poor. Why the priest? The priest represented the community before God. The priest was obligated by the Torah to examine the former leper. If he finds no leprosy present, the former leper is restored to the community and to the rituals by which the community worshipped God. The man could not contain his joy but reported his cure every-where so that Jesus had to remain outside of towns. A strange reversal! The leper is now inside, while Jesus is outside, a symbol of his taking the sins of the world upon himself and dying rejected outside the city.
