Everybody’s In
Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time Homily
By Rev. Dr. Beverly Bingle
February 14, 2021
As we get ready to jump into Lent this coming Wednesday,
Mark gives us another healing story, this time a leper.
It echoes last weekend’s story
about Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law.
Just like that story, it’s not the magic it sounds
like to us 21st century Americans.
The rules about leprosy come from the Book of Leviticus.
Scholars tell us that what was called leprosy wasn’t really leprosy.
In the Bible there is a group of skin diseases called tzaraat
characterized by scaling and peeling,
something like psoriasis or dermatitis.
People with those diseases were considered ritually polluted.
Back then, people didn’t know about germs.
They believed that people who suffered any physical imperfection
were controlled by a demon,
and that demon could jump from person to person
if you got close enough.
So the law declared that afflicted people
were spiritual pariahs, unclean.
Whatever the condition, they had to live alone, outside the camp,
unfit to participate in the community’s worship.
People would scream at them, “get away from us,”
“don’t you know your place!”
That rejection, that isolation,
was a death sentence to people in that culture.
Cut off from friends and relatives and family,
shunned by the community,
they were dead to the world that mattered to them.
Because this leper’s disease
was thought to be caused by spiritual failure,
he needs spiritual cleansing.
The word has been going around that Jesus was healing people,
so the man breaks the law to go up close to Jesus,
asking to be “made clean,”
the word for a ritual removing of his pollution.
Jesus responds by taking upon himself
the priestly function of declaring him clean.
This “leper” is considered unclean,
but Jesus touches him,
and that touch challenges the culture’s judgment,
restores the leper to full membership in the community,
puts the leper back in relationship with other humans.
He’s not untouchable any more.
And then Jesus tells him to do what the Torah’s law says:
go show yourself to the priest and offer the required sacrifice.
History is full of disease.
The worst century that we know about was the 14th,
when the bubonic plague killed
a fourth of the people in the world—60 million.
Among other plagues we’ve faced over time are
yellow fever, malaria, diphtheria, scarlet fever, polio,
cancer, heart attacks, AIDS, HIV, and avian flu.
Whatever the source,
whether it comes from our individual genetic predisposition,
or the failure of our culture or our time, or real germs,
the diseases that tear us away from our friends and families,
that send us “outside the camp,”
that render us “unclean” to others,
are rampant among us.
These days it’s not just COVID-19 that’s tearing us apart.
We do it ourselves.
We go about judging others as acceptable or not.
We treat people like lepers.
Just look around at what’s happening to Jews... Blacks...
Muslims... migrants... people living with disabilities...
immigrants... Democrats... Republicans...
The list goes on and on.
Jesus reached out to those people on the margins of society,
to poor widows, penitent publicans in the temple,
hated Samaritans, prostitutes, foreigners, and tax collectors.
And we, as followers of Jesus, are called to do what he did.
Today’s gospel is not the story of a magic cure.
It’s about how we judge others
as acceptable—or not—in the community.
It’s about about how we treat others
on the basis of appearances or assumptions.
And it’s about how Jesus taught us to reach out,
to touch them, to bring the outsiders into the community.
Jesus knew that there was no greater law than the law of love.
You can have a human law
that says certain people are out,
other people are in,
but for Jesus, that kind of law is wrong.
There is nobody out.
Everybody’s in.
We are all one in Christ,
and therefore all the same:
daughters and sons of God,
brothers and sisters of Jesus.
Amen!