Epiphany 6, Year B
Mark 1:40-45
My husband and I are political junkies, so we’ve been watching the recent Republican debates and turmoil with great interest. There’s always somebody putting his foot in his mouth over something. One recent gaffe was when Mitt Romney asserted last week that he is “not concerned about the very poor" because they have an "ample safety net.” He added that if the net is “broken” he’d “fix it”, but that was too little too late for the firestorm that met him in response.
It is outrageous to be unconcerned about the very poor when 15% (or more than 46 million people in this country) are living in poverty, which means making less than $22,350 for a family of 4. Can you imagine living on that? It is outrageous to be unconcerned about the very poor when you take a stroll down the less attractive parts of Route 1 and see people carrying all their belongings in trash bags. The safety net” that Mitt relies on so heavily isn’t close to enough. More than a quarter of families living in poverty don’t have health insurance. One in six people in the U.S. experienced “food insecurity” last year, meaning that they didn’t have access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle. Even if the safety net were air tight, it does very little to address the real causes underlying poverty.
And yet while I sit back and judge Mitt Romney for what he said, what am I doing that is so much better? Sure, I’m concerned about the very poor, I might donate a little time and a little money to help sometimes, I might argue for stronger safety nets, but I too find it easier to look at poverty from afar than get too close to it. Easier to talk about than to touch.
That hit home to me in an experience my family had last week at Ledo’s Pizza on Route 1. We were having our usual restaurant experience, which means trying our best to keep the kids’ squabbling to a minimum and to keep Maya from climbing on the table, when a voice behind us started getting louder and louder. About every other word was unsuitable to be repeated in this forum and Holden could see her taking swigs of Jim Beam from her purse. I was annoyed by her language in front of my kids and so turned around to try to catch her eye and suggest maybe she could keep it down a bit. Which is when she started directing the 4 letter words towards me along with a threat that if I looked her way again she might kill me. Which turned my annoyance into an odd mix of aggravation and anxiety. It wasn’t long before the waitress asked her to leave, and after a bit of a scene, she did. Soon my annoyance, aggravation and anxiety turned into something more like pity. I wondered what had happened in that woman’s life to make her behave like that, wondered if she was dealing with mental illness, if she had a job, if she had friends or family to support her.
Only later did I wonder what Jesus might have done in that situation. Jesus who demonstrates in our Gospel story this morning what real concern looks like in the Kingdom of Heaven.
A leper knelt before him and said, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”
Now let’s pause for just a minute and remember what leprosy meant in those days. Leprosy was a dread disease. Lepers were kept at a distance, barred from the religious community and declared unworthy of God. They were outsiders who depended completely on the charity of others. The book of Leviticus in the Old Testament spends two chapters teaching priests how to diagnose diseases of the skin, how to pronounce lepers ritually unclean, how to perform rites of purification should they be healed. From Leviticus Chapter 13: "The person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, 'Unclean! Unclean!' As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp.” Lepers were shunned because their disease was contagious, but it was also more than that. It was their pain, their loneliness, their unspeakable fear that no one wanted to catch.
Had Jesus obeyed the religious rules of his time, he would have kept his distance from this man who knelt in front of him. He might have thrown food or a little money his way, but he certainly would not touch him. But that just wasn’t Jesus’ way.
Jesus, we are told, was “moved with pity.” But the original word used is actually much stronger than that. He didn’t just feel sorry for the man; he wasn’t just sad or concerned. He had a profoundly intense emotional response that propelled him into action. His compassion was so intense that he couldn’t help but act.
And so Jesus stretched out his hand and he touched the leper. The Greek word here is actually closer to “caress” – what happened here between the leper and Jesus was that intimate, that holy. And in that touch, that caress, Jesus shattered the boundaries of the proper social order. According to the religious law, Jesus was now unclean and had to keep separate from society; he forfeited his own place in society for the sake of this now-healed leper.
And yet Jesus’ action was entirely by his choice. The leper said that if Jesus chose, he could make him clean. And Jesus responded, “I do choose.” Jesus saw his pain, heard his cries and was moved with compassion to choose to touch him. Just as God sees our pain, hears our cries and is moved with compassion to choose us, to touch and love us. That creative and compassionate choice of God is what defines God’s relationship with us, from the creation to the incarnation to the cross and beyond. And it is what makes it possible for us to make that same choice towards others – to be moved just as intensely with compassion toward those around us – to reach out and touch the untouchable and love the unlovable.
Ours is not a faith that allows us to sit back content with feeling pity from a distance while keeping our hands clean. Our faith is supposed to move us with compassion, compel us to touch.
Of course, it can be a risky road to start down. In our story from Mark this morning, when Jesus heals this leper it changes things not just for the leper, who is now healed and acceptable and can reenter society and be reunited with his family, but also for Jesus. Now that the leper has broadcast the news of his healing, now that Jesus has defiled himself by touching the unclean, life becomes so intense that Jesus can no longer go into a town openly but has to stay out in the country. Both the leper and Jesus end up on a different path by the end of this story than they were on when it began. That might happen to us too, if we really allow our compassion to move us into action. We might be putting our well-laid plans and expectations into jeopardy, we might end up on a different road that we’d originally foreseen for ourselves.
There’s nothing easy about it.
Now, with that lady at the pizza place, I’m still not really sure what the right thing to do might have been. But I think it would have been defined by compassion, and choosing, and touch rather than by annoyance and aggravation and pity. And maybe recognizing that is at least a place to start. Amen.
Mark 1:40-45
My husband and I are political junkies, so we’ve been watching the recent Republican debates and turmoil with great interest. There’s always somebody putting his foot in his mouth over something. One recent gaffe was when Mitt Romney asserted last week that he is “not concerned about the very poor" because they have an "ample safety net.” He added that if the net is “broken” he’d “fix it”, but that was too little too late for the firestorm that met him in response.
It is outrageous to be unconcerned about the very poor when 15% (or more than 46 million people in this country) are living in poverty, which means making less than $22,350 for a family of 4. Can you imagine living on that? It is outrageous to be unconcerned about the very poor when you take a stroll down the less attractive parts of Route 1 and see people carrying all their belongings in trash bags. The safety net” that Mitt relies on so heavily isn’t close to enough. More than a quarter of families living in poverty don’t have health insurance. One in six people in the U.S. experienced “food insecurity” last year, meaning that they didn’t have access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle. Even if the safety net were air tight, it does very little to address the real causes underlying poverty.
And yet while I sit back and judge Mitt Romney for what he said, what am I doing that is so much better? Sure, I’m concerned about the very poor, I might donate a little time and a little money to help sometimes, I might argue for stronger safety nets, but I too find it easier to look at poverty from afar than get too close to it. Easier to talk about than to touch.
That hit home to me in an experience my family had last week at Ledo’s Pizza on Route 1. We were having our usual restaurant experience, which means trying our best to keep the kids’ squabbling to a minimum and to keep Maya from climbing on the table, when a voice behind us started getting louder and louder. About every other word was unsuitable to be repeated in this forum and Holden could see her taking swigs of Jim Beam from her purse. I was annoyed by her language in front of my kids and so turned around to try to catch her eye and suggest maybe she could keep it down a bit. Which is when she started directing the 4 letter words towards me along with a threat that if I looked her way again she might kill me. Which turned my annoyance into an odd mix of aggravation and anxiety. It wasn’t long before the waitress asked her to leave, and after a bit of a scene, she did. Soon my annoyance, aggravation and anxiety turned into something more like pity. I wondered what had happened in that woman’s life to make her behave like that, wondered if she was dealing with mental illness, if she had a job, if she had friends or family to support her.
Only later did I wonder what Jesus might have done in that situation. Jesus who demonstrates in our Gospel story this morning what real concern looks like in the Kingdom of Heaven.
A leper knelt before him and said, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”
Now let’s pause for just a minute and remember what leprosy meant in those days. Leprosy was a dread disease. Lepers were kept at a distance, barred from the religious community and declared unworthy of God. They were outsiders who depended completely on the charity of others. The book of Leviticus in the Old Testament spends two chapters teaching priests how to diagnose diseases of the skin, how to pronounce lepers ritually unclean, how to perform rites of purification should they be healed. From Leviticus Chapter 13: "The person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, 'Unclean! Unclean!' As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp.” Lepers were shunned because their disease was contagious, but it was also more than that. It was their pain, their loneliness, their unspeakable fear that no one wanted to catch.
Had Jesus obeyed the religious rules of his time, he would have kept his distance from this man who knelt in front of him. He might have thrown food or a little money his way, but he certainly would not touch him. But that just wasn’t Jesus’ way.
Jesus, we are told, was “moved with pity.” But the original word used is actually much stronger than that. He didn’t just feel sorry for the man; he wasn’t just sad or concerned. He had a profoundly intense emotional response that propelled him into action. His compassion was so intense that he couldn’t help but act.
And so Jesus stretched out his hand and he touched the leper. The Greek word here is actually closer to “caress” – what happened here between the leper and Jesus was that intimate, that holy. And in that touch, that caress, Jesus shattered the boundaries of the proper social order. According to the religious law, Jesus was now unclean and had to keep separate from society; he forfeited his own place in society for the sake of this now-healed leper.
And yet Jesus’ action was entirely by his choice. The leper said that if Jesus chose, he could make him clean. And Jesus responded, “I do choose.” Jesus saw his pain, heard his cries and was moved with compassion to choose to touch him. Just as God sees our pain, hears our cries and is moved with compassion to choose us, to touch and love us. That creative and compassionate choice of God is what defines God’s relationship with us, from the creation to the incarnation to the cross and beyond. And it is what makes it possible for us to make that same choice towards others – to be moved just as intensely with compassion toward those around us – to reach out and touch the untouchable and love the unlovable.
Ours is not a faith that allows us to sit back content with feeling pity from a distance while keeping our hands clean. Our faith is supposed to move us with compassion, compel us to touch.
Of course, it can be a risky road to start down. In our story from Mark this morning, when Jesus heals this leper it changes things not just for the leper, who is now healed and acceptable and can reenter society and be reunited with his family, but also for Jesus. Now that the leper has broadcast the news of his healing, now that Jesus has defiled himself by touching the unclean, life becomes so intense that Jesus can no longer go into a town openly but has to stay out in the country. Both the leper and Jesus end up on a different path by the end of this story than they were on when it began. That might happen to us too, if we really allow our compassion to move us into action. We might be putting our well-laid plans and expectations into jeopardy, we might end up on a different road that we’d originally foreseen for ourselves.
There’s nothing easy about it.
Now, with that lady at the pizza place, I’m still not really sure what the right thing to do might have been. But I think it would have been defined by compassion, and choosing, and touch rather than by annoyance and aggravation and pity. And maybe recognizing that is at least a place to start. Amen.
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