Epiphany 6B 2006 Mark 1:40-45

When I was a child the biblical stories of miracles always seemed so vivid and real to me. They had a living color and tone that five years of graduate school in history and three of Seminary failed to dim. I do now understand them in a different way, however.

But the stories about lepers always filled me with a deep sense of dread and foreboding. An avid reader at a young age I remember reading a story about the leper colonies at Carrville, Louisiana, and on the island of Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands. I think I remember particularly that one of the early signs or symptoms of leprosy was that the destruction of the nerve endings in the tragus and lobe of the ear. The article warned that early diagnosis was the key to controlling the disease with the new drugs and treatments that had been developed by the end of World War II. What I do remember is, that for years afterwards, whenever I thought of leprosy or heard the leper stories in the Bible, I would pinch my tragus and earlobes to see if it still hurt! Came from having a mother who was a hypochondriac, I suppose.

Today we conclude the first chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark with the miracle of the curing of a leper – and yes, I tweaked my ear when I read it. In the Old Testament, leprosy did not include Hansen’s Disease – clinical leprosy as we know it. Any skin disease involving scaling or drainage was called a leprous disease as was scaly mold and bacterial growth on clothes and in buildings. Hansen’s appeared in the Near East about 300 BC; Greek physicians in Egypt described it about that time, and it had spread to Italy two hundred years later. Most likely, the leper in today’s gospel had Hansen’s Disease – true leprosy as we know it.

Noted last Sunday was the pell mell “and then and then and then” quality of this first chapter. And while the point about that may have seemed a little confusing, riding on top of that high speed data stream of bits and bytes, was a mainstream of insight and information about this Jesus of Nazareth.

Today we will begin to try to address what Saint Mark is really trying to tell us across the centuries from the beginning of the Early Church to now and beyond, things we might have missed as the torrent flow of the narrative swept by us and over us and around us.

The first thing that Saint Mark is trying to tell the very Early Church and us is Jesus was filled with the power of God. At his baptism God spoke his approval from the heavens and declared that Jesus was his Son, his Beloved, with whom he is well pleased.

And it follows that the second thing is that Jesus is divine himself. The unclean spirit holding sway over the poor man in the synagogue confirms this. Before Jesus shut the demon up, the demon recognized who Jesus really was. Not just a prophet, not just a teacher, but something quite different.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth.. I know who you are, the Holy One of God. The demon recognized the two natures of Jesus Christ, both the human – Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, born in a stable – and the Christ, the Holy One of God, true God from true God, begotten not made: God in man. Jesus tells the demon to shut up and get out of the man and the unclean spirit obeys instantly. This is an event of the use of the raw incandescent divine power over both the human and the supernatural. In fact, power over all that is and all that will be. The man is healed, the evil spirit is silenced and cast out.

The third thing is a demonstration that Jesus has power over ordinary human illness as well. He is told that Peter’s mother in law is ill with a fever and he takes her by the hand and pulls her up from her bed and she is well without a word from Jesus himself. Well enough to set about serving them as their hostess.

This healing story is what we call in clerical circles as content rich. It points out two other things about what Saint Mark is reporting about Jesus, the fourth and fifth things of this first chapter.

The fourth thing is that Mark is telling us that all who are touched by Jesus, whether in their Baptism, or in their prayer life, or by other Christians – all who are touched by Jesus are called to fulfill the second requirement of Jesus’ great Summary of the Law: to love our neighbors as ourselves, to serve them. Peter’s mother in law instantly starts doing what every Christian is called to do by Christ himself, to love and serve others.

The fifth thing is that by his actions Jesus is setting aside a large body of the minutely precise prescriptions of the Mosaic Law concerning the Sabbath. He exorcizes a demon on the Sabbath, right in the synagogue itself, he heals Peter’s mother in law on the Sabbath, and permits her to work on the Sabbath. Loving one’s neighbors and serving others, Jesus says by his example, is infinitely more important than the manmade proscriptions set down in much of the Mosaic Law that would prohibit and hinder such love and service.

The sixth and last thing is related to Jesus setting aside other parts of the Law that prevent or hinder humans from loving and serving others wherever and whenever is necessary.

“A leper came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean.”

Touching, really, having any thing to do with someone whose disease made them ritually unclean was one of the greatest taboos in the Mosaic Law – Leviticus devotes two full chapters to the subject of leprosy alone, 13 and 14. And the person who touched them became ritually unclean in the process according to the Law.

Jesus chose to ignore the prohibitions of the Levitical Law. He refused to accept a narrow and rigid orthodoxy which obstructed love and service to a neighbor in need. This is what Saint Mark is telling us.

AMEN

Wicomico Parish Church
PO Box 70
Wicomico Church, Virginia 22579