Sunday, February 15
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

 Focus Theme
Compassionate Community

 Weekly Prayer
Divine Physician, healer of bodies and souls, stretch out your hand and touch us. Cleanse our hearts from the sins that separates us from you and one another. Recreate us in your own image, and restore us in Christ, so that we may run the race and receive your prize of everlasting life. Amen.

 All Readings For This Sunday
2 Kings 5:1-14 with Psalm 30 and
1 Corinthians 9:24-27 and
Mark 1:40-45

 Focus Reading
Mark 1:40-45

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

 Reflection and Focus Questions
by Kate Huey

Focus Questions 1. How do you feel when your schedule is interrupted by someone asking for money, or complaining about a situation, or needing your time, right then? 2. What difference does it make to read the words "moved with pity" as "moved with anger"? 3. With what sort of power is Jesus contending? 4. What does faith feel like to you--like confidence that God can do something good, or that God wants to do something good, or that God will do something good? 5. Where are the places in your soul where this story touches your own pain, your own need, your own thankfulness? Text for Meditation Moved with pity, / Jesus stretched out his hand and touched.   For ideas on how to meditate with the Bible, read our article on Praying With the Bible

Tension builds. Plans have to be adjusted along the way. Dramatic healings and exorcisms apparently don't fit into a nice, quiet ministry of tending the flock. Jesus has to leave the crowd at Peter's house (last week's reading) and travel on to the neighboring towns. First, he spends some time alone, in prayer, in a deserted place; perhaps he's just a little thrown by the response to his ministry of preaching and healing. Perhaps he doesn't want to be seen as a magician, or even to be known as a worker of miracles if that keeps people from hearing the message he proclaims, from coming to understand who he is, from coming to true belief.

And then, right in front of Jesus, there appears a "dead man walking": a leper who begs to be made clean, if Jesus wills it. Fred Craddock describes the leper's loneliness, living as "a corpse haunting the edges of the community he could no longer enter." He was considered "unclean" because his physical imperfection violated the Holiness Code of his people, found in the Book of Leviticus. "God made the world in a certain ordered fashion," Graydon Snyder writes: "People were also created in a clearly defined manner. If they were born with a defect, became visibly diseased, or their body didn't function correctly, then they were unclean." In other words, this was a matter for the priests, not the doctors.

A matter for the priests, not the doctors
In their own day, in their own way, the priests were key to holding the community together, to making it work and keeping it safe. Richard Swanson elegantly explains that "ritual tends the network that communities establish to balance the world....[to] make life as comprehensible as it can be in the middle of ordinary chaos." This chaos reigned around a "still point of the universe," tended by the priests: "the place where God's finger touches the world and holds it still." Laws were not cold-hearted, meaningless regulations. Swanson observes, "With each step toward the mysterious center of the world, Jews drew nearer to that which kept them safe and stable, that which allowed them to keep their balance...." In the Temple, the priest had an important function for the sake of the whole community in regard to the leper, "to tend to the ritual of reincorporation, that dance of rejoining his cleansed body to the body of the people." Keeping that in mind will help us understand why Jesus sends the healed man to the priests, for what Swanson calls "the ritual of reincorporation."

Safe to touch

Have we somehow progressed beyond treating some people as unclean and untouchable because of disease? Swanson says that we're tempted to assume that Jesus, being who he is, has knowledge of how safe it is to touch the man; in other words, he has a modern, informed perspective on disease. But don't we post-Enlightenment, scientifically minded folks know people we'd rather not see, let alone touch? Skin disease is difficult enough, but for a long time people with cancer and later those with HIV/AIDS have experienced a distance that surrounds them once they're diagnosed.

What about people with mental illness? There are probably no lonelier people, even among our church members, than the families of people who are mentally ill. Our awkward silence and discomfort in the face of their suffering enable us to avoid letting our lives touch theirs. Are we afraid that we might "catch" their pain and their problems? Swanson says that in every age there are "unclean" people and things "that have been touched by the inexorable, the uncontrollable, the uncanny." Uncleanness pushes them to the edges of the community, like that leper. But we're not so far away from that same fate, Swanson says: "All it takes is one catastrophic illness and all financial plans are out the window, and (with not too much bad luck) any one of us is out of our house and on the outside edge of a community that had been our home." We could so easily find ourselves on the margin, too, where most folks wouldn't want their lives to touch ours.

No gentle healing

Once we sense how the leper might have felt, we have to deal with Jesus' reaction to his plea. "Moved with pity" sounds nice until we see a footnote that other ancient texts read "with anger." While the thought of Jesus being angry at a leper asking to be made clean may disturb us, it's probably the accurate translation. As texts were copied over and over, scribes sometimes substituted a more acceptable word for any that might not fit with their image of Jesus. Every copy made from that edited version would then preserve that change, but those made from unedited copies would preserve the earlier word. So scholars tend to go with the more difficult translation when there's a conflict between texts, and then try to understand why it was used. We commonly say that a person's pain touches our heart, but Graydon Snyder reminds us that "in Hebrew thought compassion comes from the guts." So Jesus felt something powerful, something physical, when he looked at this man, an emotion better translated, Richard Swanson says, as "Jesus felt his stomach turn." That this was no gentle healing, no "balm in Gilead," is indicated by other phrases in the text, translated as "sternly warning," and "sent him away at once." Swanson says that "snorting" and "casting him out" would be closer to the real meaning Mark was trying to convey. Perhaps Jesus was angry at the interruption, or at the added suffering of the man's isolation. Or maybe there is something more.

Stephen L. Cook notes that the verb for "sent away" is also used for expelling demons, and he sees in this cleansing a much bigger picture, "God's messianic rebirthing of God's covenant community. Like the victim in the lesson, all of us stand unclean and excluded from real intimacy with the Holy One and with each other....The good news of the gospel, however, is that God is reversing all our estrangement." Here in the first chapter of his Gospel, Mark already has Jesus doing the things that will create tension between him and the religious authorities of his day. Cook says that the priests "lack the spiritual imagination" that would open their hearts and minds to the deeper meaning of the Holiness Code. After all, we recall that this is the "Holy One of God" who "comes to bring earth the very ideal of wholeness to which the ritual code pointed." From a distance, we can criticize our faith ancestors until we reflect on our own limits and expectations about how God will and should work. Cook urges us "to think much more 'out of the box' than these ancient priests. The new redeeming work of God in Jesus is paving a broad, inclusive road leading to a holy Zion. Upon it, God is drawing all redeemed people back home." God, he says, is "washing clean all Zion's children, soaking out all our muck and scrubbing it away." His words remind us that what happens in this story is more a cleansing than a healing, although the man's restoration to his community is a kind of healing itself.

Trying to keep things quiet

Ironically, as the leper is restored to his community, Jesus himself becomes a kind of leper, banished, in a sense, by his own popularity and power, the overwhelming needs of the people, and perhaps the rumbles of tension between him and the priests. It's no wonder that he tries to keep things quiet by telling the now-clean man not to tell anyone what has happened. Fred Craddock says, "The publicity created audiences, not congregations, and Jesus had to avoid the towns, keeping himself in the countryside." But it's no use, because word continues to spread. Mike Graves contrasts the women at the tomb at the end of the Gospel with this former leper: "So while Mark ends with a commission to tell, given to followers who don't tell (what might be called 'the great omission'), the Gospel begins with a leper who is warned not to tell but does."

With the man on his way home to his people, bursting with the news, Jesus heads out beyond the edge of town, but the people come after him anyway. Deborah Krause conveys something of Jesus' deeply human experience of this "success," for Jesus is "anguished and emotional, not dispassionate and 'in control'." It's clear, as she says, that "the kingdom of God is on the loose. It is beyond even Jesus' control....It is a mission that invites conflict in its challenge to any power that does not intend peace (shalom), justice, and love." This didn't exactly fit the expectations of some who looked for God to send a different kind of deliverer. Fred Craddock says, "All the way to the cross Jesus will be trying to get those who think 'where the messiah is, there is no misery' to accept a new perspective--'where there is misery, there is the messiah'."

How might the earliest Christians have heard this story, and how did it shape their understanding of ministry and of themselves as a compassionate community? Graydon Snyder notes the transformation that happens when people are touched by Jesus through the Body of Christ, for "once the church touched a person who was unclean or ill, that person became part of the faith community....he or she once again had a family, and furthermore, became a functioning part of early Christian ministry." In this very first chapter of Mark's Gospel, we've already watched Simon's mother-in-law become the church's "first deacon," and now this former outcast is preaching to the crowds!

Even a personal faith isn't a private one

We must also ask how the church hears this story today, and how it shapes our understanding of ministry, our understanding of ourselves as a compassionate community. We're tempted to keep our faith personal, that is, a private relationship with Jesus that changes our lives, at least on the inside, but Megan McKenna cautions us: "It is not enough to relate personally to Jesus and then live off a moment of healing or connection. Instead, we must return again and again to Jesus' word and to the company of other followers and walk the way together." We need one another, a community of faith, in which we can better understand who Jesus is, and what that means in our lives, that is, what it will mean to follow Jesus faithfully. We're called to serve and heal and make whole, to restore and rebuild and reach out.

This call, however, while it sounds beautiful, is not always easy. Dianne Bergant observes that suffering exacts a toll because it "can sap our energy, jeopardize everything we have achieved, and leave us unproductive and feeling worthless." Suffering isolates us from our community and affects our inner well-being, reminding us of "our own finitude," and our "vulnerability and our desperate need of each other and God." But the final challenge on this text comes from Gérald Caron, who questions the way we objectify one another with labels such as "the sick, the lepers, the poor, the downtrodden." Isn't this a powerful way to draw a line between "us" and "them"? We are "we," and they, well, they are not "they" but "the," almost a something instead of human beings, sisters and brothers. Caron also suggests that we think twice about using the word "wholeness," as if people who are sick "are not whole persons. It is as if wholeness and impediments, physical or otherwise, were incompatible." However, his even greater challenge is to the compassionate community itself to be healed in a very real sense of its own illness, for illness is one way to understand alienation and brokenness, and sin as well. And so we hear this story, just as those early Christians told it and heard it, and, like them, we let ourselves and our lives be shaped and cleansed and remade, so that we too might be restored.

 For Further Reflection

Wendell Berry, 20th century
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.

Willa Cather, 20th century
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

Weekly Seeds is a source for meditation and prayer based on the readings of the "Lectionary," a plan for weekly Bible readings used in Protestant, Anglican and Roman Catholic churches throughout the world. When we pray and study the Bible using the Lectionary, we are praying and studying with millions of others. We invite you to continue the conversation on our "Opening the Bible" forum at http://i.ucc.org.

Weekly Seeds is a service of the Congregational Vitality Initiative, Local Church Ministries, United Church of Christ. Bible texts are from the New Revised Standard Version, © 1989 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The Revised Common Lectionary is © 1992 Consultation on Common Texts. Used by permission. The Ancient Christian Devotional is © 2007 by Thomas C. Oden and ICCS, and is published by InterVarsity Press. Used by permission.