Lepers are bad and stuff and they are smelly and look weird and don’t belong and I don’t like them and cause you know the thing and so umm …. HEY JESUS WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING!
Mark 1:40-45; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Psalm 30; 2 Kings 5:1-14
Leprosy is a rather interesting disease. Now, to be honest, when the Bible mentions leprosy, it probably doesn’t actually mean leprosy, it really meant a generic disease of the skin. And back in Bible times, it was kind of a big deal. If the priests, who happened to serve as the medical consultants as well, decided you had this kind of skin disease, your life was changed, essentially, forever. From Leviticus 14:45-46: “‘The person with such an infectious skin 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.'”
It makes those with these kind of disease the ultimate outsiders. Can you imagine having to yell “Unclean! Unclean!” every time you see someone? Yet in our gospel lesson, one man with this kind of suffering defied convention and Jewish law and begged Jesus, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”
Now there’s any number of ways Jesus could have reacted. He would have been well within his legal rights to tell the leper to get away from him and go back to the hole he crawled out of, or something to that effect. An easy argument could be made that Jesus would have had every moral right to do so as well — it just wouldn’t do for the Son of God to get leprosy would it? But instead Jesus did something completely unthinkable; he touched the leper.
You see, we know now that when it comes to leprosy, if that’s indeed what this man was suffering from, is incredibly not contagious. 95% of the population has a natural immunity, and, even if you’re one of the 5% that aren’t immune, you pretty much have to be coughed upon by a person with leprosy to get it. (Or, oddly enough, handle, eat, or share dirt with a nine-banded armadillo.) But back in Bible-times, leprosy was thought to be extremely contagious, so much so that just being around a leper was considered enough to catch it. So when this guy showed up in front of Jesus, he actually reached out and touched the guy, saying, “I am willing; be clean!” And of course the man was healed.
It’s really not out of character for Jesus to do this kind of thing. He was all about meeting with “outsiders”, be they tax collectors, sinners, diseased, or just disaffected by the religious elite. In fact it seems like the people that most often were around Jesus were those who didn’t really fit with the rest of the culture. Look at his disciples: Peter kept trying to get in Jesus’ way, James and John had anger issues, one was a terrorist, one a tax collector, another doubted the resurrection, and another betrayed him.
In its early days, Christianity tended to be the religion of those who weren’t mainstream — slaves, servants, or people who just didn’t fit in. Though it spread quickly to all aspects of society, Pliny the Younger wrote from Turkey to Emporer Trajan, describing the trials being held to convict people of Christianity, that “many of every age, of every social class, even of both sexes, are being called to trial and will be called. Nor cities alone, but villages and even rural areas have been invaded by the infection of this superstition.”
After the time of Constantine, when Christianity’s popularity increased tremendously, it became “mainstream”. By the Middle Ages and into the Renaissances, it was Christians doing to non-Christians what had been done to Christians by the Romans: persecution, killings, and the like. Now, Christianity is still the mainstream, though with an ever-growing number of marginalized, somewhat hostile “outsiders”.
What our job is now is, quite simple, to reach these outsiders. Now, there’s a particular visitor here today, in large part because I asked him to come. I had a friend of mine come up today and look like an “outsider” to our community, because I was rather curious how we at Holy Cross would react to someone who isn’t quite as mainstream as we’re used to.
We’re in a new era when it comes to how we do ministry in the Christian church. We’re no longer in a time when the people interested in “church” are like us. Brigham City has a few subcultures that need to hear about Jesus, but no-one is telling them. And they look like, well, they look like me and my friends. Earrings and tattoos, jeans and t-shirts. I’m convinced that it’s those people who are the future of the Church, not just Holy Cross, but Christianity in general.
It’s a little outside of all of our comfort zones, I know. I’m sure Jesus disciples were more than a little worried about the leper Jesus was talking to in our gospel, but if we are really called to follow Jesus, it’s the “outsiders” who should be most prominent on our radar.