Sharing the Word – 11th February 2018
2nd Reading, 1 Corinthians 10 : 31 -11 : 1
Gospel; Mark 1 : 40 – 45.
The first reading shows how pertinent the strict application of the Mosaic Law of cleanliness was to the Jewish community. The whole chapter from which the reading is taken shows the various forms of diseases of the skin. The reading ends up with how a person suffering from leprosy should be treated, like an outcast. In the Gospel, we see a leper, an outcast, present himself to Jesus and Jesus’ love and compassion for him cures him. Jesus even touches him which was unlawful. In fact, people of Jesus’ time fled at the sight of a leper or at hearing his cry of ‘Unclean!’ If a leper tried to approach a person, let alone a rabbi, he would be stoned or to the least, warded off.
The leper was an outcast by law. He was required to live outside the city and to cry out “Unclean! Unclean! whenever anyone approached him. They suffered from rejection, abandonment, discrimination and marginalisation. In the last years of my primary school, I visited the leper camp in Mbingo-Kom almost every Friday afternoon with the priest with whom I grew up. Among my school mates, I heard horrible stories about the lepers there. They would say lepers were rejected as cursed by God for some sin. They had to be alienated from family and society to wait for death. My friends would even refuse to eat the juicy sugar canes they gave us when we visited. My white priest would play with them and tell me they were normal people, just they were suffering from a contagious disease. He did not fear what others feared. He wanted the lepers to know God’s love. From the Gospel today, we see the same attitude with Jesus. He shows God’s love and touches the untouchable!
We live in a world where there is a lot of segregation, discrimination and marginalisation. Each of us, to some extent has felt the pain of rejection. Rejection or marginalisation makes us feel that we are worthless. It makes us want to shrivel up or even openly rebel. It is like a shower of hail falling on tender young flowers. Each of us longs to be accepted, accepted for what we are. When someone accepts us, they give us the feeling that we are worthwhile. Acceptance means that we are free to be ourselves. Even though there is need for growth and change, we are not being forced.
It is the love and acceptance of others that makes me the unique person that I am. When I am accepted only for work I do, then I am not unique, for someone else can do the same work perhaps even better than I can. But when I am accepted for what I am, then I become unique and irreplaceable and I can blossom to my full potential. This is how Jesus Christ accepts us. Jesus has touched and cured us in several conditions – conditions we wished we were not in.
In secondary school, I read the experiences of a young seminarian in India where the caste system is apparently still prevalent. Louis was helping out in a parish when their water supply failed. He went to the well of a high class Hindu and begged for water. The man refused and told Louis to go away. He could not share his well with an untouchable. Two years later, Louis was sent to work at a Leprosy center. He reports that the greatest suffering of the patients was not the dreaded disease but the total rejection by their families and the society. Making his rounds, Louis suddenly stopped in his tracks! There, before him, stricken with leprosy, was the man who had refused him water two years earlier. Louis spoke to him, befriended him, did not fear to touch him. The man was humbled and showed signs of accepatnce.
The Gospel of today challenges us to inquire in our own lives who are our own outcasts, our rejected. How do we create our own ‘lepers?’ Each of us needs to ask who are the people we have written off, consciously or unconsciously as outside the pale of ‘respectable people’. Who are the people we have labelled? These are our lepers of today. I guess, there are more today than ever! AIDS patients, Alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, Moslems, other Christians, Hindus, Blacks, whites, people from other families or village, the illiterates, those not as intelligernt as we are, those with infirmities, those not from the same social stratus as us, those from the opposing political party, those who have not had the opportunity to ‘fall bush’, those from unpopular families, those we consider wretched? Have you ever been labelled wretched, like me, by a Christian from a ‘rich family’? When we as Christians segregate, build fences to exclude, how do we act as channels for the grace of God?
Jesus’ acceptance and touch of the leper teaches us another lesson; that God’s mercy and love speak more eloquently than words. Many of us are afraid to touch our rejected. We may give a few dimes to a beggar, but making sure there is no contact between, sometimes not even eye contact. Jesus did not stand off or keep a distance. He was not afraid to touch the rejected of His time; the sick, the sinners, the lepers we see in today’s Gospel and even the dead. Physical touch gives us what precisely gives a sense of warmth, joy and acceptance. Touching announces, ‘I accept you just as you are’. Also, when we reject, we sin. When, we sin, sin infects our souls and alters our lives into anguished isolation, cut off from God and the community of Jesus’ followers, the Church. The action of the leper tells us to turn with confidence to God’s mercy which is for all and in all conditions without limits.
Every Christian who is privileged, needs to ask her/himself whether s/he is segregative. Do you marginalise others because they are not of your ‘class’? From here, each Christian family and community needs to ask itself whether it is a closed group of self-contented people or whether it is faithful to the challenge of Jesus to reach out to those beyond its doors and seek to make community with them.
Again, do not expect that making community with the ‘rejected’ will keep you at peace with those who still cling to the status quo of rejection. “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside in places where nobody lived”. This is the cross of a Christian and the Christian community! When you act with compassion and love, do not expect that all people will agree with you. All the same, by your action of breaking down the fences of segregation, you will be saying like Jesus, “I will, be cured” and our little spots of darkness will be removed as well as our pretenses that we are angelic. Paul tells us in the second reading to do all these for the glory of God.
A Little Prayer.
Thank You Jesus, Lord of Heaven and earth. You hear the cry of the rejected. Save me from darkness, sin of self-contentment and disease of rejection and body. Cure me and turn my darkness into light. Make me able to bear your light to where You send me. May I be filled with a warm heart and kind hands. Amen.
Have a Blessed Week!
Bobe Talla Toh
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