Sitting with the Sacred

This week’s readings:

1. Leviticus 13:1–2, 44–46
2. Psalm 32:1–2, 5, 11
3. 1 Corinthians 10:31—11:1
4. Mark 1: 40-45

What this week’s readings say to me:

In the first passage, I read that the Lord gives specific instructions to Moses and Aaron about what to do if someone has leprosy and what to tell the affected person to do.

The subject of the psalm is a different disease — the disease of sinfulness. The Good News that this psalm shares is that God offers treatment for the latter condition to everyone. The first step in the treatment is acknowledging I have this illness. The second is sharing with God and with a wise adviser or two the symptoms of it that I’m experiencing. The third step is acknowledging that I can get rid of neither the symptoms nor their cause of this illness on my own. The process of spiritual healing begins with my trust in the power of God to cure what’s sick in my soul and my awareness of and gratitude for what in me reflects God.

The third passage, the epistle, begins by reminding me that my purpose is to reflect God. The ideal is for people to be drawn to God by being able to appreciate how others and whatever is beautiful around them reflect God. I’m called to discern what guardrails come from love of God and others and what might seem like a guardrail but isn’t. It’s a wall, a human construct that divides family members and distorts their relationships with the world around them. In this passage, Paul is able to envision a world in which members of the human family, with God’s accompaniment, can come from different places and with different experiences without being divided. He urges us to honor each other’s feelings and to respect the diversity of our human family.

The Gospel passage, I see Jesus curing a disease that has separated a man from the wider community of people affected by that illness. I also see him honoring the feelings and the gifts of that person, as well as the practices of the culture both men were born into. I read that Jesus was “moved with pity” and that “he stretched out his hand [and] touched [the man] (Mark 1:41). Jesus feels empathy for the challenges the man faces.

I also notice that when the man approaches Jesus, he doesn’t actually make a request. Instead, he makes a proclamation of faith in what Jesus can do for him. In this scene, Jesus doesn’t say after the healing that faith has saved the man, but another healing scenes, he does tell the beneficiary this. I think showing the ill man making a statement rather than a request and then showing Jesus healing is another way of recognizing the man’s faith. (Skip ahead to Beyond This Week’s Readings for an important aside about this aspect of the story. Finished the PSA break? Okay. Let’s rejoin our regularly scheduled programming that’s already in progress.)

The passage could have just said that Jesus touched the man, and the man was healed. But it doesn’t say this. It stands out to me that the passage says Jesus “stretched out his hand” (Mark 1:41). Because of my muscle spasticity, I can’t fully extend my arm, so to me, the passage is making a point that Jesus’s work takes effort and that that work is closing an often wide divide between people with this condition and people without it. Now quarantining people with this condition had a practical benefit for the wider community. What’s today called Hansen’s disease is contagious, though not as contagious as it was once thought, according to Wikipedia’s Leprosy entry. The infection can affect the nerves and the lungs and can lead to amputations as well as affecting the skin. 

Jesus demonstrates knowing that communities lose irreplaceable contributions when some members are cut off from them. He also demonstrates understanding that humans are made for community, and not just conversation either, but companionship that includes touch.

Jesus’ actions after the healing also reveal wisdom, as we might expect. They remind us, for one, of the importance of letting timing shape our actions. His actions suggest he has discerned that working within the expectations of authority figures who will be challenged by his message, not giving offense, in other words, is important to fulfilling his mission at the time of this healing. He tells the newly cured man not to discuss with anyone the change in his condition or how it came about. He tells the man that instead of talking about his healing, he should go to the priest, who will see that he no longer displays the visible symptoms of the illness. Once the priest declares him clean, Jesus instructs, he should make offerings to God in gratitude for his cleansing (Mark 1:44).

I think Jesus knows the man won’t follow his instructions. Aside from Him being both fully human and fully divine at and it not being clear to us in this life how those two natures interacted, I can’t imagine the healed man being able to resist telling everyone he meets what he’s just experienced. People will no longer distance themselves at the sight of him. They’ll no longer turn away if they spot him in the distance. His appearance won’t make children scream or cry. And these are just the unpleasant reactions I imagined him receiving on account of the outward signs of his former condition. Illnesses and disabilities shape lives in so many ways that aren’t visible. I suspect Jesus not only understands that healing the man will have these effects on his life, but also he understands how tempting it is to share even a secret that is far less significant than the one the healed man knows.

Regardless of how prepared He was for the man not to follow his instructions, the reading shows Him seeking to do what He’s called to do in a way that acknowledges and responds to how the choices of others affect that calling. He responds to the news of his miracles spreading by staying in more sparsely populated areas (Mark 1:45).

We saw in last week’s Gospel that He uses time away from crowds to rest and to speak and listen to his Father. Maybe it was during one of these times away that the man who gets healed in this reading was able to approach Jesus. This week, we read that despite His efforts to give Himself that time and space, people who need help and trust that He can provide it find him anyway. God works in all our circumstances, regardless of whether our senses can detect that this is true or whether we feel like it’s true. My senses often can’t, and I often wish I felt the Spirit’s unending accompaniment more strongly.

What someone else is sharing about this week’s readings:

Olivia Cathrine Hastie reflects on what it means for God to make us clean. It means far more than removing visible or invisible dirt from us, even “dirt” as in anything that might be perceived as unpleasant or uncomfortable, either by us or by someone forming an impression about us based on what he or she can perceive. She also points out that there are different words used in different translations of how Jesus is described as feeling in the Gospel passage. As I wrote earlier, the translation used for Masses in the U.S. says he feels pity for the sick man. Ms. Hastie says other translations use the word “compassion” in the place of “pity. “

Beyond this week’s readings:

I propose that compassion makes more sense than pity in the context of the Gospel passage. I make this proposal because I’d also like to offer that pity says the person who has it only feels sorry for the person who inspires that feeling, whereas a person acts with compassion. Compassion addresses a need, whereas pity merely recognizes one. Okay, maybe sometimes pity donates a few coins or offers another temporary fix in response to a situation, but I’d like to think that compassion allows for deeper connections that extend in more directions, and it offers both material and emotional or spiritual help.

In addition to prompting me to make a distinction between pity and compassion, the Gospel passage prompts me to feel it’s important to say a bit about the relationship between faith and healing. Some believe that if a person has enough faith, he or she will be healed of whatever ails him or her physically and/or mentally. As a person who is neurodiverse and has a physical disability, this perspective is unhelpful and even hurtful. It implies, however unintentionally so, that if I had enough faith, my mind and body would work the way medical textbooks say healthy minds and bodies should.

Elsewhere, Jesus tells his disciples that a man isn’t blind because of his or his parents’ sins (John 9:3). And Jesus provides the ultimate example of faith, yet he still suffered crucifixion and died from it before rising the following Sunday. 

The miracles in the Gospels teach readers and hearers about who Jesus is. He is God. That is to say that he has authority over nature and the authority to forgive sins and liberate people from the grip of them. He is sensitive to the requests and the unacknowledged needs of people who approach him. But we were reminded last week that he didn’t stay in one town and continue to work miracles there. The inclusion of this detail suggests that not everyone who might have sought healing from Jesus in a given town was healed.

I have faith that there’s not a single form of suffering in the world that He doesn’t care about, yet despite this care that I have faith in, suffering still continues, and sometimes it’s not the result of anyone’s actions. I struggle with the idea that He wills suffering. Yet my senses compel me to accept that he allows it. Why? I won’t pretend to know all the reasons.

Lord, help me to recognize what suffering I can prevent and what suffering I can alleviate. Help me to be patient with the suffering You allow that I cannot prevent or alleviate — at least not right now. Help me to recognize if my ability to help changes. Help us to experience Your presence with us in our suffering. Amen.

Work cited

The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.