Reflection - Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

In 1973 I was invited to attend a Sunday Mass in a little chapel attached to the Tumi hospital in Suva, in Fiji. What I did not know was that Tumi hospital had an out-patients clinic for people with leprosy. Or Hansen’s disease as it is now called.

I looked down at the feet of a woman kneeling in front of me and the realisation that she had no toes on one of her feet stunned me. She was a leper! I wanted to leave but felt I couldn’t.

With a mind whirling in something like panic we left the hospital but not before I was introduced to an elderly Fijian gentleman who was a patient. He was gracious at my hesitancy to shake his hand. How many people subjected him to this humiliation?

The need for human contact is keen in us as human beings. The leper in the gospel was ostracised by being forced to live outside the village in empty places. He had to wear torn clothing, heap dirt on his head and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean’. What a humiliating, degrading life he endured!

With this context in mind, a leper approaches Jesus, (he was acting against the law), and kneels before him and says, “ If you want to, you can heal me.’’ He really has a cheek to act in this way; the Jewish law forbade lepers from approaching ‘çlean people’.

But Jesus reaches out his hand and touches the leper. This action of touching makes Jesus unclean automatically. He needed to go and perform the rites of purity that would make him clean again.

We understand the need for the law about exclusion in this Covid pandemic world; this was the way the healthy were separated from the unhealthy. Society needs laws. But the human cost to the leper was devastating: no social contact until his skin disease passed, he was humiliated, feared and despised.

And Jesus touched him. His response was to reach out and make contact with the leper. Once again, the importance of touch, the humanising effect that a loving touch has on him and on us.

The gospel says that Jesus becomes angry and it seems, rails against the disease and what it has done to this unfortunate man –it made him a non-person. From the earliest Christian times followers came to know how importance healing was in the life of Jesus.

Though the cured man is sternly told by Jesus to tell no one about his healing, he ignores this command. It is easy to understand how elated he was, to be able to resume his normal life, to eat and sleep at home, to be home.

The irony here is that Jesus becomes so popular as a healer that he cannot go into villages and towns. He assumes the solitary life like the leper.

His healing power will attract crowds, but his purpose is to tell people of God’s reign on earth. This requires faith in him and his message: a different proposition altogether. 

Columban Fr Gary Walker is currently living at the Columban house in Sandgate, Brisbane.