Covenant United Methodist Church

Mark 1:40-45

“What Has Jesus Done for You Lately?”

February 12, 2012

The gospels have several accounts of times when Jesus healed people of leprosy.  It was a terrible disease, and one of the worst parts of it was that when it was detected the person affected was suddenly to be cut off from everyone else for the sake of public health and safety.  It brought a lifelong sentence of quarantine, however long or short that life would suddenly become.

For the sake of the community, there could be no exceptions.  The Old Testament tells us that King Uzziah of Judah was in the temple itself when the high priest spotted signs of leprosy on his forehead and they rushed him out right away.  The Bible says that

“King Uzziah was leprous to the day of his death, and being leprous lived in a separate house, for he was excluded from the house of the Lord.  His son Jotham was in charge of the palace of the king, governing the people of the land.” [II Chronicles 26:21]

The disease took him out of the worshiping community and out of his home.  It took his power and his throne and gave them to someone else, all in the space of a moment.  And he was treated better than most.  One of the great losses that came with the disease was the loss of relationship.  No longer would someone be Susannah or Jedediah or Simon.  They would become Susannah the Leper or Jedediah the Leper or Simon the Leper.  Eventually, they would become just “a leper”.

The Law said,

“The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip [that would be like making someone today wear a surgical mask all the time] and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’  He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean.  He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.” [Leviticus 13:45-46]

If there was any hope, it was in misdiagnosis.  There were some diseases that looked like leprosy but were not as severe.  They were characterized by skin problems that might go away.  It was the duty of the priests to take a look if someone who had been declared a leper suddenly was able to say, “Look!  It’s gone!” and then to restore them to the community, in some way to make them a person again, and there was a whole series of rituals to recognize that and restore them, so that everyone could see publicly that they were welcomed again.  That was the process that Jesus probably wanted to set in motion, because

“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.’” [Mark 1:43-44]

Luke describes another time when ten lepers came to him in a group and Jesus did the same thing.  He told them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” [Luke 17:14]  Healing and restoration to community go hand-in-hand.

Last weekend I got roped into helping friends of mine look for furniture.  I hate doing that.  It means walking all over showrooms, watching my one friend run up to every couch and chair with a handful of upholstery swatches and squint at them, then make her husband do the same thing, and then ask me to weigh in if they have a disagreement about which shade of burnt umber goes better with olive.  This time was a little bit worse than usual, though, because one of my friends was having a rough time with arthritis that goes back to an accident in high school.

So there we were on the second floor of a furniture store, having climbed some steep steps to get there, at the end of the day, and he said something about it to an especially energetic saleswoman who was trying to shuttle everyone from room to room to room.  She tried to be understanding, but I could tell that she had no idea how to do it, because she said something to him about how maybe someday he might experience a healing.  I think she lost a sale that way.

“I don’t want a healing,” he muttered, “I want her to stop rushing me around.”  I don’t think what he meant was that he enjoys his aches and pains, and wouldn’t want them to go away.  I think what he meant was that he has, over the years, come to see his limitations as part of the way things just are for him, and that what he really wants is respect for that from other people, too.  Let him deal with it on his own terms, thank you, and in the meantime stop seeing the condition and look at the person.

The Susan Komen Foundation has been in the news a lot recently.  One of the ways that they raise money for breast cancer research and prevention is through a great piece of music called Sing for the Cure that you can get on CD and that is performed live from time to time.  It represents the work of various composers who have taken stories of people affected by breast cancer and used them as the basis for a string of choral pieces, connected by narration written by the people whose stories they are based on.  One narration that sticks with me runs this way:

“Corinne and her small children have been coloring together on the floor.  Suddenly she feels something tickling her head and she brushes it off, several times, but the sensation continues.  When her children begin to giggle, she finally gets up to look in the mirror.  To her delight, she sees that they have colored her bald head with blue magic marker.  They say, ‘Mommy, we wanted to give you back your hair.’

Judy has a student named Michael.  One morning he walks into class bearing a crumpled plant.  Handing it to her he says, ‘Here, Miss Casey.  This is from my mom.  She says that nobody should have me and breast cancer in the same year.’”[1]

That is about a person, not her illness.  It points to the strength that people can find in connection and the grace that comes from facing whatever we face together with one another and with the Lord.

When the leper that Jesus healed knew that he had been healed, rightly or wrongly, he skipped the formalities and went right out to tell people about it.  He went right out and took his place in the community from which he had been separated by his former illness.  He went right back to being whole.  He had always been whole in the eyes of God, but now he was whole in his own eyes, too, and could be whole in the eyes of the people whom he told what Jesus had done for him.

That is a great gift, and one that is there for all of us.  Apparently, enough people who heard the former leper believed him and enough people saw their own need

“that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.” [Mark 1:45]

Things have not changed so much that people do not still define themselves in terms of their illness or difference.  I know a woman with cerebral palsy who has an annoying habit of referring to herself as “a wheelchair”.  She’ll say things like, “They stuck us wheelchairs in the back of the auditorium,” or, “People get nervous about us wheelchairs in restaurants.”  On the other hand, there are times when she’ll say, “Don’t get us wheelchairs mad – we’ll run you over, and we’re motorized.”

For a lot of people, the difficulty that they live with is not something so visible.  It might be an addiction, a learning disability, a hearing problem, some trauma in the past whose memory haunts them, or just about anything that a human being can experience.  It might be a sense of shame over something totally insignificant to anyone else, but important to them.  It might be a sense of guilt for some sin, or a grief that just will not seem to end.  Almost anything can cut people off from one another and from parts of themselves.

That is where we need to hear people like that leper run up to us and say, “Guess what!  There’s someone who can help!”  That’s when we need to go seeking Jesus, and find him, and and again and again, “I do choose.  Be made clean.” [Mark 1:41]  And that’s when it’s up to us to spread the word.

Tell me, what has Jesus done for you lately?