Brief synopsis of the readings: The first reading comes from the Old Testament Book of Leviticus. Here God instructs Moses and Aaron on what to do if someone appears to have leprosy. The person in question is to present himself to Aaron (or one of his descendants). If the priest determines that it is leprosy, the person is instructed to go into mourning and avoid contact with anyone. In Mark’s Gospel a leper came to Jesus and asked Jesus to heal him. Moved with pity Jesus touches the leper and heals him and instructs him to present himself to the priest (and be declared healed). The now clean man then told everyone about this and more people began to come to Jesus for healing.
Long time readers of this blog know well the frustration I feel when we are called to understand images that were well known in Jesus’ time but are obscure to us. Whether it be shepherds or crops, I’m a city boy who has to do all sorts of research to understand those analogies. But today’s readings speak to something that we all understand: illness.
As a matter of fact I believe we think more about illness these days than they did during Jesus’. Back then if someone got sick there really wasn’t much anyone could do except pray and hope. The person either got better or died and there wasn’t a good way to predict ahead of time which way it would go.
Because so much illness back was bewildering it was commonly assumed that illness was somehow a curse from God that would either be cured by God or not. And into this paradigm comes leprosy. Now unfortunately it’s easy to draw a line from the leprosy spoken in the Bible with modern day Hansen’s Disease and it’s not.
Hansen’s Disease may or may not have existed back then (there are arguments on both sides) but what they call leprosy could have been any disfigurement with the skin. There were strong rules back then on how a person could be declared “unclean” and how a person could, if the disfigurement clears up, rejoin the community. While there was some fear of contagion the greater fear was that you could become unclean yourself if you associated with an unclean person. That’s why they were ordered to stay away from the rest of us.
So of course Jesus, being Jesus, destroys all of this. When the leper approached Jesus, Jesus was supposed to stay away. There was no tradition of one person healing another and the leper probably approached Jesus more out of desperation than anything else. The fact that Jesus was able to heal him gave clear evidence of Jesus’ divine power and it’s no surprise that he became so popular.
Over two thousand years later we’ve made astounding progress with regard to diseases. We know about bacteria and viruses, how diseases are spread, and most importantly how diseases are cured. We no longer think that sick people are cursed by God or that healing is beyond our power. The horrific fear we used to have for polio and smallpox are now relegated to history books.
And yet… We’ve developed an entire new fear around disease. While we’ve made incredible strides in eradicating diseases like polio and smallpox we’re still battling cancer, ebola, and measles. And we’re still battling death. Until about 100 years ago everyone lived with the reality that diseases as common as pneumonia and appendicitis could easily kill someone of any age and it was a rare family who did not lose a loved one in childhood. In the 20th Century a person’s life expectancy rose nearly 30 years; that’s wonderful news but it also gave us a certain hubris toward disease and death.
We’ve come to see disease and death as something we’ve conquered and when evidence shows us wrong, we blame the victim or find some conspiracy. This past summer the news was filled with stories about ebola, a horrific disease that is not easily transmissible. Many in our country expressed unfounded fears and called for silly restrictions on travel that ignored simple science. Clearly this spoke more to our fears than our intelligence.
As I write this I find our country in a heated debate over vaccinations for measles. All our God given intelligence points to the efficacy of vaccinating ourselves (and primarily our children) against a disease that can be fatal. And yet there are those who claim the real enemy is not the disease but the vaccine. Simply put they chose to go back to a time where preventable disease had the upper hand. Their unplaced fear has called them to go back in history to a place of ignorance.
Instead we need to take a page from this part of Mark’s Gospel. Jesus’ healing of the leper (I believe) foreshadows our current view on disease. The leper was able to rejoin the community and have a full life, but eventually he died. I hope at the end of his life he was able to look back on his life with joy.
The mistake we make in the twenty first century is the belief that we can successfully cure disease to the point where we won’t die. That’s simply not true. No matter what we do the death rate is still the same: one per person. We should look at disease not as a way of avoiding death but as a way of enjoying the life we have. We don’t know how many years the leper had after Jesus’ healing but we do know that those years were much better because he rejoined his community. I pray this former leper approached death with joy and courage because his life was fulfilling and did not approach death with desperation, looking for Jesus to “cure” the end of his life.
I’ll gladly admit that my 17 years in hospice work has affected my view of approaching death. There are some diseases that we can cure, and some we can’t. No matter who we are, something is going to cause our death. I believe that we shouldn’t spend time or limited resources chasing cures that just won’t happen. We shouldn’t use our limited ability to cure disease in an attempt to live forever and believe that there is always a cure around the corner.
Instead let us see disease as the leper in Mark’s Gospel: being cured allows us to live well instead of living forever. Let us approach death with the recognition that we have been able to live all our years well.