Sixth Sunday, Year B, 11 FEB, 2024: Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46; 1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45
There’s a real conflict between Jesus’ desire to heal the leper and that man’s disobedience in spreading the news of Jesus’ “power.”
In Jesus, God’s merciful, compassionate drive to heal and restore humanity is at work. It is a creative act to reorder creation to what it is meant to be before we went off track. The focus is God’s gracious intention for our right relationship with God.
The reaction of the healed man reduces Jesus to a problem-solver who bails me out of an impasse. As such, Jesus’ healing would only remove the symptoms of my disordered state, allowing me to walk in circles in my same old dead-end. Nothing has really changed in my relationship to God or in my life. I have reduced the ministry of Christ to a quick fix.
In other words, this man is cured of his disease, but not healed of his disorder. He had less compassion for himself, less insight into his infirmity than Jesus does. Jesus Christ would have led him back to a fuller life in God, but he let himself be arrested in his unlikely bail-out.
It doesn’t have to be like that. In Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus frees the possessed man of the legion of demons, that man fully responds by wanting to follow Jesus. But Jesus sent him back to his people to announce what God’s mercy—not Jesus’ power, by the way—had done for him. This is a complete healing, reintegrating him into his community as a herald of God’s Kingdom.
Is my reliance in Jesus Christ based on what he can fix, or how he can challenge my present life to grow deeper into God?