Daily Lesson for January 16, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Mark chapter 1 verses 40 through 45a:

40 A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ 41Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ 42Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. 43After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, 44saying 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.’ 45But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly . . .”

In 2009 Pope Benedict canonized Father Damien, a Belgium-born missionary whose ministry took him to work in a colony of lepers on the island of Molokai, Hawaii, where he himself later contracted leprosy. Father Damien has become a universal symbol of compassion for and identification and solidarity with those who suffer. Living and dying amongst the outcasts of the world, in a twist of irony the State of Hawaii later chose a statute of Father Damien to sit in the center of Statuary Hall in the US Capitol.

Jesus came in solidarity with the reviled and excluded.  He welcomed the prostitutes, sat with the tax collectors, and as in today’s Lesson reached out and touched the lepers. And like Father Damien’s later, Jesus ministry brought him to a place of exile along with the ostracized. In the story today, the leper came to see Jesus in the center of the village — a bold and daring act for a social outcast to make. Jesus reached out his hand to the man; but not without cost. By the end of the story, Jesus was living amongst the outcast, no longer able to come into the village. His ministry had made like the leper to whom he ministered.

I have so much respect for those who like Jesus and Father Damien have risked their own exile to minister amongst the outcasts. I think of friends I know who in the 1980s minister to AIDS patients, or more recently to those suffering with the frightening disease of Ebola. 

But truly we each have a leper in our lives, someone for whom to minister to or care for or reach out a hand of friendship towards. And we hear them say the same thing the leper said. “You can heal me if you choose.”  And with our lives we say what Jesus said, “I do choose.”

Not all who touch lepers receive a place in Statuary Hall.  But there is an even greater place to which we aspire. And though reaching out may make us exiled and outcast here on earth, Jesus said it would make us welcome into heaven. 

And in the end that’s really the only place where belonging really matters.