6th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (B)

Moved with pity, he [Jesus]stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, “I do will it. Be made clean.”

Mk 1:40-45

v. 41. Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, “I do will it. Be made clean.”

Touched him:

To touch a leper would have seemed at the time an un-thinkable action; even if it did not actually violate the Law, it brought ceremonial defilement, quite apart from the loathsome appearance of leprosy. Montefiore writes: 'Here we begin to catch a new note in the ministry of Jesus: his intense compassion for the outcast, the sufferer, who, by his sin, or by his suffering, which was too often regarded as the result of sin, had put himself outside respectable Jewish society, who found himself rejected and despised by man and believed himself rejected and despised by God. Here was a new and lofty note, a new and exquisite manifestation of the very pity and love which the prophets had demanded.'

v. 44. Then he said to him, “See that you tell no one anything, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed; that will be proof for them.”

For the procedure involved see Lev. 14.

 Further Discussion

This story clearly circulated at one time as an isolated unit of tradition without any note of time or place.  Presumably, therefore, St Mark's motive for placing it here was theological. He may have intended it as a sort of final appendix to a typical day of Jesus, showing that Christ's power was able to deal even with leprosy - a claim which, would certainly have seemed something of a climax to the contemporary reader. For leprosy, besides being a loathsome and disfiguring disease, involved ritual uncleanness and complete segregation from the community and religious life of Israel.

The Law could do nothing for the leper. It could only protect the rest of the community against him. Moreover it is probably significant that according to the rabbis, the healing of leprosy was 'as difficult as the raising of the dead'. What, therefore, the Old Testament religion - the Law - could not do was done readily by Jesus. Cf. Mt 11:5ff and Lk 7:22ff for the view that the cleansing of leprosy was an expected sign of the Messiah's arrival.

The text, when studied in detail, presents several problems, some of them concealed in the English translation.

(a) It is uncertain whether the words “and kneeling” (v. 40) are original; but probably they are, and, if so, stress is laid on the emotional urgency of the leper's approach.

(b) Instead of “moved with pity” (v. 41) we should almost certainly read, with many MSS (MSS stands for “manuscripts”) , “moved with anger”. Why? Because in v.43 the words “sternly charged” implies indignant displeasure, or at least a wave of great emotion. Moreover, the word translated as “dismissed” really means “drove out”. It is often used in connection with the exorcism of demons (cf. 1:12).

(c) The last words of v. 44 mean literally: 'for a testimony to them'. It is unclear as to testimony to whom about what.

(d) V. 45 reads “The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter.” The New American Bible assumes that the one who went away was the healed leper and what he began to publicize was the healing. The Greek, however, could equally mean: “And he [i.e. Jesus ] went out and preached [the gospel] constantly and spread abroad the word [of God] so that he could no longer .. .' In some ways this would be the more natural interpretation of the Greek.

A great deal of discussion has not so far produced any generally agreed solution of these difficulties. Perhaps the most likely solution is that the story in its present form arose out of a conflation at some stage of two accounts of the incident told from rather different points of view.

• According to one account Jesus was moved to pity by the leper's appeal, healed him by a touch and a word, and bound him to secrecy, as in so many other healing stories in the Gospel.

• According to the other account, Jesus' reaction was one of indignation against the leprous spirit which had produced the agonized urgency of the man's appeal. In this state of extreme emotion he 'drove out' the spirit and bade the man carry out the prescribed procedure for having himself declared clean and readmitted to the community.

In the present conflate form of the story Jesus' strong emotion and his action, originally directed towards the leprous spirit, have come to be applied to the man, and the command to silence has been rather awkwardly combined with the instruction: go, show yourself to the priest (v. 44).

Be that as it may, St Mark's understanding of the story as he gives it is likely to have been:

(a) That the anger of Jesus arose from his opposition to the combined forces of disease, death, sin, and Satan.

(b) That Jesus wished, as usual, to conceal his identity.

(c) That the command to carry out the requirements of the Law showed Jesus as fully obedient to this.

(d) That the leper, through his action in having himself officially declared clean (v. 44b), would bear witness to all and sundry that there was a power among them capable of healing leprosy, a task, as we have seen, reputed to be as difficult as raising the dead.