6th. Sunday of
Year (B)
(Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46; First
Corinthians 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45)
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The
good of the whole, which the teaching in our first reading brings to
mind, that is, the physical safety and human dignity of society, has unquestioned
priority over individual ‘rights’.
Likewise in our second reading: the individual should,
first and foremost, endeavour to serve God and the Church:
Do everything for the glory of God, avoid giving offence.
Thus
far we can glimpse what is perhaps a fundamental characteristic of any
God-fearing, any committed Catholic and Christian, human-being: a deep-seated,
soul-satisfying, desire to give oneself to something greater than self, to some
supreme and transcendent Good; indeed, to the Personal Good Whom we in Jesus are
blessed and sublimely privileged to know as God our Father. To what degree that longing develops will
depend first of all, on our recognition and acceptance of its presence in our
mind and heart, and then upon our correspondence with the demands it makes upon
us.
Holy
Mass is the supreme offering mankind can make to God in and through His beloved
and only-begotten Son, Who -- being God incarnate, that is, both perfect God and
perfect man -- seeks to draw us to Himself that He might then be
able to draw us with Himself
to the God Who sent Him, His Father, Whom He wants to become ‘Our Father’. He sets out to do this, first of all, by His
words and His teaching: the whole of the first part of the Mass consisting of
prayers, readings from Scripture, and the Creed. He does all this that we might thereby be
inspired and enabled to participate more
intimately and fully with Him in His own sacrificial presence and Personal
commitment on the altar and in our hearts, which is the sublime promise and
ultimate purpose of the Mass.
People of God, do strive, pray, earnestly to understand
and take to heart the teaching presented in the Liturgy of the Word at Holy
Mass, that you might better love and unite yourself with Jesus’ very Person as
He offers Himself to the Father for you, and gives Himself to you
for the Father; for that teaching and that offer of Christ, together with your
personal response and commitment, are the whole substance of
salvation.
The
offertory at Mass … bread and wine which earth has given and
human hands have made … are words which show that our whole life
and work, that is our whole being, is required to be involved. The offertory is, or should be, the time when
we offer ourselves to the Father so that we too, just as the bread and wine
become the Body and Blood of Christ, may be transformed ever more completely
into living members of Christ’s Body, loving temples of the Holy Spirit, and
children of God’s heavenly and eternal family.
What
therefore, precisely, is salvation, the ‘work of our redemption’? Look at our Gospel
reading:
Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out His hand, touched
the kneeling leper and said to him, ‘Be made clean’.
For
the Jewish leaders -- those public figures seen as learned and known as powerful
-- leprosy was a sign of God’s punishment, and a leper was to be regarded as one
damned and rejected, dis-owned, by God; and so, for them, those pathetic words
the afflicted had to endlessly and loudly proclaim, ‘Unclean, unclean’, were
necessary, not primarily to protect others against the degrading, flesh-eating
sickness as God intended, but to protect ‘devout’ Israelites from incurring the
contamination of legal and liturgical uncleanness!
Jesus responded, "Well did Isaiah prophesy about you
hypocrites, as it is written: 'This people honours Me with their lips, but their
hearts are far from Me; in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines human
precepts.' You disregard God's commandment but cling to human tradition. You nullify the word of God in favour of your
tradition that you have handed on. And you do many such things.” (Mark 7:6-8,
13)
By
what miraculous power or process did Jesus correct such distortions and heal
this particular courageous victim at His feet?
By the miracle of love! God’s
divine love for us!! And indeed, the
Greek verb translated ‘touched’ can also mean ‘embraced’, Jesus embraced
him!
What
actually happened on that day and at that very moment, was that Jesus -- in a
real but initially symbolical way for our better understanding and appreciation
of His future human life and destiny -- took the man’s leprosy onto Himself, in
so far as the leper who had previously been obliged to dwell apart, making his abode outside the
camp, was made clean, whereas Jesus, we
are told in the Gospel reading, after His healing gesture, was obliged
to:
Remain outside in deserted places,
because, the man spread
the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town
openly.
Ultimately, of course, and most literally, He would take
our death upon Himself, to lift from
off our shoulders the curse of our sinfulness and raise us up with Himself to a
new possibility and experience of transfigured life.
Today, in our very sick and tormented world, we are the
hands whereby Jesus is able to ‘touch’ sick, wounded, and needy humanity … and
such contact is established whenever we try to do what Paul
advised:
Do everything for the glory of God, avoid giving offence.
However, we should never be under any illusion that we
can, of our own efforts -- least of all by seeking personal popularity, which
many justify to themselves by imagining it will then ‘brush off’, as it were, on
to Jesus Himself !! -- effect the changes needed; because, at best, we are but
the hands whereby Jesus contacts men today, it is still His divine love and
Personality which alone can make such contact salutary.
In
total ‘opposition’ to modern popular thinking and politically-inspired teaching,
therefore, we – as individual disciples of Jesus -- need to learn more and more
how to forget those human rights accorded us by men, in favour of
Jesus’ need for transparent and humble contacts with humanity today … and notice
that St. Paul wants us to thus humbly serve Mother Church
also:
Avoid giving offence whether to the
Jews or Greeks or the Church of
God.
How
many however, grasp those human rights accorded by men to attack, or at least to
give offence to, Mother Church and the world-wide People of God!! How many would politically accept such rights
while denying the Ten Commandments; or would pretend that such rights give the
truest and fullest exposition and understanding of God’s law. Can we recognize the difference between the
two as Jesus so beautifully distinguished between the Pharisees’ understanding for their own
purposes of those words ‘Unclean, unclean’, and God’s original purpose of
love revealed in them and exemplified for us by Jesus?
