Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 14, 2021 – Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46; 1 Corinthians 10:331-11:1; Mark 1:40-45

Cyndi Lauper, best known for her hits in the middle eighties, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “True Colors,” but now she is best known for her Cosentyx commercials. She talks about the anguish of appearing on stage with psoriasis, of having it cover her arms in embarrassment. And the commercial goes on to talk about other people who suffer from psoriasis and also from psoriatic arthritis which is not only embarrassing, itchy, and painful, but also a very serious disease. And yet, she was able to continue making a living and now the residuals from those commercials will guarantee that she continues to make a very nice living.

If Cyndi Lauper had lived in time of Jesus that would not have been true, because all skin diseases that cause any kind of eruption were all called leprosy, and all of them equally make a person unclean. And so she would have been ostracized. She would have been required by law, under pain of death, to call out before herself, anytime she got near another person, ”Unclean, unclean,” because, as the first reading said, she was, in fact, unclean. Nowadays, with medical science, we know the difference between Hansen's disease and psoriasis, or acne, or some other fairly benign skin eruption, but back then they didn’t know that.

That's why I asked you to see if you spot the two laws of the Torah in our first reading. The first one was obvious - the leper must isolate himself or herself from society, and call themselves unclean in the presence of others because with that skin eruption they are unwelcome in any sanctuary and cannot offer sacrifice to God in any way.

But the other law is the law that people may not touch the leper. That's the law that's implied in our reading. Clean people may not touch or come near, or have interaction with or socialize with, those who are ritually unclean and, if they do, then they become unclean as well. So, with that in mind, let's take a look the story in today’s Gospel.  

I asked you, at the beginning, to see if you could spot the two laws that are broken. The first law that’s broken is that the leper does not cry out, “Unclean, unclean,” before approaching Jesus. He has risked everything in the faint hope that this man will be able to help him. He could be arrested on the spot and executed. But he risks it, hoping that Jesus, about whom he has heard great things, will cure him too. But the other law that is broken is that Jesus breaks the Torah. Mark is very explicit. Very often when miracles are described, Jesus speaks and the person is cured. But Mark says Jesus reached out to the man and touched him and said, “I do will it. Be made clean.” So what has Jesus done? He has made himself unclean, and broken the law. His empathy is so great, he is willing to place himself in the life of the other person.

If you have any doubt about that, in Luke's gospel, which borrows heavily from Mark, there’s another story, a story about a dead man being carried out of the city of Nain, with a funeral procession behind him. Leading the procession is his grieving mother, who, Luke tells us, is a widow and about to bury her only son. When Jesus comes upon the entourage, he reaches out and touches the bier on which the body is lying. That is also an act of ritual impurity. By touching anything on which a dead body lay, a person became unclean. And so, Jesus makes himself unclean. Why? Because the widow is also a pariah in society. In that time you had to be your father's daughter, your brother's sister, your husband's wife, or your son's mother in order to have legal status in society, and because she was a widow and this was her only son, she had lost her standing in society. Like the leper today’s story, she was ritually unclean, unable to function in society. And Jesus reaches across that barrier to express his empathy with her plight.  If we had any lingering doubt that that's the point of St. Mark's story this morning, St. Mark goes to great pains to tell us at the end of the story that Jesus could no longer go into a town, but stayed outside in the deserted places, because He was what? He had made himself unclean.

So what's the point of the story for us? We live in a time when many people live on the peripheries of society; they are, in one or another manner, unclean. And you know them all as well as I do. Let's just take one example: those refugees gathered in the hundreds of thousands below the United States border. They have left places where their lives were forfeit if they stayed, or they was so poor and so hungry, that even the glimmer of hope offered by rumors about what the United States is like, drove them hundreds of miles, many of them on foot. But there are all sorts of divides in our society, and those divides require two things. They require, like the leper, to risk it all in the hope of something better. But they also require that we reach across those barriers in empathy. That is what Jesus teaches us this morning. That what’s required in all of the crises in life - political, religious, ethical, every kind of crisis - what’s required is empathy. And sometimes, even though words are very trite, they still remain true. There was a song in the early 1970s by Joe South, “Walk a mile in my shoes. Walk a mile in my shoes. Before you accuse, criticize, and abuse, walk a mile in my shoes.” Jesus walked a mile, figuratively speaking, in the shoes in the leper, in the shoes of the widow. Jesus invites us to walk a mile in other people's shoes.