There’s an old joke that makes its way around teachers’ faculty rooms, about the teacher who assigned her class an essay on Abraham Lincoln, and one child, more enthusiastic than historically accurate, wrote, “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he helped his father build.” Of course, what happened was, in a fit of enthusiasm, the child knew a couple of facts about Abraham - one was that he was known as the log splitter, one that he was born on the American frontier at that time, and the other was that he grew up a very well behaved and helpful boy - then kind of smooshed them all together. Nowadays we frequently refer to bringing something into a story before it belongs there as a “spoiler alert.” We tell someone who dies in the final reel before they watch the movie, that’s a spoiler alert. But in Biblical literature there is another word for doing that. It’s called “proleptic,” and the Greek means to catch on to something, or leap on to something, before it happens. And most scripture scholars believe that is what the stories of the Transfiguration are. They’re stories from the resurrected life of Jesus, placed into His ministry, for the purpose of the writer. In Mark’s case, it’s to give the chosen apostles, the leaders, a glimpse of Christ’s divinity.

About 20 years ago, maybe a little bit more than that, Ted Turner bought a television station and he began produce original content for it. And one of the things he decided to do was to do a series of dramas about the lives of famous Native Americans. After about four of them he gave up, because it just wasn't drawing the sponsorship dollars that he had hoped. But one of his best efforts was the story of the great Lakota Chief, Crazy Horse. It begins with the most amazing story. A little boy, about 12 years old, is sent by his father, off into the wilderness, carrying nothing but a knife on his belt - no food, no clothing, nothing - to spend a week  in the wilderness fending for himself, feeding himself, defending himself from any dangerous animals that should come his way, and praying for a vision from God. And every Sioux boy had to go through this process. But it's something that almost all primitive societies did, in one way or another. They found a very similar process among the Aborigines in Australia. The Spartans in Greece did it. The Romans did it. The Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland, did it. The number of days or weeks spent alone, and the precise nature of the tasks required, changes from culture to culture, but a couple of things stand out.

It is going away from the society, so that you can come back to serve the society, that's the essential ingredient. The second essential ingredient is to find one's own inner self. To find one’s own inner self.  The third ingredient was to come to some sort of terms with the mystical elements of the world. Whether you called it the Great Spirit or something else, there was some defining presence in the world that was above the world, or beyond the world, with which you had to come to terms; make some sort of peace.

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.

When I was working for WPIX for the Archdiocese, one of my jobs was to sit with the director at the midnight Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and let him know what was going on on the altar all the time. And the way they would do midnight Mass, they had six or seven cameras set up throughout the cathedral, and one of them always was a center shot of the center aisle. And this was the mid-1970s, when streaking was all the rage. At one particular Christmas midnight Mass, a young man decided to streak down the middle aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the midnight Mass. And, of course, as soon as we realized what was happening, they got off that shot and unto something else. But one of the concelebrants at the Mass was our oldest living bishop, in retirement, living in the rectory in the cathedral, and they would sort of prop him up for midnight Mass, and he was half asleep during most of it, but the commotion woke him up. Yet he didn’t understand exactly what was happening. He stood up and waved his finger at the congregation and said, “There will be no running in the cathedral.”

That was sort of a lighthearted story, but here’s another one. In one parish where I worked, one morning I was saying the morning Mass and, like at most parishes, it was a small congregation for the morning Mass, maybe 15 people or so. And I was about a quarter of the way through the Mass when one of the people in the congregation came running up the center aisle, and our sanctuary was arranged like the one in our own church - the altar was in the middle and then, over to one side, was the tabernacle - and she ran up to the tabernacle, and threw her arms around it, and began wailing, keening, almost like a banshee. Of course, one of the members of the congregation immediately dialed 911. So, within a couple of minutes, there were police and emergency personnel there, and they had to pry the woman loose from the tabernacle, and drag her, still keening, out of the church, which sort of made it very difficult to go on with Mass.

In both of these instances, it’s like someone pulled the pin on a grenade and lobbed it right into the middle of a very staid ceremony, where everybody was sure they knew what was going to happen next, and, all of a sudden, everything changed. That’s what’s happening in today’s gospel. This gospel was not meant to be read in little pieces like we do at Sunday Mass. At least the first chapter, if not the whole gospel, was meant to be read at one sitting, because it’s all one story.