When you settled into your seats to listen to the first reading from the Old Testament, I wonder how many of you were immediately discouraged when the first thing you heard was about scabs and pustules. This is not what we want to hear about when we come here for a little inspiration. But, for better or for worse, the fact is, our ancestors in the faith thought that things like this were a serious issue for their community, and in those parts of the Old Testament that people skip through really fast when they decide one day they want to try to read the whole thing, there are many rules and regulations about various illnesses and types of uncleanness. It is strange to think that we come from a tradition that was so obsessed with this. I’m sure it is a relief to Fr. Tim that 2,500 years later, unlike Aaron the priest in this reading, his duties as a priest do not any longer include the task of closely inspecting everyone in the parish who has a gross skin problem. Really, the job has been upgraded quite a bit since that time.
In this book of Leviticus we read from, why is there so much about what is clean and unclean? Part of it of course was that people were worried about contagion, about diseases that could easily spread from one home to the other. They knew almost nothing about what caused illness or what could cure it, so their radical solution was sometimes to throw people out of the community who had a problem they were afraid of. But it wasn’t just about being contagious. The fact is many kinds of imperfection worried them. They believed they were in a relationship with the one God, and in that relationship they wanted to be holy themselves, without blemish. So women had monthly times when they were unclean, and even the animals sacrificed to God had to be perfect, without any irregularity. Imperfection was unworthy of God’s greatness, and to demonstrate how much they appreciated that greatness, they kept imperfection away from God, and from themselves.
I hope that if you tuned out the first reading your attention at least came back for the parallel story in the gospel we just heard. Because when Jesus encounters this diseased man who approached him who wants to be healed and restored to life, we find out much more about what God really feels about sickness and imperfection. It’s not all about the obvious thing, that Jesus cures this man, wants him well, wants him restored to the community, no longer wants him to be ostracized, and makes that happen. It’s Jesus’s reaction to seeing him and hearing him that we should focus on. This translation says he was moved with pity, but the actual word that the gospel writer uses is stronger than that, in fact some translators say it’s a lot closer to our saying that the sight of the man was like a punch in the gut to Jesus. It was a strong reaction of not only compassion but maybe even shock and anger. The idea of this man’s suffering and separation stirred something up inside him. “Of course I want to heal you,” he says, “I do will it.” And then he touched the man, touched this unclean person that no one else would touch out of fear that they would become unclean themselves. Apparently God is not as disgusted with imperfection and uncleanness as we might have thought. God is way stronger than that. God’s compassion seems to overcome it.
A lot of diseases, thank goodness, no longer inspire fear in us. But you don’t need a lot of imagination to know that there are plenty of other afflictions that separate people from one another, even just garden variety illness and old age and poverty, where people live apart and are not quite included in the life the rest of us lead. We also know there are plenty of prisoners and other outcasts, many of whom will spend the rest of their lives afflicted with the sense that they are unclean, shunned by people who believe they are people who can’t be healed or changed and that they’re a danger to the rest of us. It’s also not hard to imagine that even here close to home, there are people who feel themselves to be separated from God by their own imperfections, weighed down by sins that can’t be forgiven, people who are discouraged and feel set apart by the judgments that other people and maybe even our church have passed on them.
I am sure you know people like that, who don’t think they can approach God with confidence and joy, or who don’t believe that God could possibly have a passionate interest in the welfare of someone so imperfect and broken. In fact, at one time or another, if we’re honest, all of us feel that. We all need to know that God’s love for us is much more unconditional than we tend to think it is. We want to know that in our imperfection, God still wants to touch us.
Unlike Jesus, we don’t have the power to heal everyone who feels damaged and separated, to make that burden go away. But we do have the power to be people who live their lives knowing that the separation of people from one another is not God’s plan. Instead what God wants is what Jesus felt in his gut that day, the impatient desire to have people be healed and restored to one another. That is a message that with God’s help we can bring to the people who need to hear it, and we know that God will not be satisfied until no one feels that they are beyond God’s reach.