If you were listening to the 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. If you have ever sat down to try to read the Old Testament all the way through it’s passages like this that probably convinced you that if you were going to make it there are some parts you would end up skipping. But the fact is our ancestors in the faith thought that things like this were a serious issue for their community. There are many rules and regulations about various illnesses and most importantly, types of uncleanness.
Why is there so much there 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 remove people from 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 concerned 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.
But what about today’s gospel reading, then? Because when Jesus encounters this diseased man who approached him who wants to be healed and restored to life, we find out 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, 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 about being near imperfection and uncleanness as we might have thought.
So one question this all raises for us might be, what does it really mean to be holy and how do we get there? Sometimes holiness and the images of holiness we have in our minds are centered on that kind of purity and perfection, avoiding sin, of course, but also avoiding the sinful, doing all the right things and following all the rules about what to do and especially what not to do. And of course there’s nothing wrong with avoiding sin and avoiding what damages us. But in a way Jesus wants to show us that holiness is as much about compassion as it is about purity, and in fact our desire for purity doesn’t mean much if it distances us from the mess of the world, from people who need us to touch them.
We don’t necessarily have the power to heal people by our touch, the way Jesus did. But we do live in a world where there are plenty of outcasts, people who are scapegoated because of their religion or their race or their orientation or their history of trouble, or because they come from somewhere we have decided is a problem. They are on the outside looking in, the way this leper was. It is easy to look at them and keep our distance, and be afraid of them or confused by them, or assume they can’t be healed or changed. And yet at moments God asks us to see them the way God sees them, the way God saw this leper, the punch in the gut of just being appalled at their condition, and God wants us to enter into their world the way Jesus reaches into the separate world that this man with leprosy was trapped in. Jesus is trying to show us that compassion is how you get to holiness. Compassion and a willingness to cross the line and touch someone that no one else wants to be with. We become holy by embracing the unfortunate, the way that great scene of the last judgment in Matthew’s gospel suggests, we find Christ when we go to the places and people Christ sought out, clean or unclean.
So maybe God isn’t always all that offended by imperfection. If God was maybe he wouldn’t have created so many imperfect people. What he wants is for imperfect people like us
to not only have compassion for the rejected and the sick, but to become more perfect by touching them.