Today’s readings: Leviticus 13, 1-2.44-46; 1 Corinthians 10, 31 - 11, 1; Mark 1, 40-45

Today’s gospel story is a powerful story that shows how it is only in our stories that God’s loving presence shines out in the world. He is a God in hiding, and it is in our witness to gifts received that He manifests Himself. This is the key to Christian living, it is how God’s mystery unfolds itself in our concrete stories.

The story of the leper is that of an outcast, not trusted and trusting no one. He had learnt to live with his shattering loneliness, with no one to care for him, condemned to carry his lifetime sentence. What is mostly remarkable in this story is that this leper and Jesus eventually exchange roles: the leper emerges from his isolation and Jesus takes his place, “staying outside in places where nobody lived”.

For Mark’s gospel, written specifically for gentiles, inclusiveness is inherent to the very nature of the gospel. This contrasts heavily with what we read from Leviticus establishing by law that anyone ‘infected’ was held as unclean and “must live apart, outside the camp”. It was apartheid at its worst and it should make us realise the forms of apartheid that still infest our Christian communities.

All forms of apartheid, even in the Church, have always been justified as ways of protecting the community from whatever or whoever was deemed a threat physically, socially and morally. But this always recalls the words of Jesus: “Who will throw the first stone?”

We have built walls and created outcasts, socially and morally, in God’s name, and probably with the good intention to safeguard doctrine. We killed the spirit to protect the institution; we sacrificed people on the altar of orthodoxy. Today’s story shows how the leper, like so many outcasts and unlike those surrounding Jesus, seemed to have no doubt in Jesus’s power to cure him.

To better grasp the meaning of this story, we need to read the context in which it was written with an eye to our context today. The Gospel is not simply composed of historical narratives to confirm truths about Jesus, that he was divine. Diarmuid O’Murchu, in his book When the Disciple Comes of Age, says that the early Christians had enough creativity and imagination which our excessively rationalised world has subverted and crushed. He refers to Scripture scholar John Dominic Crossan who writes: “These ancient people did not tell literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally”. This literalism has caused untold damage to the Christian faith.

Jesus is the antithesis of all forms of exclusion and this is what ‘leprosy’ stands for in today’s narrative. This should be extraordinary news for the Church to find new ways of opening up to so many whom we have always excluded from our table. It is time we stop being presumptuous and claiming the right to determine who is eligible for heaven and who for hell.

Jesus’s cure of the leper undoubtedly stands for the demolition of the frame of mind of the Judaic religion which, unfortunately, we eventually substituted with another very similar one. We cannot perpetuate the mechanisms of segregation that Jesus himself abolished in the name of the dignity of each person. His touching the leper was something risky and dangerous in his context. What risks are we ready to take to put the person above the institution?

Our inclusivity is the measure of how far we can go in discerning where God wants to take us. Those whom we condemn as outcasts will always stand in our judgment. Understanding God and the Christian message from their standpoint would surely give a radically different version of the gospel from the mainstream in our churches.