Homily, Ordinary Sunday 6B
I’m always grateful to God for making me a priest. Countless blessings have come into my life through the priesthood, even just the privilege of meeting people I would have never otherwise met, including all of you in these parishes, witnessing and serving as God’s instrument at the most significant moments in people’s lives, when God comes to meet them with His grace and mercy through the sacraments. And every once in a while, it dawns on me how grateful I should be that God did not make me a priest during Old Testament times. We don’t often think about it, but during the Old Testament, priests like Aaron and his sons and the other Levites assisting them had to be trained as butchers, to offer the various animal sacrifices to God. They had to separate certain cuts and parts of the animal, the fat around certain organs, to be burnt up as belonging to God, while other parts would belong to the one making the offering or to the priest himself and his family.
Besides doubling as butchers, we hear in today’s readings that Old Testament priests also served as dermatologists, being called upon to examine people’s weird rashes, boils, moles, and other blemishes or sores, to declare them clean or unclean. The laws governing leprosy and other skin diseases—even from over 3000 years ago—these laws should actually sound really familiar to us today. Lepers had to make their dwelling outside the camp. In other words, they had to make sure they kept their social distance and quarantined themselves. This is also why lepers would keep their clothes torn, their heads uncovered and their mouths covered, while crying out, “Unclean, unclean!” to make sure that others would recognize them and keep their distance to avoid becoming unclean themselves through close contact.
Sound familiar? Aside from wearing torn clothes, a lot of what they did with lepers sounds like what we’ve all been encouraged to do to slow the spread of COVID. The difference, of course, is that these measures used to be required only of those who were actually sick and diseased and not for those who were healthy or not showing any symptoms. Now I’m not here to get into the science of how COVID spreads or if asymptomatic carriers can transmit the virus, but we should realize that social distancing has a profound psychological and emotional effect. For many lepers, even beyond the physical consequences of the disease, a lot of their suffering stemmed from their isolation from the rest of society, especially their isolation from the worship of God in the Temple.
In the Gospel we just heard, Jesus actually ends up trading places with the leper. Keep in mind that as Jesus reaches out His hand to touch the leper, this could be the first actual physical contact with another human being that the leper has experienced in many years. And as he is healed and made clean through contact with Christ, he’s finally able to enter back into society, back into the Temple and the worship of God. Meanwhile, because of the crowds vying to see Him, it is now impossible for Jesus “to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places,” just as the leper had been required to do previously.
Just as we know that the physical consequences—as bad as they were at times—were often not even the worst part about having leprosy, we should also realize that social distancing doesn’t just slow the spread of disease. What other effects does it have, when as a society we are trained more to relate to one another not so much as fellow human beings possessing great dignity and goodness, but more as potential carriers of dangerous diseases? We know that there are sufferings far worse than physical illness. By faith we know there are things far worse even than physical death. Different Saints have talked about how just one soul in the state of sanctifying grace is a greater treasure than the goodness of all the material universe put together. And thus, one mortal sin and the loss of sanctifying grace is a worse evil than the destruction and annihilation of all the material universe.
Do we have our eyes open to the spiritual realities that surround us? Eyes open not just to the merely physical needs of others, but to the social, emotional, and spiritual ways that God calls us to reach out? To those who might be feeling isolated and ostracized, those who are hurting in more hidden ways? No one should be made to feel like a leper, especially when they’re not even diseased. Is there someone that God has placed on your heart to make a special effort of reaching and making more meaningful contact during this next week? In His own day, Jesus was one of the only ones who would dare to reach out and touch a leper. As He reaches out to us with His Body and Blood in this Eucharist, we pray that He strengthen us to do His will, to show God’s love and concern for the most afflicted, for those in great need of human contact.
The Word Proclaimed 