Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Lv 13:1-2, 44-46
Ps 32:1-2, 5, 11
1 Cor 10:31--11:1
Mk 1:40-45

Hello, I'm Franciscan Father Greg Friedman, with the "Sunday Soundbite" for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time. A common experience of human illness—no matter how serious—is isolation. A simple cold or the flu can cut us off from other people. A common experience of healing comes when the human touch of another shatters our isolation: the touch of professional healers or the embrace of friends.

Mark's Gospel knows this human experience. In today's story, Mark shows Jesus reaching across a huge cultural barrier to touch and heal a leper. For Mark, this story is one of many that identify the mission of Jesus as a struggle against evil, manifested partly in human sickness and suffering. Sickness doesn't mean the sick person has necessarily sinned, rather illness is part of the evil that Jesus is battling.

The story of the healing of the leper is full of emotion. We sense God's power at work. The man is invited to re-connect with the community, signaling the end of his isolation through a ritual visit to the priests. The power at work in Jesus cannot be kept secret. Word spreads far and wide.

How have you or I become isolated from the community of believers? How is Jesus calling us to re-connect? At Sunday Eucharist we're invited to lay aside our isolation, and to witness to one another what Christ has done for us.

Scripture:

•He shall dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp. (Leviticus 13:46b)

•Blessed the man to whom the LORD imputes not guilt, in whose spirit there is no guile. (Psalm 32:2)

•Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. (1 Corinthians 11:1)

•A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” (Mark 1:40)

Reflection:

•Is it necessary or required for any follower of Jesus to make “his abode outside the camp”?

•Who is completely free from guile (duplicity)?

•How is the leper transformed? How did he know that Jesus could make him clean?

Again, that expression, le point vierge, (I cannot translate it) comes in here. At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak his name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.