A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, “I do will it. Be made clean.” The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean. Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once. He said to him, “See that you tell no one anything, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed; that will be proof for them.” The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere.” (Mark 1.40-45)
In 1882, the popular writer and satirist Mark Twain published a book that he called “The Prince and the Pauper,” a book ostensibly written for children, but really intended for adults. It tells the story of the mistaken identity between Edward Tudor, the Prince of Wales, who lives in Westminster Palace and an urchin boy Tom Canty who lives in a London hovel with his abusive, alcoholic dad.
Accidentally meeting near the gates of Westminster one day where Tom is loitering, drawing the ire of the palace guards, the two boys bear a shocking similarity to one another. Afterwards, Edward invites Tom into his private chambers in the palace where they decide to exchange clothes for a while, a reckless move that results in the Prince being mistaken for Tom by the guards who throw him out of the palace.
Meanwhile, Tom, dressed as Edward, tries to cope with court life and people assume he has suffered an illness because of his failure to remember anyone or anything. King Henry dies and Tom, now the assumed heir, must prepare to ascend the throne. Edward, for his part, finds his way through the streets of London to the Canty home where everyone believes he is Tom. He endures the brutal behavior of Tom’s dad and escapes, befriended by a soldier who has returned from war.
As he experiences the impoverished life of a pauper on the streets of London, the Prince has his eyes opened to the inequity of laws in the country and the unfair punishments inflicted upon the poor by the judicial system. He vows that when he returns to the palace to take back his rightful place he will rule with mercy. Eventually, the identity of the two boys is cleared up and they switch back to their original places. However, the newly crowned king names Tom “the King’s Ward,” a position of privilege that Tom holds for the rest of his life.
Twain ends the tale with the statement, “The reign of Edward VI was a singularly merciful one for those harsh times. Now that we are taking leave of him, let us try to keep this in our minds, to his credit.” The mercy, of course, comes from the Prince’s lived experience of the plight of the poor. As Twain writes, “Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity.”
I would suggest that Mark’s story of Jesus and the leper that we hear today carries much the same lesson as “The Prince and the Pauper,” unlikely as that may seem on the surface. As we have seen throughout Chapter 1, there is the matter of mistaken identity. That theme will carry throughout the gospel. Those who are supposed to be in the know, such as the scribes, fail to recognize Jesus as the Beloved Son, treating him callously and cruelly because they do not accept that he is the prince of peace promised by the prophets of old. Surrounded by the poor and by the sick, he is seen as no different than those he has befriended.
Walking among the destitute and the deprived, Jesus, for his part, sees the plight of the poor who gather around him and, unlike the religious leaders, he wants to bring remedy and redress to the wrongs done to them. He wants to fix the problem. Some early manuscripts, in fact, state that Jesus became angry when he saw the leper, his anger rooted in the stranglehold of evil that he saw all around him. Everywhere he looked he found injustice and intolerance, the mark of Cain upon humanity.
Other manuscripts instead say that Jesus was moved with pity, a word just as often translated as compassion, either way expressing a deep feeling of concern for the one who suffers alone. The evangelist Mark writes, “Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, “I do will it. Be made clean.” The change is immediate, a word Mark uses regularly in his book, the leprosy leaving the man who is restored to full health.
Scholars are quick to point out that this story–retold later by both Matthew and Luke–shows in a singular way the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, a humanity that brings him close to those who suffer and who cry out in their pain. And Jesus’ response to the plight of the leper is one of compassion, the Greek word stressing that the feeling comes from deep within his guts.
In fact, so strong is his compassion that he touches the leper, something strictly forbidden by the Mosaic Law which decreed that a leper had to stay a long distance away from anyone else and “shall wear torn clothes and have disheveled hair and shall live alone with a dwelling outside the camp and cry out, ‘unclean, unclean.’”
Furthermore, according to the law, in that act of touching the afflicted man, Jesus himself becomes unclean, suffering the same ostracization as the leper. In that moment, Rabbi Jesus trades places with the man, becoming contagious while the sick man, for his part, becomes clean through the compassion of the Galilean.
That same point is made at the end of the story when Mark tells us that Jesus was unable to enter a town openly, having to remain outside in deserted places, while the cured leper who previously had to live alone in a dwelling outside the city, now walks about freely, telling others of the healing that was given to him. Jesus has taken the place of the leper.
So, having heard this story, where does it leave us? What does it say to us? The most obvious answer is that it reminds us of our shared humanity with one and all whom we meet on the roadways of life, however different, distant, or despised the other person whom we meet might be. We are the same deep down, and our guts should tell us so, moving us to compassion.
However, in a world that stresses the differences between people, is the first thing we see in another the differences, or is it the sameness that we all share? There’s the rub. The story of the leper that Mark tells us presents the Man of Galilee as someone who understood at a primal level the common bond that all humanity shares.
So, when the leper stood before him and begged him for mercy, the Galilean did not back away, did not blanch at the sight of the sick man, did not balk at the cry for help. Instead, he did the opposite. He stretched out his hand, he touched him, and he said to him, ‘Be made clean.’” His actions were those of a man who saw another person as someone more like him than someone more different than he was.
Apparently, it mattered little to Rabbi Jesus that the Law prohibited these very actions, requiring him to see the differences, putting the sick man into a separate category, and insisting that the leper had no place in the human community. So strict was the Law in this matter that leprosy was the most dreaded of all diseases, specifically because it demanded the sick person be separated from family and from friends.
As a result, it was often called a living death, the leper as close to a dead person as was possible if someone was still breathing. But Rabbi Jesus would have none of it. When the Law was wrong, he did not hesitate to bypass it. And in this instance, he knew the Law–concerned with isolating someone with an infectious disease–failed to see the fundamental humanity that remained part and parcel of every person, regardless of disease, disability, or difference.
In 1918 as the Spanish flu pandemic slew thousands of people across the country, the Red Cross in Philadelphia warned that the city did not have enough nurses to treat and to minister to the sick. Recognizing the need, the archbishop of Philadelphia called on the sisters in his diocese to leave their convents and to care for the sick and the dying throughout the city.
Over two thousand sisters, almost all of whom had no medical training, responded, jumping aboard the empty street cars and walking through the streets in search of ailing people. Dressed in white gowns and wearing gauze masks, the sisters treated one and all, including immigrants, black families, and Jewish people. They went into the sections of the city where the poorest of the poor lived, where orphans, the homeless, and the destitute cried out for mercy.
Too often, they found homes where the parents were dead in their beds while hungry children cried out in the next room. Wherever they went, they washed soiled linens, served hot soup, and provided medicine. They gave out water, ice, blankets, and–above all else–comfort. It was said that the cry “Sister, Sister” could be heard throughout the night as the sick and the dying begged for help.
At the end of the epidemic, twenty-three of the sisters had died, succumbing to the same disease that took the lives of more than 12,000 people in Philadelphia. The mayor of the city thanked the sisters for their help and said of them, “I have never seen a greater demonstration of real charity or self-sacrifice than has been given by the sisters in their nursing of the sick, irrespective of the creed or color of the victims, wherever the nuns were sent.”
Hearing that story, it is easy for us to see the many ways in which the sisters imitated the Man of Galilee, answering the cry for healing, touching the unclean, and bringing compassion with them across every doorstep. We might ask ourselves how they were able to do what they did. Again, the answer is not difficult to find. Like the One whom they imitated, they saw others, not so much in terms of the diseased, the distressed, and the despondent, but in terms of a shared humanity, and because they saw first another human just like them, they were moved with compassion, stretched out their hands, and touched the sick. “We do will it,” they said, “be made clean.”
As we look for a lesson in today’s reading, we might begin with a simple question. What do we bring to our encounters with those whom the world considers untouchables? Do we bring condemnation, correction, and disconnection as everyone else does? Or do we bring healing, freedom, and life because we find in them someone very much like ourselves. In other words, can we trade places with them and, in so doing, tap into the compassion that dwells in the depths of our soul?
The answer we give to the question informs us as to our own imitation of the Galilean. Unless and until we can trade places with those who are desperate and desolate, in this way “softening our heart and breeding gentleness and charity,” we cannot claim to be imitators of the Galilean who traded places with the leper.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 