Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

we have Jesus going about his business

and approached by a person or persons in need of healing.

Two weeks ago,

it was a man with an unclean spirit

who showed up in the synagogue where Jesus was teaching.

Last week,

it was Simon’s mother-in-law first,

then in the evening, "all who were sick or possessed with demons."

This week – and note that we are still in just the first chapter of Mark –

a leper approaches Jesus and says, perhaps a little manipulatively,

"If you choose, you can make me clean."

And Jesus does so,

though with a stern warning that he tell no one except the priest,

who will first need to make a sacrifice of thanksgiving on his behalf,

and, then, whose job it is to take official note that he is disease-free,

so that he can rejoin the community.

Of course, our grateful recipient of healing does no such thing;

he tells everyone whose ear he can bend,

so that Jesus can no longer go into the towns,

but has to stay out in the country.

Which doesn’t stop the people from coming to him!

This is a strange story on several levels.

In the first place,

it’s a story in which the scholars of most English translations

have unaccountably chosen a variant reading of the text

over one which has much more reliability,

both in terms of the number of Greek manuscripts utilizing it,

and in terms of their relative age.

In verse 41,

where our reading says that Jesus was "moved with pity,"

that’s not what most of the Greek manuscripts say.

They say that he was "moved with anger."

As strange as that sounds,

it does fit with the stern warning that Jesus gives the leper in verse 43,

when he sends him away at once.

What’s that all about?

It occurred to me at first that maybe Jesus,

for all his prayer and compassion,

is growing tired of people approaching him

just for what they can get out of him.

He’s traveling about the countryside of Galilee,

"proclaiming the message," as it told us last week in verse 39,

but all these people keep coming

who seem less interested in the message

than in the messenger,

and his seemingly miraculous powers of healing.

He wants to talk about the kingdom of God;

his listeners, it seems, are impatient with a promise for the future,

and want to be made well here and now.

Now, in the story we will hear next week,

you’ll find that Jesus has figured out a way

to give them what they need

while still staying "on task" with his message.

So stay tuned for that!

But here in these six verses,

that doesn’t yet seem to be the case.

Here, he is headed one direction,

and keeps on getting pulled in another.

Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that he is angry,

at least momentarily.

And, not surprising that he says

"Please don’t tell anyone."

As if to say,

okay, I’ve done you this favor,

but now I really must get back to work,

so let’s just keep this between the two of us.

Compassion can be exhausting, can’t it?

There never seems to be an end to the need for it.

I use our church Samaritan funds to help one person with her electric bill,

and within 48 hours I’m hearing from another person

who just happens to live in the very same apartment complex,

and word just happened to get around.

You decide to give a dollar to the guy

standing with a sign on the street corner,

and lo and behold, two blocks down,

there’s another person also needing money.

You brace yourself and process 25,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina, and look!

Here come thousands more fleeing Rita!

Not to mention the homeless people who were already here.

You are moved by a request for funds that you receive in the mail,

and so you send them something you can afford,

and what happens?

Suddenly your mailbox is full of solicitations

from all kinds of worthy causes and needs,

and maybe a few not-so-worthy.

I get angry, sometimes …

At people who feel free to call the church demanding help,

but who never darken the door of a church except to ask for money.

I get angry at organizations who sell their mailing lists

with my name on it …

labeled – what – something like,

"Compassionate! Sucker for a good cause!"

And, I get angry in a much more general sense:

It seems like no matter what I do,

and no matter what we do,

there is always more need out there.

Seems like God could have set it up a little differently.

Compassion is costly.

It costs us money, at times …

it costs us time, and energy;

and sometimes that money and time and energy

come at the expense of other things that seem to us to be more important.

Notice also that this compassion costs Jesus

some of his ability to move about freely.

Mark tells us that he can "no longer go into a town openly,"

but has to stay out in the country, where people come to him.

Puzzling, at first.

Did towns refuse to receive him

because of the wave of broken and hurting people

that they knew would soon follow?

Were they afraid of the chaos

his presence might stir up?

Had they heard about how,

when he was at Simon and Andrew’s house,

the "whole city" of people was gathered around the door?

Indeed, that sounds like a recipe for

impossible crowd control.

Stay out in the open, Jesus.

If crowds of people come out into the desert, fine,

but at least we won’t have to be cleaning up after them in the streets,

and trying to find food and lodging for them all,

and worrying about catching the diseases they brought with them.

Compassion can be costly even for the bystanders.

Whether it was real or not,

people feared that having hurricane evacuees here

would increase the crime rate.

If a homeless shelter is built in the downtown area,

business owners claim that it will be costly for them

in terms of continuing to have "undesirables" on or near their property.

If you choose to give a certain percentage of your income to help the poor and needy,

there is a certain cost involved to your family

of things you aren’t purchasing for them.

Like everything else, it seems,

compassion is not a free good.

It costs something,

not only to the one who gives,

but often, even to those who are near him or her.

I think there’s even more to this story, though.

It explains, even better than anything I’ve said so far,

why Jesus might have been angry at the leper,

and why he had to stay out of towns after that encounter.

To understand it, you have to remember

how deathly afraid people in his day were of leprosy.

No one really understood disease and contagion,

and it did seem that leprosy could be caught

simply by touching, or being in close proximity to,

someone who already had the disease.

So lepers were considered "unclean."

Not only was it bad hygiene to touch a leper,

it was deemed contrary to the Jewish law.

Lepers had to live apart from everyone else,

often, just at the edge of town or outside of town.

They could not live with their families,

even if their families were willing to assume the risk.

If you were a leper, you had to dress in rags.

You had to carry a bell around with you,

and ring it to warn anyone who came near you,

and call out "Leper!" to announce yourself and your status.

If someone was walking toward you on your side of the street,

you had to cross over to the other side

in order to avoid contaminating them.

To be a leper was to be a permanent outcast.

To touch a leper was a make of yourself an outcast.

So, when a leper approaches Jesus, and kneels in front of him …

his approach and nearness have made Jesus unclean,

in the eyes of any self-respecting town-dweller.

Here, Jesus is trying to go around into the towns around Galilee

to proclaim the message,

and this man desperate for healing

has just made the task impossible.

So, it’s really not surprising that Jesus is,

at least momentarily, angry.

But just maybe there’s a way out.

Don’t tell anyone! Jesus says.

Maybe if no one knows that we touched,

I can still go about my business, my ministry, my proclamation.

After all, you know and I know that you are now clean.

But, as we heard, it doesn’t work out that way.

Overjoyed at his healing, at being restored to human community,

the former leper tells everyone whose ear he can bend.

Which means that Jesus now has to stay out in the countryside,

because he is no longer welcome in the towns.

He might be dangerous. Contagious.

Unless he might be willing to dress in rags and ring the bell

like the rest of the lepers …

Jesus is no longer welcome where crowds of human beings might gather.

Instead, they must come to him.

Compassion can, sometimes,

make an outcast of us.

Do you remember the very early days of AIDS and HIV,

when we really didn’t know very much

about what caused it, or all the ways it might be transmitted?

It was a whole lot like leprosy in biblical times.

If you had AIDS,

the general public was afraid of you.

In the hospital,

those interacting with AIDS patients

wore disposable masks, and gloves,

and full outfits that were immediately disposable.

I was in San Angelo at the time,

and there was exactly one funeral home in town

that "dared" to handle persons who had died from AIDS,

and only one embalmer on their staff who would do the work.

And those of us who participated in "buddy programs"

for persons with AIDS …

well, a whole lot of people just knew we were next!

They’d be gloving up to visit us in the hospital,

and planning our funerals …

Befriending the outcasts

can make us outcasts as well.

Advocating for people who are powerless to advocate for themselves

can make us powerful enemies.

Having compassion on those who suffer,

whether because of their own fault,

or through no fault of their own,

very often brings suffering to us as well.

Compassion is costly.

In the end,

it cost Jesus his life.

Well, yes, but that wasn’t the end, was it?

Suffering with others –

which, after all, is what the word "compassion" means –

is suffering; it is real; it is painful.

It may cost us friends, or status,

or time, or money, or energy, or all of the above.

Does that mean we give it up?

I hope not!

It means, simply,

that we wait to be "paid back" for our costs

at the resurrection of the just.

As was Jesus, in his own resurrection.

If we had any doubt at all that he made the right decision,

God settles that question once and for all.

Let us go and do likewise.

Amen.

© 2006 Julie Adkins (e-mail: Drjadkins@trinitypresdallas.org)