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Law: Keep Them Outside of the Camp
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Leviticus shows us today that leprosy rendered one
unworthy to worship. Afflicted persons were totally ostracized, both
socially and ritually. I have never seen lepers standing in rags
announcing that they are unclean or untouchable, but I have seen
individuals with AIDS whose family and friends refused to visit, let
alone touch them. I have seen people with mental illness struggle to be
accepted and respected.
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Very often in our society the aging are isolated, live
alone, even shunned. Our lepers may be those who stand in front of us in
the grocery line with food stamps or the undocumented whose entry into
this country we resent as a free ride. There are those among us who know
only too well that they are judged unclean or untouchable. Today's
lepers are quite aware that we resist standing near them. You see, we
humans can be very cruel and we are capable of distancing ourselves from
those we think unacceptable.
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In today's gospel, we see a simple compassionate, ritually defiant act of Jesus.
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Ignoring the laws of ritual purity, He reaches out and
touches: a healing touch, and healing words... "Be Clean."
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Jesus was taking a great risk in reaching out to touch
that man. He was breaking every rule in the book, both civil and
religious. But compassion is not a cool-headed, calculated sort of
response. Compassion makes Jesus step across the forbidden line of
convention or law.
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There was great risk to Jesus in doing something as
simple as touching the hand others avoided. Why did He touch? He could
have healed him from a distance, like He did with the ten lepers that
Luke tells us about.
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My guess is that He touched him because the man needed
to be touched, needed to feel human contact, human kindness. It was a
very human thing to do, and Jesus always humanized His religion, kept it
in the thick of the everyday life of the people. Jesus swept away
ancient taboos. His first concern was not law, but people; not religion,
but life.
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It may be relatively easy to identify who the lepers are
for each of us. The question is, can we identify and acknowledge the
unclean places within ourselves? These limitations or sins that
discourage or embarrass us? Dare we touch that untouchable?
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All of us at some time or another need to be like the
leper and ask for healing because if we do not, there's probably not
much chance that we will have compassion for the flaws of others. We
will soon enter the time of Lent, a time to strip away our pretenses and
defenses, and discover what lies beneath the layers of accumulated
stuff.
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And we might be prompted to, like the leper, approach the
one whose touch can heal us and make us clean. Then we realize that we
and the leper are one, and in that discovery we might be willing to
widen our circle to include all. Even those we like to keep at arm's
length, keep them outside of our camp, untouchable for whatever reason.
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Perhaps this comes down to a fundamental question: what
is a Christian? Someone who is baptized, who prays? Who asks
forgiveness, who worships God? Yes, a Christian is all this and more.
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Jesus told us what Christians are meant to be: You are
the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world, you are the
leaven in the bread. He also said, feed the hungry, visit the sick, the
poor, the dying, because, you see, compassion is just another name for
Christian.
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Yours in Christ,
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Fr. Robert Warren, S.A.
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