In warm indignation Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said . . . Mark 1:41
Mark’s Gospel today describes Jesus as emotionally upset when confronted by a leper pleading for a cure. The root meaning of the Greek word used to describe Jesus’ reaction (in our jargon) is “sick to one’s stomach” – except in this episode it doesn’t mean nausea so much as anguish over the suffering and isolation of the victim. Indeed, it’s not strange that a few old manuscripts describe Jesus’ gut reaction to the leper as one of genuine anger or indignation over what this leper and human beings in general have to go through in this world.
You could even say Jesus identifies with the victim and all persons weighed down with agony of one sort or another – even as Saint Damien of Molokai toward the end of his sixteen years of service to a leper colony could one day say: “I am one of you.”
And therefore the Gospel says Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the leper – a no-no by the social, religious and health standards of the time.
To touch! What an interesting word! It can range from physically laying a finger or one’s hand upon another to touching another’s heart, generating a deep emotion by one’s word or look or other evidence of one’s love. Indeed, back in the Middle Ages the Latin word from which we derive our own word “touch” was toccare – meaning to knock (as upon a closed door) or to strike as upon a bell – making it resonate far and wide, sweetening the air, raising one’s thoughts to the heavens thereabout, to the healing grandeur of God.
Certainly Jesus’ personal, compassionate touch must have resonated throughout the mind, body and soul of this leper: he was so suddenly made clean and irrepressibly went about telling (tolling?) everyone about it!
But as I always emphasize, this episode is not just about a leper of long ago. It’s about you. You may not actually be a leper or even a victim of some skin problem – but you can be toxic, depressed, cranky, critical, hostile; you may feel isolated, a pariah at times as in “nobody loves me”; you may behave in ways that make people avoid you . . . all those characteristics of any one of us from time to time. So it becomes imperative at this Eucharist that you cry out as Christ arrives among us in the bread and wine: “If only you will, you can cleanse me!” And you can count on Jesus being touched by your pain and your being touched by his sacrament – and made ready to tell the world about how good it feels to be a more social, resonant, gracious being at last.
Which is what Emily Dickinson did at what was a mysterious, treasured moment in her life, when she wrote: He touched me, so I live to know / That such a day, permitted so, / I groped upon his breast — / It was a boundless place to me / And silenced, as the awful sea / Puts minor streams to rest. // And now, I’m different from before, / As if I breathed superior air — / Or brushed a Royal Gown — / My feet, too, that had wandered so — / My Gypsy face — transfigured now — / To tenderer Renown —