Imitating Christ, Paul and Our Lady in Caring for the Sick and Outcast, Sixth Sunday (B), February 11, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
February 11, 2024
Lev 13:1-2.44-46, Ps 32, 1 Cor 10:31-11:1, Mk 1:40-45

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• At the end of today’s second reading, St. Paul gives the first Christians in Corinth and all of us a summary of the Christian life: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” Each of us is called, first, to imitate to Christ and to imitate those, like the saints, who excel in imitating Christ. Then, like Christ, St. Paul and the saints, we’re supposed to set an example so that others, through emulating us, may ultimately enflesh Christ’s words and actions. St. Paul is one in a great line of saints whose actions were a living commentary on the modern expression, “What would Jesus do?,” and the great convert of Tarsus urges us to model ourselves on his seeking to glorify God in everything we do.
• In today’s Gospel, we see what Jesus did and what we’re called, with the saints, to reproduce. One of the most physically disgusting and repulsive human beings imaginable came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away their flesh and bones and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for basically the rest of their life apart from the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them, except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from work, from the synagogue and temple, and basically from love and mercy. They were ostracized from all things human, forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them easily from a distance. Whenever they had to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law, as we see in today’s first reading, to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!,” as if their whole identified were summed up by that off-putting adjective. Anyone who accidentally touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, ritually unclean.
• What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature who desperately broke all convention to come close to Jesus and kneel before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch his infection. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. To the leper’s plea of faith, “If you wish, you can make me clean,” Jesus, filled with compassion, stretched out his hand and touchedthe leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of the frightened onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched the man in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “I do will it. Be made clean!” He was thoroughly and immediately made whole. Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure so that he, so long a persona non grata, could legitimately return to the human community.
• This is the Jesus we’re called to imitate. The Lord turns to each of us today and says, “Come, follow me!” (Lk 18:22) and, “I have done this as an example so that, as I have done for you, you also should do (Jn 13:15). We’re not called, necessarily, to imitate Jesus in caring for those with Hansen’s disease, because, thanks be to God and to the gift of modern infectious disease medicine, leprosy has been mostly eradicated in the U.S. — with fewer than 200 cases per year — and in most of the world, where there are fewer than 200,000, located in 14 countries, with half still in India. Most of us, likewise, are not gifted with the Lord’s divine power to work stupendous miracles of healing, so we’re not called to imitate Christ the wonder-worker. But what Christ is calling us to do is to love the untouchables with the same love that he does, the love which would make him go to the Cross again for them if he needed to.
• While there are thankfully far fewer men and women with Hansen’s disease, there are still many outcasts. There are bodily lepers, whom the world considers ugly or unattractive, or whose illnesses are too long-lasting that few want to care for them or even to have society care for them at the end of life. There are psychological lepers, with mental illness or disabilities, whom some just relegate to institutions or allow them to live derelict on the streets. There are moral lepers, like drug addicts, prostitutes, death-row inmates, and those who have committed very public and embarrassing sins, who are shunned to the sidelines as practically irredeemable. There are economic lepers, like the homeless, the very poor, or those of a particular social class, who live as exiles from society and from the things most take for granted. There are racial lepers, like gypsies, Bedouins, migrants and refugees, who, because of skin color, lineage or the lack of a properly colored identification card, are refused welcome and treated as social castaways. There is a new class of “cancelled” lepers, who because of unpopular opinions or mistakes have been permanently excluded from enlightened society or even the possibility of employment. There are unborn lepers, who, because they’re unwanted by, or inconvenient to, parents, are left unprotected and vulnerable to legal slaughter. And there are many emotional lepers, who, because of their own psyche or others’ actions, feel complete alone and abandoned. All of these are among the ones Jesus wants us to reach out and heal through our very human touch, to bring back from the peripheries into communion.
• We see in the lives of the saints that very often their path to holiness began when they cared for an outsider. One day St. Francis of Assisi was a carefree young soldier riding his horse outside of Assisi preparing to seek glory in battle. He saw a leper on the path begging for alms. Francis’ horse jerked out of repugnance. The future saint, himself, was filled with horror and disgust. He looked at the leper for what seemed like an eternity, but then, pierced by conscience, dismounted, drew close to the man, and took his emaciated, cold and inert hand and placed within it a coin. Then Francis lifted that hand up to his lips and kissed the wounded flesh of the rejected and abject man. As the leper withdrew his hand, Francis raised his head to look at him in the eyes, but the man was no longer there. Neither was the old Francis. Francis realized that it was obvious Christ in the disguise of a leper who had met him. From that point forward Francis, and eventually the Franciscans around him, would visit the leper community two miles outside of Assisi to care for those presen, seeking to love them with the love with which they sought to love Christ in a leprous disguise.
• A similar conversion happened in the life of St. Martin of Tours. He was a fourth-century Roman soldier approaching the gate of Amiens, France, on a frigid day. It was there that he met a homeless man, practically naked, shivering in the cold. Martin had no money to give him and so was initially just going to gallop on. But, moved interiorly, he got off his horse, took out his sword and cut his heavy Roman cape in half, giving half of it to the poor man. When Martin went to sleep later that evening, Jesus appeared to him in a dream wearing the other half of his cape and saying, “Martin has clothed me in his garment.” It was what led first to his baptism, and ultimately to his becoming Saint Martin of Tours.
• Likewise for us, the path to our sanctity begins with our loving those whom the world finds unlovable. As we learn from the examples of Saints Martin and Francis, Saints Vincent de Paul and Teresa of Calcutta, Saints Damien of Molokai and Marianne Cope, every time we care for an outcast, we are caring for Christ. The Lord himself told us that everything we do or fail to do to “one of the least of [his] brothers and sisters” we do, or fail to do, to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Christ takes on the disguise of the pariah and the amount of love we show the castaway is the amount of love we have for him. It’s easy to love those who are lovable, Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount. “Even pagans do as much” (Mt 5:46). But it’s hard to love those who are seemingly unlovable, and that’s the standard Jesus gives us. Like a leper, Jesus himself became full of disgusting, open bodily wounds, was cast out of the city of Jerusalem and left abandoned with other outcasts on crosses. As Isaiah wrote about him 700 years earlier, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely, he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (Is 53:2-6). If we would draw near to Christ, he wants for us to do so, and waits for us, on a modern Calvary in the disguise of contemporary rejects.
• Today’s Gospel is a powerful one to have on this World Day of the Sick, held since 1992 on February 11, the Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, the great shrine in the French Pyrenees where so many of the sick converge to pray to God and many leave with miraculous healings, and so many others leave strengthened to make up what is lacking in their flesh of Christ’s sufferings for the sake of the Church (Col 1:24). This Church of Notre Dame de Lourdes has been built not just with one of the world’s greatest physical replicas of the Grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes as the retablo, but also with a formal association with the French sanctuary. When St. Bernadette was kneeling before the image of Our Lady as we are privileged to do here, our Lady pointed to a spot and asked her to drink from the stream. As there appeared to be no stream, Bernadette dug in the ground, seeminly unsuccessfully. But by the next day, water began to flow from that spot, now 32,000 gallons of water a day. Those who are healed normally bathe in that water. For the last 111 years, the Shrine in Lourdes ships cases full of Lourdes water here, that we are able to give out to those who are sick and request it, and many people, with that water, have likewise experienced healing. For us at Columbia, we are so lucky to be able to worship here before this image of Our Lady of Lourdes, where we can count on her prayers just like she prays for those at the foot of the French Pyrenees. Today on this World Day of the Sick the whole Church prays and is summoned to do what our worship here each day is meant to inspire: to bring to Christ through Our Lady’s intercession our fervent prayers for everyone who is sick and ask for the grace that we might care for them, just as the malades are lovingly cared for in Lourdes.
• Today’s Gospel is also a beautiful one to have three days before we begin the Holy Season of Lent. During Lent, each of us is called to approach Jesus with faith, with all our sins that are eating away our soul like Hansen’s disease destroys flesh and bones, and say, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Jesus wants to say to each of us in return, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Lent is a time of such cleansing. The practice of prayer helps us to overcome the leprosy of egocentrism and to put God first. The practice of almsgiving helps us to conquer the leprosy of selfishness and to place others ahead of ourselves. The practice of fasting helps us to triumph against the leprosy of pleasure-seeking, of making our bellies our god, so that we can learn how to hunger for what God hungers. Lent is a period of purification and healing. Each of us needs to be humble enough, and smart enough, to recognize our state and come to God so that he, moved with compassion, can stretch out his hand and touch us. Please prepare well over these next two days to live the best Lent of your life and commit yourself to imitating the saints in the way they lived Lent in imitation of Christ’s prayer, fasting and giving of himself in alms.
• At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus told the healed leper, “See that you tell no one anything.” Jesus well knew that if news of the miracle became widespread, everyone would be coming to him first as a free medical doctor and secondly as the long-awaited Messiah whom they would interpret in political terms, as someone who would boot the Romans and reinstitute a Davidic temporal kingdom. Jesus wanted to avoid those misconceptions because he had come not as a new political candidate or as a new Hippocrates but as a Savior. But the former outcast’s response to Jesus’ stern warning, however, was to ignore it totally. St. Mark says, “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. Jesus remained outside in deserted places,” basically changing places with the leper, exactly validating Jesus’ concerns that underlined his warning and command. Today at the end of this Mass during which Jesus is going to give us a far greater miracle than what he worked for the leper in the Gospel, giving us his Body and Blood and touching us on the inside, he’s going to give us his blessing and a command, namely “go and announce the Gospel of the Lord,” to “go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.” He wants us to pass on the Gospel with far greater enthusiasm than fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers are going to be cheering their lungs out during tonight’s Super Bowl. Jesus wants us to share with others the same healing Gospel he gives us, the same truth that will set us free, the same words of eternal life that will help us rise from sin and death. As he prepares to reach out his hand to touch and cleanse us — he does not want us to let go of his hand, but to journey with him in holiness each day, as we seek to do everything, eating, drinking and beyond, for God’s glory. He wants us to imitate Saint Paul, Saint Francis, Saint Martin, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Vincent, Saint Damien and Saint Marianne, as they imitated Christ, so that others after us may imitate us in our faithfully going to Christ to be made clean. He wants us to imitate his mother, Our Lady, in her prayer and compassion on the multitudes. The same one who said to us in St. Matthew’s Gospel, “I was ill and your cared for me,” is about to say, “This is my Body given for you” and “This is the chalice of my blood, poured out for you.” Let us today ask him ultimately for the grace to imitate Christ’s own self-giving so contagiously that others may see Christ’s healing, saving, light in our light. Praised be Jesus Christ!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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