16 January 2020
Thursday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
“If you wish, you can make me clean.”
What faith this leper had! And rightly so; imagine what he had already heard about Jesus curing the sick and driving out demons. Yet leprosy was far more serious an illness than the fever which afflicted Peter’s mother-in-law; would the power of this man from Nazareth be enough to cleanse him?
Yes. But it was more than the power of Jesus that healed this poor man: it was His love. Notice Jesus was “moved with pity”, going so far even as to touch the leper! Later Jesus will refer to the Law, how the leper must show himself to the priests and make an offering, yet the Law also says that touching what is unclean makes oneself unclean as well. Simon and the others must have been shocked: who would dare touch a leper, and not only incur uncleanness upon themselves but also risk infection? Recall, too, that they had seen Him cast out demons with but a word; they likely knew He could cleanse a leper with a word as well. Yet Jesus touched the man. He ordered the man to do as the Law said, yet He Himself did not go to the Temple nor the priests to seek purification for Himself; how can this be?
His disciples could not have known this yet, but they would later come to know, as we know, what St. Paul writes to the Galatians “…when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption. As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God,” (Galatians 4:4-7). Jesus could touch the leper with impunity because though, in His humanity, He was under the Law, in His divinity He was the Lawgiver. He is the cure, as well as the physician. Just as it is by His wounds that we are healed (Isaiah 53:5) it is by His own purity and wholeness that the leper is made pure and whole. Notice how a flame lends its fire to another wick and is not itself reduced? Jesus is likewise: what the disciples witness in this miracle is a sign of the greater healing Jesus came to do. In John’s Gospel the Baptist cried out “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29); Isaiah rightly foretells that the Messiah would be “…pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity…[bear] the punishment that makes us whole…” (Isaiah 53:5) and yet He would remain sinless Himself: our sins would leave no stain upon Him, even though He would take them all upon Himself.
Whenever we come to confession, we are as this leper, saying to Jesus “If you wish, you can make me clean,” and Jesus, always, responds, “I do will it.” At every Mass, while beholding the broken Host, the priest declares the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and we say, in the words of that faith-filled centurion (Matthew 8:8) “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” Indeed, He could heal our soul with but a word yet, in the Blessed Sacrament He deigns—not with merely a finger, but His whole self!—to touch us. The whole of His Sacred Heart is moved with pity for us sinners! He heals the leper and commands silence; He heals us and commands us to tell the whole world!