Third Sunday after Epiphany
Today’s Gospel presents us with our Lord encountering a leper as He comes down from giving the Sermon on the Mount. Leprosy, which in our day is curable, was in former times considered to be a curse of God. It ate away the skin and ultimately led to an atrocious death. Because it is highly contagious, lepers were excluded from living with other people and were gathered in leper colonies for an existence that could be called hell on earth. The Mosaic Law contained strict prescriptions about lepers. They were obliged to remain apart from the people, and anyone who happened to touch a leper was considered unclean and had to undergo ritual purification.
And that is what is so startling about the Gospel story. Two points would have shocked any Jew at the time. The first is that the leper dares to approach Our Lord. It was strictly forbidden to do so and, in the mentality of the time, it could only have been seen as an affront to the dignity of Our Lord. The second, even more shocking, is that Our Lord not only does not send him away but actually touches him. He does what is forbidden by the Law. He touches the leper. According to the Mosaic Law, by touching the leper Jesus became impure. In reality, this leper becomes pure.
All this becomes even more enlightening when we consider that in Holy Scripture leprosy is the symbol of sin. Just as the disease disfigures a person’s body and ultimately leads to its death, so sin disfigures the soul and makes it unrecognisable as a creature of God. If God would open our eyes and show us the loathsomeness, the ugliness, the horror of sin, we would be terrified. Sin deprives the soul of its life, pulls it down to the level of the beasts, and lays it in the pestilential mire of attitudes and actions that leave it dishonoured, liable to eternal death in Hell. Sadly, so many today make light of sin. Some even think that because everybody does it, that somehow makes it OK. Such is not the thought of our Blessed Lord. It is because sin is such a horrible reality that He took flesh to suffer and die, in order to obtain the forgiveness of our sins and therefore save us from Hell.
The sacrament of Penance is the means given to the Church by which those afflicted with sin can find healing. Like the lepers of antiquity, we sinners can touch Our Blessed Lord by going to confession. Admitting our guilt to the priest is like the leper showing himself to Jesus. And as we do so, in all humility and sincerity, hiding nothing of our guilt, the touch of the Lord through sacramental absolution purifies us and reconciles us with God and neighbour.
At the conclusion of today’s epistle, St Paul, after having given us a number of pithy statements that summarise many of the Christian attitudes that have transformed the world, concludes with this one: Be not overcome by evil: but overcome evil by good (Rm 12:21). This is precisely what Jesus did with the leper. It is precisely what the sacrament of penance does. The evil that is in ourselves because of our own fault, we allow the Lord to overcome it, by imparting His good grace that restores His friendship in us. And this, in turn, gives us the capacity to overcome evil in others and in the world by the practice of good.
Today there is much evil in the world and in the Church. In a time of crisis like the one we are currently experiencing there are two ways by which the enemy of our souls seeks to exploit the situation. One is to push people to abandon the Church because of scandals and confusion. Many fall for this and in this way imitate those who left Our Lord at the time of His Passion. They were content to be with Him while the crowds cheered and were fed, but when He was arrested they were gone. The other is to react in the opposite direction and, in the face of a weak, compromised and confusing authority, to declare that the solution that one imagines will fix everything. We see this happening in the growing phenomenon of those who reject the authority of the Pope, thereby placing themselves outside the Church, and losing access to grace. It is indeed a defined dogma of the Church that it is necessary to be under the authority of the Roman Pontiff to attain salvation. The true Church of Christ is visible. It was the error of Luther to identify it with the truly pure and holy souls on the earth, thereby making it invisible. Christ never said that His vicar and His bishops would be impeccable, that they would never cause scandal or teach error, but He did say that we must respect them, listen to them and remain in the communion of those whom He sends, for the visible bonds of communion are essential to a visible structure. They are not to be made light of. Let us all remain in our place and, as St Paul says in the epistle, not claim to be wiser than we are(Rm 12:16).
