MK 1: 40-45 

Marginally Mark…Epiphany 6… Revised 2018

 (for The Transfiguration see MK 9:2-9)

Reuven - let’s give him a name & a face - is more likely, we believe today, to be suffering from psoriasis or similar. Enough, though, to push him beyond the margins of society. It makes no difference to Reuven whether he has leprosy or psoriasis; under the law he's one of the living dead! In even approaching Jesus, Reuven puts himself still further out, & pulls Jesus out there with him! Jesus is no stranger to our margins! Out there in a sense Himself, now, through being approached by Reuven, He is nevertheless filled with compassion for him & heals him.  Note, though, that Reuven’s ‘If…’ is a statement of faith. Are the big ‘Ifs’ in our lives statements of faith, or hints of doubt about God & what God is capable of? 

How do we feel about ‘outsiders’ whoever they are? Compassionate enough to do what we can for them? On the spot? Or are we among those who want to keep them at bay? Shut them out behind bigger & better walls, turn back their boats, & the like?

That Jesus' response is to snort with anger rather than compassion was probably the earlier - harder - textual reading. Jesus' anger or indignation is His on the spot reaction to the state Reuven’s in. No-one should be consigned to live like that! Not Reuven, not any human being should have exclusion imposed upon affliction! Jesus’ anger then expresses itself in compassion. I don't have any problem with a truly & fully human Jesus losing his cool in compassion. If He can do it, so can I! If we're truly Jesus' friends, maybe we ought to be madder about a lot of things happening to people ‘out there’. If  healing is to take place for some people, that may mean getting our reputations as well as our hands dirtied as happens in Jesus’ case here. 

In telling of Jesus sending Reuven off healed, MK uses the same expression as he does of Jesus being 'thrown out' into the wilderness for His testing ([1:12]. Are we, as today’s disciples driven - in the Biblical sense used here of that word - to either go out into some wilderness, or maybe to come in from one? Jesus knows what a test Reuven’s return into society's going to be for him. As He was tested & then had to return back into society to minister among us.

I’m tempted to hang more loosely today than in a previous existence from a church become too institutionalised; too much organisation, too little organism. Jesus' instruction to Reuven to comply with the Levitical law, though, warns me not to undo the tie that binds me to the behemoth too completely! Perhaps the issue is whether that tie brings freedom as it will do in Reuben's case, or simply binds us still tighter to a law that brings more bondage than the freedom Christ brings?  Ironically, in a sense we end, here, with Reuven & Jesus swapping places in so far s who’s in & who’s out!

MK captures Reuben's sheer excitement at his cleansing. Are we living out, celebrating, telling about the healing freedom of Christ, who resolves all our ‘Big Ifs’? Or is spiritual psoriasis binding us instead of freeing us?