The gospel story this Sunday is a veritable jewel. At first glance it looks as if it's about Jesus healing a leper. But there's more to scripture than meets the eye. Turning it over and over, like a precious stone, you can find many levels of meaning. At the most obvious level it's a beautiful story of kindness and compassion; Jesus reached out and healed a leper. Another way is to see the leper as representative of all of us, sinners in need of forgiveness and restoration. Again, it challenges us to look at how we deal with society's outcasts and pariahs.
Matthew and Luke have similar stories, perhaps the same incident. And Luke has a second story about Jesus healing ten lepers. In each, Jesus sends the leper to the Temple priest. That a leper who had been healed should present himself to the priest for detailed physical examination and restoration to worship was a requirement of the Mosaic Law as found in the Old Testament's Book of Leviticus. Half a dozen of the twenty-seven chapters of Leviticus read like a medical text book!
I like to see the story through the lens of the first reading, taken from the Book of Leviticus. In each, the role of the Temple priest is crucial. The Old Testament priest was the monitor of worship; you had to have his approval before you could worship. Lepers were believed to be ritually unclean and therefore incapable of worship. It wasn't enough for Jesus that the leper was cleansed; for completeness of healing he needed to get back to the worship from which he had been excommunicated.
The Old Testament looked forward to a Messiah who would gather together into one the scattered tribes of Israel - scattered though warfare, exile, schism, sin and rebellion against God. Together they would worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the temple on Mount Sion. Their worship would be the cat's pyjamas, the envy of all the world. Every nation on earth would want to come and join. God's people, all humanity, would be everything God had intended - at peace with one another and with God.
The leper, like all the ritually unclean in Jesus' day, represented all who had wandered from God's vision and intention, all who were unable or unwilling to worship. Vatican II grew out of a history of liturgical ferment which had built up for more than a century. The revival of liturgical worship was the overarching vision of the Council. Everything else - ecumenism, religious liberty, the nature of the church etc. - was in the context of worship, its indispensability and centrality. The renewed Sunday Mass was to be the source and summit of the whole Christian life.
What happened after Vatican II? There was a vast exodus from Sunday Mass! That only 25% of Catholics in this country (far less than that in mainland Europe) attend Mass today would have flabbergasted the Council Fathers. This can be explained in many ways - sociologically, politically, culturally, theologically, spiritually....
What does worship do? What's its role in life? It is meant to order all life to God. It is meant to transform us into the people we are supposed to be - in mind, will, imagination - according to God's plan. In worship we become rightly ordered, complete. Without it, we are somewhat disordered, turned in on ourselves, incomplete. Worship is a signal to us of what life is about.
God doesn't need our worship. We need it, desperately and urgently. St. Augustine, in his 'City of God,' proposed that you can uncover the nature of a society by asking who or what does its people worship? He blamed the fall of Rome on the Romans' worship of the wrong god. Paul Tillich, the great Protestant existentialist philosopher of the last century, held that the key to understanding a person is to ask in what consists her or his ultimate concern. If worship of God is not the chief concern, there is a disorder present.
Our Sunday Eucharist is meant to un-disorder us (Wow - get a load of that!!), to cleanse and purify our hearts, and make us complete human persons. It is a discipline, a spiritual workout. People complain that Mass is boring, often the same people who spend many 'exciting' hours in the gym each week! Mass is meant to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. It's a celebration that presupposes we're traveling the most difficult journey, the journey inward. So, yes, the leper in the gospel story this Sunday is representative of all of us.
We are like the leper; we need healing. We are different from the leper: Jesus took away the sickness; the addiction, anger, abusive and impulsive behavior Jesus will not simply take away. We have to work the program like any working journeyman Christian.
PASTOR EMERITUS
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