Inside and Out

by BJ Brown

After that first day of Jesus’s public ministry, after Jesus casts out a demon from a man in the synagogue and a fever from Peter’s mother-in-law, and after spending long hours healing the ones who approached Simon’s house after sunset, the next morning he leaves Capernaum for the neighboring villages. And the very next thing that Mark tells us is that a man with leprosy throws himself at Jesus’ feet and asks to be healed.

The first reading for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time suggests a measure of the audacity of the man’s request. The lectionary’s selection from the book of Leviticus is part of a longer passage concerned with the role of religious authority in protecting the community’s health (a timely topic to return to on some other occasion!) According to the instructions in Leviticus, when the priests find that someone has a visible skin disease that can be passed on to others, they are to be completely cut off from the community. They are sent to “dwell apart” and they are to rend their garments as if in mourning, as if they were dead.

There is where the man who kneels at Jesus’s feet in the same Sunday’s gospel comes from. His request, “if you wish, you can make me clean” professes complete faith in Jesus’s healing power. And Jesus, “moved with pity,” does heal him. Jesus’s touch bridged all that separated the man from his community; Jesus’s word chased disease out of him just as the demons fled from the man in the synagogue and the fever left Peter’s mother-in-law.

Mark’s introduction of Jesus as a powerful healer is one thread tying together the three miracles of Mark 1:21-45, Mark’s account of the beginnings of Jesus’s public ministry that we’ve lingered over for the past three Sundays.

But these three stories are not just well-matched pearls on a string. Each one adds something to the composite picture, to the fullness of Mark’s gospel. What, then, does the story of the man with leprosy reveal?

Some Scripture scholars find in this passage the beginnings of what they call the “messianic secret.” Unique to Mark’s gospel, the “messianic secret” is about Jesus’ true identity. Mark’s hearers and readers know who Jesus is, because Mark tells us in his very first verse that Jesus is the Son of God. And the demon recognized Jesus before it was cast out, calling out, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God”? The man with leprosy also recognizes Jesus’s power. It’s Jesus’ own disciples who don’t seem to be in on the truth of who Jesus is. His first four disciples, Simon and Andrew, James and John, have so far demonstrated no special understanding of the man they have dropped everything to follow.

These same Scripture scholars have thought and written at great length about the Gospel of Mark’s “messianic secret”, and what it means for how we come to know Jesus Christ. But the man with leprosy does not have that sort of scholarly interest in secrecy. He has firsthand, insider knowledge of Jesus’s healing power and he just can’t keep it a secret, despite Jesus’s command. The outsider—a leper cast out of his community—becomes the ultimate insider, experiencing and proclaiming Jesus’ saving power.

The story of the man healed of leprosy ends with a curious twist, as recounted in the last words of the first chapter of Mark: “it was impossible [for Jesus] to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere.” Jesus and the man with leprosy effectively trade places. The one who was outside the community has been restored within; the one who brought him back must now remain outside, even as people keep coming to him.

In our own days, Pope Francis calls us to pay attention to the outside edges, to the people on life’s peripheries. In his encyclical letter on social friendship, Fratelli Tutti, Francis writes that “each of us can learn something from others. No one is useless and no one is expendable. This also means finding ways to include those on the peripheries of life. For they have another way of looking at things; they see aspects of reality that are invisible to the centers of power where weighty decisions are made” (FT 215). Pope Francis calls us to “authentic dialogue” , to a fluid exchange between insiders and those out on the peripheries. This involves “the ability to respect the other’s point of view and to admit that it may include legitimate convictions and concerns” (FT 203).

These are very challenging words in a winner-take-all culture that generally takes it for granted that if the Democrats are in, the Republicans must be on the outs (and vice versa). These are challenging words to those who fear that Black power means simply to replace White privilege, and not to create new political boundaries, new ways of funding public education, and expanded access to social services for all in need.

What Pope Francis urges us to is a willingness to move between inside and out, to reach out across what appears to separate us, just as Jesus, moved with pity, stretched out his hand and touched the man with leprosy.

But remember again the prohibitions of the first reading from Leviticus. Imitating what Jesus does in today’s gospel requires a willingness to touch the untouchable, even if doing that violates the hallowed and authoritative customs of the communities we belong to. And as it did for Jesus, drawing others in may put us out, costing us dearly in some way, separating us from what’s known and familiar. It’s still hard for many of us to imagine nine women on the Supreme Court, to imagine African-American and Latinx faces at the top of Fortune 500 companies, to see women in positions of leadership in our church, without also noticing that the faces we are accustomed to seeing are missing.

But isn’t that another sort of a messianic secret? Isn’t this a revelation of the truth of how Jesus saves us all? When Jesus heals the man with leprosy, he shows us that going to the peripheral edges of our common life, by drawing outsiders into life’s circles, is how we will all become true insiders. It is how we will all become one with Jesus Christ, the Holy One of God.