a homily for Epiphany 6B                       Text: Mark 1:40-45

Nudy Trees

My daughter and I have this little game. We point out the nudy trees to one another. She shouts: “That tree’s nudy!” Then she squeals and says “there’s another one!” I do it too.  Then I point to another one that has lost most of its leaves and call it a “nearly nudy one.” She looks, her eyes widen, and says “Let’s look for nearly nudy trees!”

It goes along like that for a while. We point out to one another which trees are nudy, which are nearly nudy, and which ones are still fully-clothed.

This went back to this past fall, when I was explaining autumn to her. She had asked what had happened to all the leaves. I told her that they fall off when it starts to get cold outside. This, of course, makes them “nudy”. I also pointed out that conifers, which have needles, aren’t bare. So some trees are nudy and some aren’t.

Bridging the gap between these two stories (our looking for nudy trees and my teaching her about the season) requires something of you, the listener. You have to know my daughter. You have to know what excites her and surprises her. What she finds funny and risqué. She must make sense to you.

Knowing Jesus

For our gospel to make sense, we have to know Jesus. We have to “get” Him. What excites and surprises Him. So let’s backtrack for a second. In the first chapter of Mark, we get a big arc all in one short space:

1. Jesus is baptized by John and begins his ministry
2. He calls disciples to follow Him
3. Then He jumps right into it

And His ministry is about

1. Proclaiming the Kingdom of GOD
2. And healing the sick.

And he moves from simply healing sickness to healing demon possession: all of this and we’re still in chapter 1! Then it builds to something bigger than possession: The Leper.

Let’s think about The Leper in context. Diseased. Infectious. Dying. He is driven outside of the walls of the city to protect the people. For the city, this is a matter of survival, so he has been literally cast out.

The Leper is visually frightening; the markings on the skin, like a warning: Keep Away! The fear of contagion is more infectious than the disease itself. The lack of scientific understanding—and the unwillingness to try.

Chapter 1 is concluded with Jesus healing the ultimate outcast. One so frightening and other that even we dare not imagine this as someone’s father or son, afflicted and pushed away.

Ritual Purity

So when the man with leprosy walks up to Jesus, what happens? [he asks for healing and Jesus heals him.] Jesus doesn’t run away. Then what does Jesus tell him to do?

1. Tell nobody
2. Go into town and get ritually purified

We don’t know about the second one, whether or not the man chooses to get purified or not, but we know he ignores the first. It says:

But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

Why can’t Jesus go into town?

Is it His new fame? Or could it be His own ritual impurity? Is He cast out? It is easy enough for us to dismiss these notions because of Jesus’s divinity, but what of his humanity?  He is, after all, a deeply devout Jew. He touched a diseased man and has not been ritually purified.  In fact, he really did get his hands dirty. So does Jesus really become an outcast? The difficult answer is yes! But unlike the man with leprosy, who is ignored, forgotten, and left to die, the very last words, the final clause of chapter 1 is

“and people came to him from every quarter.”

Into the Wild

Jesus pulls us from the protection of the city walls and out into the wilderness with the beasts. That’s the scope of His ministry in chapter 1. And for us. He calls us out to follow and then he takes off for the wilderness.

It is in the wild that the need is. Outside the protective city walls are the sick and the lonely and the hurting. We are called to minister to the most in need. The fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers who are pulled from their families, walled apart from one another. One locked within a city of protection and the other locked out in the wilderness. We are called to heal these broken relationships and this sickness of separation.

Let’s follow Jesus out into the wild, leaving the 99 in safety as we go after the lost sheep. Let’s find the places in our surrounding community that most need protection, that most need Jesus, and risk our own ritual purity. To follow Jesus, we need to get our hands dirty.