Be Imitators of Christ!!!

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time February 12. 2012

In Hide and Seek the good places to hide are usually gone in a flash, and someone winds up left out in the open. It was like that with Jesus; He had no place to hide. As knowledge of His healing power spread, He was overwhelmed with requests for cures and often needed to get away from the crowds. In today's Gospel Jesus admonishes the cured man to tell no one of the miracle, but the fellow cannot contain himself and shares his joy with everyone. When we look at our own situation we see irony here. In Matthew 28:129, Jesus tells us to tell everyone about Him. What do we do? That's right. We tell no one. We should bring back the former leper. He was a better public relations person than we.

Mark's Gospel is the shortest, but contains the most miracles. Today as the scene opens, Jesus is walking out of the Galilean mountains. He has delivered His famous sermon on the Beatitudes and is being followed by a huge crowd. As He approaches a town, a desperate man breaks through the crowd and painfully kneels before Jesus. The crowd recoils in horror, for the fellow is afflicted with leprosy, a common disease in Palestine. In its late stages, the illness is really awful. Nose, lips, toes, etc, become foul-smelling sores. The Jews looked upon it not so much as a physical disease but a spiritual uncleanness. The leper carried both physical wounds and the conviction that God hated him. The leper, as we heard in the first reading, was rejected: the one who bears the sore of leprosy shall keep his garments rent and his head bare he shall cry out, unclean, unclean! he shall dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp

Imagine the courage of this fellow! The law stated if a leper exposed others to his disease, he was to be stoned to death. Lucky for him that the people around the Teacher were so anxious to get away from the scene. Otherwise they might well have stoned him to death. Would Jesus have put Himself between them and the stones? With you, I answer yes, but how did the leper sense that the Christ would not flee in revulsion with everyone else? What quality did he discern in Him that told him Jesus would hold His ground? Mark here is telling us much about Jesus. We discover He has time for those whom others consider human garbage. One hears people say, "My sin is so horrible not even God could forgive it." This Gospel gives the lie to such a statement. The mystics tell us God will forgive us not because of who we are but because of who He is.

People in pain do not speak in pages; they have time only for the essentials. "If you want to, you can cure me." This plea is just eight words. Today's account tells us that the Teacher cured the man before Him, reaching out a hand to touch him. Can anyone here imagine what that touch must felt like to the

leper? It was probably the first time in years that someone had dared place a hand on him. If a picture is worth a thousand words, one touch must be worth ten thousand to a leper.

Unlike many other miracles in Mark, this miracle occurs in a split second, without preliminaries. The misery had to end immediately. What does that tell you about the Christ whom you worship? Would that we could teach ourselves to have just a fraction of that compassion. Suffering and illness bring with them a feeling of isolation, not only in lepers of biblical-era Palestine, but also in our people today. While not all of us have a healing ministry, every one of us can imitate Christ and reach out to the sick members or our community, accompanying them through their experience, and letting them know they are not cut off from our community.

February 11 is the 20th annual World Day of the Sick. And today we invited our sick members to come forward so that we can pray for all of them and anoint them, to express our support, to let all of them know that they are very important members of our community. Walt Whitman wrote, "Seeing a wounded soldier on the battlefield, I do not ask who he is. I become the wounded man." So should it be with us. Let us be Christ-like in our compassion.

One final note! The leper teaches us how to pray. His prayer needed only eight words. Jesus shows such fondness for short prayers that I think, were he to walk the earth today, he would be among the first in e-mails and text messages. "In your prayers do not use a lot of meaningless words...". Paul invites us to be imitators of me, as I am of Christ, to become Christ-centered rather than self-centered. In contrast to the game Hide and Seek we need to open our eyes and, like Christ, not worry about a place to hide, instead reach out a hand to our suffering brothers and sisters and joining with them say to Jesus: if you wish, you can make us clean!!!
"Los llamo mis amigos, porque les he dado a conocer todo lo que mi Padre me ha dicho" Juan 15, 15b

Con y desde el , Phonso