Show Notes
Fr. talks about the leper and what we can learn from him and his gratitude for Jesus in his life.
Gospel:Mk 1:40-45
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you.
A reading from the holy gospel according to Mark a leper came to Jesus and kneeling down, begged him and said, if you wish, you can make me clean.
Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, I do. Will it be made clean?
The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean.
Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once.
He said to him, see that you tell no one anything, but go show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed.
That will be proof for them.
The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter.
He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere. The gospel of the Lord well, this is sure to turn out to be a great day. We've got the Super bowl this evening, and our first reading had the word pustule in it, so it can't get much better. This is another one of those gospels, like last week, where we have an anonymous hero.
This one happens to be a leper who came to Jesus in desperation to find healing.
So we're going to give him a name, too. This one is going to be Butch.
And the reason why I say Butch is a hero might be a little, I don't know, shocking, might be too strong a word. But here we have him not listening to what Jesus told him to do. Don't go tell anybody about this yet. That's exactly what he did.
But I think that's okay, because what he did is show us how real evangelization happens, and it doesn't happen through the best theological argument we can come up with. It doesn't come with an appeal to thomistic philosophy. It doesn't come from a document written by a pope or a letter issued by a bishop or a homily preached by a priest.
It happens when someone has a profound experience of God's grace in their life, and that grace has such a strong impulse of overwhelming joy that that joy bursts forth from the person.
And in this case, here we have a leper who spent the whole time he suffered from this disease, which could have been many years, on the outskirts of society, isolated. Anytime he came near anybody else, he had to shout unclean and keep his distance.
So not only was he suffering from this horrible disease.
But he would have also suffered from profound loneliness and isolation.
And we have him coming before Jesus, and we're not even sure he 100% believed that Jesus would cure him, by the way. We just know it was worth him taking a chance.
And here he comes before Jesus drops on his knees with all the hope he could muster, that Jesus just might give him what he needed.
And that little glimmer of trust paid off.
And all of a sudden, all of this suffering, including the isolation of leprosy, left him.
And even though he left with a powerful understanding of Jesus love in his life, he couldn't listen. He was so overwhelmed with joy that he went and spread it all over the place. Anybody that would stand still, probably for more than 10 seconds, he had to blurt it out, including, the scripture says, abroad. So he left the area and went to perhaps even neighboring countries and villages and shared the news.
And what it tells us in the rest of the reading is that Jesus couldn't even go into towns anymore. People were just coming from every direction.
In other words, this person's testimony got people interested in the love of Christ, and they kept coming to him.
Well, I think virtually all of us gathered here have had moments where God's grace has touched us, and we felt it very deeply.
And that grace should bring joy to our lives as well.
But we tend to hold that in. We don't let it out. And maybe the lesson we can take from Butch is that it's okay to let it out. It's okay to share that joy of an experience of God's grace. And perhaps if we do, we might just draw a few more people to come and find out what it's all about, to get to know Jesus a little bit better.
