Touch.

Mark 1.40-45

February 11, 2018

I.

Earlier in the chapter we heard about the Lord liberating a man possessed by an unclean spirit.  Here we have an unclean man, a leper.  Leprosy in the Bible could refer to any number of virulent skin diseases.  But the point is that the person was excluded from the community.  Lepers were rendered literally untouchable.  

Jesus, on the contrary, is about inclusion.  He refuses to allow someone who comes to him for help to remain an outcast.  He desires to gather all God’s children under his wing, into his brood.  Jesus has come into the world to touch the untouchable.  He has come into the world to take away people’s untouchability and restore all to a common community.  

Jesus is not a priest.  So we don’t know why the man would come to Jesus when the Bible says this is a matter for the priests.  Perhaps he has already been to the priests and was rejected.  In any case he comes to Jesus as a kind of alternative, unorthodox, unconventional healer.

He kneels down before Jesus and says, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”  The Lord has already rejected the categorization of people into clean and unclean.  This was the demon he cast out of the man in the synagogue earlier.  In his new community, there isn’t going to be anyone rejected as unclean, unworthy, impure, illegal, or bad.  Just as when Paul says there is in Christ no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, Jesus says there is no clean or unclean.  These are artificial constructs, developed purely for the convenience of the people in charge and the maintenance of their power.

We still feel that some need to be quarantined for the protection of the community; Jesus insists that the quarantine is itself the disease.  The early church was famous for continuing to minister to lepers and plague victims, even when everyone else had run for the hills.  It was more important to express compassion and welcome for sick people, than to save their own skin.  Certainly many Christians died in this effort, but since for us death is hardly the end of life it doesn’t matter.  It is more important that people live authentic, gospel lives of courage and love, thereby participating in the life of God, than to merely physically survive a few years longer.  This selfless attitude is one of the reasons the church grew so quickly in those days.

The authentic church of Jesus Christ rejects no one and quarantines no one.  It compels no one to suffer alone or apart for the sake of the greater good.  It is radically inclusive, welcoming all into the circle.  Jesus has no qualifying exam or test for this man.  He doesn’t have to prove his repentance or reject sin as a condition for inclusion.  All he has to be is sick.  All he has to be is in need of healing.  All he has to be is excluded.

The leper demands nothing.  On the one hand he brazenly comes to Jesus, an illegal act for a leper; they were supposed to stay away from people.  On the other hand he kneels in humility and sorrow, recognizing his own need, and affirming Jesus’ power even affirming Jesus’ divinity.

II.

The English texts say Jesus is “moved with pity,” but the Greek is a bit stronger, more like “he snorted with indignation.”  Jesus is always offended by the presence of evil in the world.  He knows it doesn’t have to be this way.  He knows God does not create the world as a place where evil can thrive; people’s selfish fantasies did that.  The disease of leprosy was bad enough, but Jesus is always frustrated at how we make these things immeasurably worse by our paranoid and callous reaction to them, sacrificing people who are already suffering, increasing their suffering in the self-serving belief that this will be better for the supposed safety of the whole.  People feel safer when they can inflict suffering on an offender.  It is the sinful ideology of lynching and incarceration.

This is what society and its leaders will eventually do to Jesus himself  They will sacrifice him to their own fears, imagining that by crucifying him they have removed a pathogen from their midst and protected the people from his virulent and dangerous ideas and practices.  Jesus identifies with these sacrificial lambs and scapegoats, the losers society has decided need to bear the punishment for everyone’s guilt and sins.  He takes on this role of innocent victim when he gives his life for the life of the world.  He exposes the violence and cruelty of this attitude, and at the same time really accomplishes the reconciliation intended.

Compounding the crime of the man who came to him, Jesus goes even further and stretches out his hand to touch him.  Touching a leper itself made one ceremonially unclean in those days.  But of course with Jesus the power goes in the other direction.  Instead of Jesus contracting uncleanness from the man, the man contracts wholeness and purity from Jesus.  He is instantly made clean.

Later, when the story says that Jesus could not go into any towns after that, it is not because of Jesus’ popularity; it is because if you touched a leper you technically contracted their uncleanness, if not the disease.  Since the leper disobeyed Jesus’ instructions and blabbed to everyone about how Jesus healing him, Jesus had to stay away from populated areas for a while.

The man’s disease certainly vanishes; whatever was wrong about his skin is healed.  But that’s not even technically what the man asks for.  He doesn’t say, “heal me of this terrible, painful disease,” but “you can make me clean.”  Uncleanness or untouchability was not a medical condition, but a religious and social one.  Obviously, they are related; but uncleanness was a ceremonial category.  When Jesus makes the man clean he changes his religious and social status.  Once authoritatively declared clean, the man is accepted, welcomed back, and restored to a place in the community.

III.

It happens though physical touch.  Something we often under appreciate.  We have an odd relationship with touching in our culture.  I know people today who believe church is going to become increasingly an on-line and streamed experience, something you get through your phone or your computer. There are already virtual churches in which no only do you never actually touch another person, you don’t even see them as they are.  You only see the avatar they have chosen to represent themselves. 

This reminds me of how, in the 1950’s it was sometimes considered better for babies if they remained “untouched by human hands,” and so less likely to contract dangerous microbes from other people.  We have this bias that things are somehow better if we can get our bodies out of it.  As if we have imported this category of “unclean” and applied it to our bodies even now.    

Jesus is not squeamish about bodies.  He becomes flesh, for crying out loud.  He is truly human, which is to say a physical, mortal, material life form like each of us.  While he does occasionally heal people at long distance, his main practice is to be face-to-face with a person, often touching them directly.

We Presbyterians have been notorious for this paranoia about touching and physicality.  At our worst we reduced worship to a purely auditory experience in which we sat still and listened to a preacher talk.  The sacraments are intentionally tactile and physical.  But our tradition sometimes leads us to baptize with as little water as we can get away with, and have communion as infrequently and as antiseptically as possible.  Fortunately, we’re getting away from that.  This week we will even impose ashes.  In every church I have served we pass the peace of Christ, which is a ritual of mandatory, promiscuous touching in which we have to encounter each other directly for at least a few seconds.

It is harder to hate and mistrust people with whom we have physical contact.  Jesus touches others as a demonstration of communion and mutuality  Touching creates community, which is why he uses it with this leper, who had been excluded from the community.  By touching we say to a person that they are not unclean, but welcome, equal, and accepted.  

I think it is a message that many people need to hear today.  I do not believe we can have authentic Christian worship without it.  This is what makes a real community.  Virtual communities are not real communities, even though we might enjoy and learn in them.  There is nothing wrong with connecting on social media.  But that can’t be the end of it.  Jesus talks about 2 or 3 gathering together; Paul talks about not neglecting gathering together.  Gathering has to be in real time and space, in real bodies that can and do touch.  Faith in the God who is incarnate in Jesus has to involve touching if it is to be authentic.

IV.

It is not a coincidence that when the Aryans conquered India part of their colonizing strategy was to divide the people into castes, the lowest one being the untouchables.  To be rendered untouchable is an unspeakable horror, intended as a deterrence against behavior the rulers found unacceptable.    

In a world where the elites maintain their power by dividing us against each other, the ultimate division is when we are prevented from touching.  Short of execution, he worst prison punishment is solitary confinement.  Incarceration is itself retribution by isolation.  

The more technologically connected we becomes, the more I fear we are becoming disconnected in reality, where it matters.  We cannot survive if our community is reduced to screens and keyboards.

The Way of Jesus Christ is radically physical.  Obedience is inherently embodied.  Discipleship is incarnational.  It is about locking arms, holding hands, and embracing each other in holy community.  It is about welcoming each other in equality before God.  It is about belonging together, and learning together how to place our trust in Jesus Christ, God with, within, and among us.

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