6th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Year B
First Reading (Lev 13: 1-2.45-46) leprosy, a disease considered to be a curse. Therefore those who suffered from it were considered unclean.
Second Reading (1 Cor 10: 31. 11:1) Saint Paul urges the people to never offend anyone but rather to do everything for the glory of God.
Gospel (Mk 1: 40-45) Jesus cures a man who suffers from leprosy.
Homily
Acceptance and Rejection: we live today in a world which uses almost on a daily basis these two words, acceptance and rejection. We are accepted by those who love us and want to see us prosper and have a good health. We are rejected by those who hate us and want to see us fail and being sick. One of the worse things that can happen to a human being is to be rejected. The feelings of rejection hurt more than any other feelings. Rejection damages one’s self-esteem. It makes a person feels useless and unworthy of life. Rejection can also lead one to become a rebel. A child who experiences rejection is likely to have a failed adulthood life. An elderly who is rejected by his or her family is likely to die sooner than expected. Many of our African elderly die earlier than expected simply because the family or the village find them being witches and therefore rejected them.
Wounds of rejection are stronger than any other physical or mental wounds. The truth is that each of us has felt to some extent the pain of rejection. There are many ways of insulating ourselves from rejection such as risking little, needing nothing, avoiding relationships and speaking little, etc. we build walls around us to avoid rejection.
The man who approached Jesus in today’s Gospel was a rejected man. As a person suffering of leprosy, he was forced against his will to live outside of the community. Nobody dared to touch him because leprosy was considered to be a disease of shame, punishment and sin against God. Hence, the painful thing of the person suffering of leprosy was not a disease per say, but rather the pain of being rejected by those who yesterday were your friends.
When today we ourselves reject people, we are indeed treating them as ‘lepers’, even though we may not be aware or conscious of this. We reject people in very small ways by the tone of our voice or even by a look. This can accumulate with serious long effects to the point that it affects our relationships.
The interesting part of today’s Gospel is not that Jesus cured a leper, but the manner in which He cured him. The man was excluded and rejected by everybody in the community. Nobody wanted to come near a leper for fear of being contaminated and being declared unclean. But Jesus defiled all this, He was moved by compassion on seeing the leper. He allowed the leper to approach him. He reached out to the leper and touched him. Jesus in fact repaired him and gave him a sense of belonging and a sense of being human again. After giving him hope that all is not lost, Jesus only then healed him.
Jesus accepted the leper as he was. Acceptance is an answer to rejection. One of the loveliest thing that can happen to a human being is the feeling/emotion of acceptance. Being accepted in the community is of great value than gold. When people accept us they give us a feeling that we are worthwhile. We all long to be accepted for what we are. We cannot be accepted for work we do or what we produce, then we are not unique, because others can do the same work perhaps even better than we can. But when we are accepted for who we are, then we become unique. This is how Jesus accepted the leper and how He still continues to accept us. And how in our turn we can learn to accept others and mostly to reach out to those who are sick, the marginalized, the elderly and those who are suffering the pain of rejection. Our mission as Christians is to rekindle hope, bring back the zest for living in someone else. We are the mirror of the infinite compassion of our God.
