Download HOMILY for the 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time, October 8th

HOMILY for the 6th. SUNDAY of ORDINARY TIME [B], February 11th., 2012
“Of course I want to; be cured”
What do you think of the word “naughty”?
According to a childcare expert (don’t you just love them?) we shouldn’t call children naughty because it
damages their self-confidence. So we shouldn’t use the “Naughty Step” or the “Naughty Corner”; so bang
goes order in the primary school. It might be acceptable to call their behaviour naughty, says the expert, but
not them. This seems to be shifting the blame, as if one says “I watched a naughty film” – I use this purely
as a theoretical example; I know it never happens in St. Boniface’s parish – when it’s not the film that’s
naughty but me.
Originally “naughty” was a very strong word, meaning “evil” or “vile” – you could use it about the weather.
It was linked with the word “nought”, i.e. absolutely valueless.
Now, when were you last called naughty?
Or called somebody else it? If I say “I’m afraid I’ve been
naughty” it usually means I have had too many whiskies and am groping around for the aspirins in the
bathroom. Or maybe we secretly sympathise with somebody who has been stirring up trouble but like to
distance ourselves a little, so we say: “tut, tut, that was very naughty”. Or when we really think something
was wrong but don’t want to cause an upset so we make it sound light-hearted. It becomes a sort of rebukelite.
I give this preamble because today’s Gospel might be called “The Naughty Leper”. Lepers have enough to
put up with, so it would be extremely insensitive to say: “The Bad Leper”, or “The Disobedient Leper”, but I
am afraid that is what he actually is. So we might say “naughty”.
But why? Well, look at the end of the story. He is dismissed by Jesus and told to go to the priest. He does
not do so, but goes telling everybody, so that Jesus is inundated and himself is “dismissed” in the sense that
he has to flee to the desert to get away. Some commentators suggest that Jesus knew in advance that this
would happen, and that is why, as we are told, he addresses the leper “sternly”. Others even say that when
Jesus said “of course I want to” he was saying it in a tone of exasperation, rather than reassurance – but
maybe that’s going too far.
So here we have another act of healing, or more strictly curing. This has been the Gospel theme for several
Sundays, and we might say it is the popular contemporary theme in the Church. Now, we have a healing
ministry in this parish, so members please hear me out to the end of this homily otherwise you’ll start
hyperventilating, etc. ....
We could say that the different ages of the Church have looked at different kinds of Jesus. The early Church
looked at the ‘theological Jesus’, working out his relationship within the Holy Trinity; the medieval Church
emphasised the ‘mystical Jesus’, and the Church after the Counter Reformation the ‘moral Jesus’.
Our
present age – and I am generalising rather – stresses the ‘healing Jesus’. Now that the trench warfare
between Catholicism and psychology has subsided and each feels that they can inject a little of themselves
into the other, Christian healing has come into vogue. Which is a blessing ... but also a danger, as we will
see.
Like all lepers, this one is forced into a radical separation from the community and he pleads “Purify me!”
We don’t have to be a leper in the strict sense to sympathise with that. Often individuals and groups feel cut
off from society, treated as lepers. They don’t conform to the established opinions. Young people, in
particular, are easily forced into a group sense where their individuality is no longer their own: they are
dictated to by fashion – the right bag, the right shoes, and so on.
an extent excluded from others and closed in on ourselves.
Illness of any kind, too, is when we are to
After the cure, comes the ritual of purification. The leper must pass through this ritual. And this is where
things go wrong. It is as if Jesus were saying: “You are cured, now go and receive the Sacrament of the
Sick”. We might say that that was totally unnecessary. The leper clearly thought so, and preferred to go
rushing off telling everybody what had happened. “If you have the address of a good doctor, spread it!”
That might seem reasonable, but it is not what Jesus wanted.
The ritual relationship to God is necessary to prevent things becoming over-personal or private: “Me and my
God; I have my doctor and I can phone him at any hour and he will come and save me”. In short, it
dissolves the cult of the personality.
Now maybe in the past there were in the Church too many rituals, and prohibitions, separations and divisions
into pure and impure, and people became exasperated with rituals, but the fact is that the shunning of rituals
– including not coming to Mass – creates a totally private Church (something which is a contradiction in
terms).
The healing is necessarily subjective. But the ritual is objective. It introduces into faith the idea
of “we” rather than “I”.
You will remember how after the Transfiguration of Jesus the three apostles
wanted to remain with him on the mountain in a holy huddle – but he made them come down.
Otherwise we catch the leprosy of a purely private faith. But the consequence of healing is that we should
hear rightly what Christ is telling us, and he tells us to attend to the ritual.
But why should Jesus have bothered about an old Jewish ritual when he was bringing in a new age? Because
the rituals were the same for everybody; they brought people together as the assembly. And Jesus was
forming the new assembly which we know as the Church.
The popularity of Christian healing now is partly a compensation for mistakes in the past. In the very early
Church, just as Jesus had performed miracles which were cures, so it was believed that the Sacrament of the
Sick would work cures. When this didn’t (usually) happen, the emphasis began to shift to the pardon of sins,
thus blurring the relationship of this Sacrament with the Sacrament of Reconciliation. And then the
emphasis moved to the pardon of sins before death, what were called the Last Rites, and what it still known
as “Extreme Unction” or anointing shortly before death. This then meant that if the priest hovered near the
patient’s bed in the hospital there was a panic because the patient seemed to be receiving a death sentence. I
myself have performed an anointing (in another parish) where the family who called me in the middle of the
night said: “Hurry up and get on with it, or he might wake up and catch you!”
Now healing, or curing, is personal, but it is also an action of the whole Church. Jesus suffered, out of love,
for the whole world. In touching the leper, and other compassionate works, he wishes to share in the
sufferings of all the sick. But he also wants the sick – and indeed the healthy too - to share in his own
sufferings, his Passion. That is what St. Paul tells the Colossians: “In my own body I do what I can to make
up what has still to be undergone by Christ, for the sake of his Church”. And in the rite of anointing the
sick, especially for somebody seriously ill, the priest says words which some find uncomfortable, but which
are deeply true: “You have given him (her) a share in your Passion, help him (her) to find hope in suffering”.
And this is because Christ has created a great network, the community of the healthy and the sick, with Christ
himself reaching out over all. And it is the ritual which links it to all the community. There is no such
thing as a private Christian wonder.
And if we don’t realise that, we are missing the whole point of the Gospel.
naughty.
We are being, frankly, rather