Mark 1:40-45
That is it a priest that Jesus tells the leper to go to is hugely significant because it is the priest who can bring the man back into the inclusion of the community. If someone was born diseased, crippled etc then that was the way God intended it to be. The whole reality of the universe circled round the religious idea that everythkng was the way God intended it to be and the Priest (not the doctor) was the symbol of that. He alone could change reality, as it were, for he alone was the one who knew the rituals of sacrifice etc that shifted the reality of what was. The leper could be made better but to actually find his place back in the community he had to go to the priest, who could move reality enough to accomodate a newly healed person.
It is the church who brings pople back into community. Only the church can fully include folk again. There's the lesson.
How easy it is for folk to become excluded: a bad relationship decision, a life circumstance, an illness, a debt, unemployment, bankrupcy... and how easy we find ourselves turning away from folk in those circumstances. It's as if people change their social class and we don't ove in the right circles to meet them any more. Where is the church, the people who say they follow Jesus, and touch lepers clean, where is the church busy with including them again?
This is a big story about inclusion. It goes to the heart of stuff. It's about who we say we are and how we show that to be the case. Where's the evidence?
This story is kind of subtle but asks us for the evidence of inclusion and bringing people back into reality again because we have the power to include. Such a big question for us living between worlds: the secular and religious.
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