The homily below was delivered on the sixth Sunday of ordinary times, Sunday February 15th 2009, at Our Lady of Solace Church in Brooklyn.
Last week, I was on my annual retreat. In the retreat house where I was, there was a unique holy water font with the inscription which read “Domene, si vis potes/me/mundar, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean,” the words of our Gospel today. What wonderful words to remember when we enter the Church and bless ourselves with holy water.
I love to watch children dipping their fingers, and sometimes hands, in holy water fonts. Children love to play with water. Perhaps that is because their Baptism was not so long ago. We need to constantly remember our own Baptism when we were made clean of original sin and became God’s very own sons and daughters.
The possibility of being made clean from leprosy and more is contracted in the Old Testament reading from Leviticus and in the Gospel of Mark.
Moses receives the command from God to expel the person with leprosy from the camp. When he sees someone coming, the leper must cry out, “unclean, unclean.” This adds only insult to injury. There seems to be no possibility of being made clean and the priests are charged with making the judgment for continued exile from the people.
By contrast, Jesus, the new Moses, is approached by a leper who in faith says, “If You will, You can make me clean.”
Jesus, moved with pity, touches him, cures him and sends him off to the priests to get a declaration of the cure, but not before the man is admonished to tell no one else of his cure. This is an almost impossible order which he does not keep. He tells everyone.
Leprosy still exists in our world today as Hanson’s Disease. In the last century there was a leper colony on the Island of Molokai in Hawaii, which still exists. Fortunately, today there are very few inhabitants on Molokai. To that leper colony was sent a young Belgian priest called Damien de Veuster, who once assigned to that colony never left.
One day as he was preaching at Mass, he said “We lepers” and the other lepers quickly understood that now he shared the fatal disease with them, a disease, without a cure at that time, which rotted limbs and extremities and disfigured faces. He will soon be canonized a Saint, not just because of the work which he did, but because of his holiness.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta one day was caring for an abandoned leper and was observed by a visitor who said, “I would not do that for all the money in the world.” To which she responded, “Neither would I.”
Where do we stand as people of faith in the face of not only the incurable diseases (eg AIDS and Cancer) of our world today, but more importantly the spiritual diseases which affect our world today? Do we believe that Jesus can still cure and make clean that which seems to be hopelessly disfigured? Are we willing to accept the conditions Jesus set for the man cured by leprosy?
Remember, he had to go to the priests and, in a sense, humble himself before them. Is this not like obligation to confess our sins to a priest?
And then be made to keep it a secret because God heals and cures whom and wherever He wills? It is not for everyone, especially for those who do not humbly ask in faith.
My dear sisters and brothers, we are invited to the banquet of the Lord which the Saints tell us is like a medicine for the soul. But do we want to become better? Do we want to become clean? The means are available for us. Penance and the Eucharist offer us the infallible means for healing and spiritual health.
May we say with faith and humility today, “Lord if you will, you can make me clean.”