Torah and Temple – or Partner with Christ

HOMILY WEEK 01 04 – Year I
Torah and Temple, or Partners of Christ
(Heb 3:7-14; Ps 95; Mk 1:40-45)
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Have you ever felt guilty for not picking up a hitchhiker? Or not reaching out to a person seemingly lost in a parking lot?

Today’s liturgy invites us to go far beyond the rubrics of the Torah and the rituals of the Temple to be compassionate partners of Christ.

The author of Hebrews, in the first reading, has the Holy Spirit speaking to us about the waywardness of our ancestors in the desert. They were chosen by God to be icons of God on earth. By their fidelity to the covenant relationship with God, and to the way of life God had given to them on Mt. Sinai, they were to draw all other nations back to God.

Salvation history tells us just the opposite occurred. Although given the Law (Torah), Land and Temple, they continually fell for the false gods of possessions, prestige and power. They had, as the author of Hebrews puts it, “unbelieving hearts that turned away from the living God.” For its part, Psalm 95 reminds us not to “harden our hearts as our ancestors did in the desert.”

The gospel of Mark shows us the opposite example. A man with leprosy, who is ritually unclean, comes to Jesus with deep faith in him and his power to heal, and makes his request kneeling before Jesus. The suffering man realizes who Jesus is: not one prophet among many, but the Incarnation of the God of Israel, the only one before whom worship is the appropriate attitude.

In our sickness, our weakness, our shame, our sin, our oddness—lots of us feel like this leper. We feel as though we’re just not worthy. But whatever trouble we are in, we must come to Jesus in the attitude of worship. He is the Lord and we’re not. This is the key step in getting our lives in order: right praise.

Consider the leper’s beautiful plea, essential in any act of petitionary prayer: “If you wish, you can make me clean.” He is not demanding; he is acknowledging the lordship of Jesus, his sovereignty. “Thy will be done” is always the right attitude in any prayer.

What an example of humble faith! Jesus, moved with compassion, doesn’t just speak words of healing. He significantly stretches out his hand to touch the leper, deliberately breaking all the rules of ritual cleanliness. Immediately, we are told, the leprosy left him, and he was made clean, with Jesus technically taking on his ritual impurity!

What is also significant is the occurrence of what is called in Mark the “messianic secret” – Jesus consistently, as he does here, cautions those he healed against speaking about it publicly, but rather to go and show themselves to the priests as Moses commanded. Jesus knew people would misunderstand his role as the Messiah before his passion and resurrection and would want to make him a king and political ruler expected to oust the Roman oppressors. They would not see him as the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament, as the Suffering Servant of God who would deliver God’s people from their real enemies, sin, sinfulness and death.

The Temple was the religious, cultural and even political heart of Judaism at the time of Jesus. Cleansing oneself in the mitzvah or ritual bath was a prelude to temple worship. Jesus, the Messiah, Son of God and Lamb of God, was “cleansing” people, not in the temple, but outside the temple, where the lowly and often excluded ones were, such as the leper. That is why he would ask the leper who was healed to first go and show himself to the priests “as a testimony to them” before spreading the news of his healing. Jesus was hoping the temple priests would get the message he was truly the long-awaited Messiah, and come to him with believing hearts, unlike their ancestors. Now that invitation extends to us.

The author of Hebrews challenges us not only to understand this mystery of the crucified Messiah and Lamb of God, but to participate in it as partners of Christ, the new Temple and the one who is greater than the Torah, who calls us to live the new law of love and compassion, not ritual and rightness. Returning to the question about guilt that opened this homily, Jesus would have stopped to see if the man needed a ride, and would probably have gone over to the person in the parking lot to see if he needed anything.

Someone who articulates this understanding well is Johann Baptist Metz who writes in his book The Courage to Pray: “If we are to pray in the spirit of Christ, we cannot turn our backs on the suffering of others. Prayer demands that we love our fellow human beings; we have no choice. This need for humanity urges Christians today to adopt a positive attitude toward prayer. We must pray not just for the poor but with them. This contradicts our instinctive tendency to avoid the company of those who are unhappy or suffering. A mature attitude towards prayer presupposes the readiness to assume responsibility.” (p. 19-22)

Driving home one cold November night, I came across a man hitchhiking. Although hesitant, I stopped and offered him a ride. Our conversation quickly revealed that he had just picked up some heavy drugs in the city and was on his way to East Hastings in Vancouver to end his life there. As he shared his hurt at the hands of the staff at an Indian Residential School, I softly suggested that he should speak to a priest. When he did not respond negatively to that comment, I revealed that I was a priest, and we settled in for a heart-to-heart conversation about that soul pain in his life.

As we were passing by his home community, I suggested I drive him home and there, we sat in the car for another hour of profound conversation during which I encouraged him to reach out for help, go for treatment, and gave him my card and contact information. A year later, at 11:30 pm when I was in bed, I received a phone call. It was Colin, that hitchhiker. After our conversation that night, he decided to go for treatment instead of Vancouver, had sobered up and was now an addictions counselor on his home community! That phone call moved me to the depths of my being, as I realized that I had indeed gone to the periphery, reached out to the marginalized, taken on the smell of the sheep, and had been a compassionate partner of Christ.

In the Eucharist, Jesus reaches out to us, speaking words of healing in the Liturgy of the Word, and sharing with us his very own body and blood in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. May our celebration deepen our faith in Jesus, like the leper, and empower us to reach out to others, beyond Torah and Temple, rules and duty, as compassionate partners of Christ.