Mark 1:40-45

Reach Out and Touch Someone

Author, Larry Davies, shared the following story … see if you identify with it. The check-out line at a local grocery store was long and Davies was in a hurry. Seeing another line nearby nearly empty, he walked over and stood behind the only customer still to make a purchase.

A young twenty-something woman was holding a small basket with fifteen to twenty jars of baby food. There was nothing else in the basket: just baby food.

“This is great,” he thought. “She’ll only be a minute and I can be on my way.”

The clerk took the woman’s check for seven dollars and forty-three cents and efficiently typed in the numbers and slid it in the proper slot on the register. At this point the cash drawer was supposed to open and a receipt printed, but not this time.

A light began to blink: “See Manager.” The clerk called on the intercom for the manager while running the check through again on her register. The same sign kept flashing: “See Manager.”

“Oh no!” thought Davies. “Not another delay. I’m in a hurry and the last thing I need is for the cash register to break down.”

When the manager arrived, however, he didn’t even look at the cash register, but instead picked up the check and began to talk to the customer.

Davies could feel the muscles in his stomach tighten as the reality of what was happening struck him. The check for seven dollars and forty-three cents was no good and the manager was quietly saying she could not buy her baby food here.

The clerk quickly set the groceries aside, closed her account and began to ring up Davies’ purchase. His transaction completed and as he was leaving the store he thought to himself, “She should manage her money better! She’s probably an alcoholic or a drug addict.”

But his flimsy excuses would not erase the picture in his mind of a grocery basket with jars of baby food.

Davies relates, “At this point, I want to finish my story by telling you all how I ap­proached the manager and offered to pay for the purchase of the baby food. It was the right thing to do. I don’t have much money, but I can afford seven dollars and forty-three cents.

“In­stead, hiding my light under a bowl, I turned my head and walked away. There are no acceptable excuses. I had a great opportunity to help someone … and I walked away.”

Can anyone relate to that story? Perhaps for you it was the sad-looking man who approached you outside of a fast food restaurant asking for money. “So many con-men out there nowadays,” we say to ourselves. “If I do give him money, he’ll probably just use it for booze.”

Or maybe it was the guy holding up the sign at the corner intersection, “Will work for food.” “Somebody ought to do something,” we think to ourselves defensively. “He shouldn’t be able to harass people like that.” Still, we wonder, at least I hope we do, “did I turn away from someone who really was in need?”

Reading the stories of Jesus doesn’t help, does it? See, Jesus never turned anyone away. In our story from the Gospel for today a man with leprosy comes to Jesus for help. It is clear Jesus was already attracting attention by his healing miracles.

This man evidently has heard the stories and believes them for he gets down on his knees and begs Jesus, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”

Now that’s faith. “If you are willing . . .” says the man. He believes Jesus can heal him, if only Jesus would.

And there’s the rub – Jesus has a myriad of reasons to ignore the man and the man knows this.  I mean, the guy is a leper, for goodness sake!  You know what a terrible disease leprosy was in those days, right?  It was literally a living death. Flesh died and decayed while still part of a living person leaving that person horribly disfigured.

Even worse than the disease, was the treatment of the person with leprosy by society. Josephus, a prominent historian of that period, declared that lepers were treated “as if they were, in effect, dead men.” Whenever leprosy was diagnosed on examination by the priest, the leper was banished from the community.

The writer of Leviticus, the third book in the Bible, spelled out the sentence of the condemned: “As long as he has the disease, he shall remain unclean and he shall dwell alone outside the camp” (13:46).

The leper had to exist with “torn clothes, disheveled hair, and with a covering over the lower part of his face,” and as he went from place to place he had to cry, “Unclean, unclean” (Leviticus 13:45).

Such is the situation of the desperate man who falls to his knees before Jesus. He does not doubt that Jesus can heal him. His only question: is Jesus WILLING to heal him.

“If you are willing,” he begs the Master, “you can make me clean.”

And here is how Jesus responded to his request. Mark writes, “Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. ‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left [the man] and he was cured.”

That’s interesting. Jesus reached out and touched the man. No one reached out and touched lepers. After all, they were ceremonially, physically, and spiritually unclean.

William Barclay tells us, “Contact with a leper defiled the person who had that contact. The law enumerated sixty-one different contacts which brought defilement, and the defilement which the contact with a leper brought was second only to the defilement caused by contact with a dead body.

“If a leper so much as put his head inside a house everything in it became unclean, even to the beams of the roof. It was for­bidden to greet a leper even in an open place. No one could stand nearer to a leper than six feet away; and if the wind was blowing from him in the direction of the other person, the leper must stand at least one hundred and fifty feet away.

Barkley continues, “A certain Rabbi would not even eat an egg bought in a street where a leper had passed by; another Rabbi boasted that he always flung stones at lepers to keep them away; other Rabbis hid themselves or took to their heels and ran whenever a leper appeared even in the distance. No disease isolated a man from his fellow men as leprosy did.”

And yet Jesus reached out and touched the leper. Why did he do it? You know why. “Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.”  Lots of reasons not to … but one reason to!

That’s the problem with Jesus in many people’s estimation. He has too much compassion . . . he’s too soft-hearted . . . too easy to forgive . . . too easy to accept people’s shortcomings . . . too willing to do for people what they ought to do for themselves.

Conveniently people who feel this way ignore the fact that if Christ were not compassionate, none of us would stand a chance of salvation. If he did not easily forgive . . . if he was not willing to accept people’s shortcomings . . . if he was not willing to do for us what we ought to do for ourselves but often cannot . . . all of us would be on the outside looking in, right?

And so we are “stuck” with a compassionate Christ. And what does that compassionate Christ expect out of you and me? He has given us a clear mandate: we are to be compassionate, too.

The example Christ has set is to be followed by those who call themselves by his name. And that example is nothing more and nothing less than being compassionate. Christ has given us the power to make a difference in other people’s lives.

Let me tell you a story about a young graduate student named Veronica Goska. Ms. Goska has an illness that causes intermittent bouts of paralysis. Some days, she cannot move her limbs. Some days, her eyes shut down and she cannot see. But other days, she can walk, and she can see. “The difference,” she proclaims, “is epic.”

When she can walk, she travels to school by foot along a railroad track. In the springtime, turtles often get stuck between the bars of the track.

Many of them starve, dehydrate, or get squashed. But when Veronica walks along the tracks, she picks up every living turtle she finds, carries it to a wooded area, and releases it. “For those turtles,” she says, “the little power I have is enough.”

“I’m just like those turtles,” she goes on. “When I’ve been sick and housebound for days, I wish someone, anyone, would talk to me. To hear a human voice say my name, to be touched - that would mean the world to me.

“One day, an attack hit me while I was walking home from campus. It was a snowy day. I struggled with each step, wobbled and wove across the road. I must have looked like a drunk. One of my neighbors, whom I had never met, stopped and asked me if I was okay. He drove me home.”

“He did not hand me the thousands of dollars I needed for surgery. He did not take me into his own house, or clean up the mess in my house for me. He just gave me one ride, one day. I am still grateful to him and touched by his gesture.

“I have lived in the neighborhood for years, and so far he has been the only one to stop. The problem is not that we don’t have enough power,” says Veronica Goska. “The problem is that we don’t use the power we have.”

Have you ever thought of compassion as a source of power? It is. Every time we exercise our sense of compassion, we are making the world a better place for somebody. That’s power. At such times we are godlike. We can’t touch the leper and make the leper clean. But we can touch the leper and give them hope for another day.

According to the late Charles Schultz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, “The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money or the most awards. They are the ones who care.” And that’s true.

“If you are willing,” the man with leprosy begged the Master.  And Christ was willing.  Are we?  Are we willing to reach out and be a messenger of compassion to those who rarely feel that from society today? 

Those who have less than; those who have been saddled with addictions; those who are the ones who are always picked last; those who are not like us; those who only know how to beg … those who (well, you fill in the blank).

 The next time you are about to step over someone or look the other way or try and walk on the other side … remember the leper … and that Jesus WAS willing … and so should we.

AMEN!