a lawless blog

Three miracles: in the Capernaum synagogue a man possessed of a demon is liberated; on the road a leper is healed; back in Capernaum the sins of  a paralysed man are forgiven. This last is for next week. Sufficient today to compare the first and second.

The first episode was characterised by the almost tangible air of authority they saw in Jesus, and the power in his command when he cured a man possessed. This second miracle cure is very different. The man has leprosy. In coming close to Jesus he breaks the taboo and the law. 

"If you want to you can cure me." This is a striking turn of phrase for what it says of the man's self-loathing: Would the teacher want to cure me? Being excluded from the community could destroy a man's self-respect. Yet something makes him come close to Jesus and mumble in words that are both a pathetic plea and surprisingly a challenge. 'I have dared come close to you: if you dare you can cure me..."

Jesus took up the challenge without a moment's hesitation. He touched the man, himself breaking the taboo and the law just as the leper had, perhaps taking his cue from the man's boldness to be equally bold. 'Of course I want to', in the more colourful  translation of the Jerusalem Bible.

'Moved with pity'. I should explain again that I refer readers to the New American Bible because I cannot find another site that has the Sunday readings presented so well, and it links to the St Louis University Centre for Liturgy that I often refer to. The Jerusalem Bible that we are more familiar with in Australia has 'Feeling sorry for him', which is colloquial and much as we would say it, but may also be a bit wishy-washy. William Barclay goes to the other extreme and says Jesus was 'heart-sorry' for the man.

All this is leading to a glimpse into the depths where scholars labour. First they note that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke leave out that little item that Jesus was compassionate, even as they retell the story pretty much in Mark's words, and of course the scholars then ask why?  Why would the other two gospels leave out a word, especially one which would show Jesus in a positive light.

Well, it turns out that some of the earliest and most important manuscripts of the gospel of Mark have a different word here: not 'Jesus was moved to pity', but 'Jesus was moved to anger'. At this point the scholars compare notes and offer different possible explanations for all this. Did Mark's gospel originally have 'anger', and Matthew and Luke left out this word because it might seem to show a less than perfect side of Jesus? Then, later on, someone resolved the issue by simply changing the word in Mark's gospel to 'pity'. The Latin translation from the fourth century has 'misertus eius' = 'had pity on him', which would indicate that the change was established by that time.

In situations like this, Scripture scholars have ways of deciding which word is more probably the original one. The 'hardest' word, the one that sounds a bit rough or that throws a dark shadow over the scene is more likely to be the original, because the tendency is to smooth things out and soften the edges of a story with the passage of time. It is hard to imagine why anyone would change 'pity' to 'anger' since it might seem to show something negative about Jesus, but it is plausible that the other gospels simply omitted the word 'anger', and a later editor changed it to 'pity'. 

So what? Well, it is interesting to pursue the idea of Jesus getting angry at the sight of this leper. Evidently it was not because the wretched leper dared come close to him because Jesus welcomed him, stretched out his hand and touched him. So what was he angry about? I can imagine a couple of reasons for starters: 

a) He would be angry that a simple and necessary rule of hygiene for a nomadic community in the desert had been raised to the level of law, and was still maintained as such in the sophisticated environment of an urbanised society. This could only happen if there was a felt need to keep some people on the outer.

b) He might have felt angry that a simple skin condition (even if it was leprosy) could be used to excommunicate a person as a sinner, so that he had to proclaim himself as 'Unclean! Unclean!' This is in fact a common characteristic of human beings, that we like putting others down by tacking on a label that puts them in a category of less worthy, less noble, even beyond the pale. We look down on others - for the colour of their skin, for their desperate poverty, for being refugees struggling to reach our shores (we call them "boat people"): the list goes on and  is enough to make anyone angry.

c) He could have been angry that the priests still claimed the right to judge if and when the person could be re-admitted to the community, and that for the price of an 'offering'.

d) One further reason comes to mind: what if Jesus felt, when he heard the leper say: 'If you want to you can cure me", that the leper was hedging his bet. This too is common. For example, we pray God to give peace to the world - as long as we can still be on top; we 'hunger for justice' - on condition it does not affect our standing; we pray that God give a loved one strength in their suffering - after all, there's nothing much we can do for them! 

The story then goes on to tell of Jesus giving a stern warning that the man should not tell anyone what had happened. Why? It seems that in Mark's gospel there is a real effort to downplay the wonder-worker image, and show Jesus not as messiah who will  fix all our problems with miracles, but one, on the contrary, who will walk the human road alongside the suffering, the victimised and the poor in protest, until he gets arrested, condemned in a sham trial, and executed.

The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere.

We can wonder why the leper, so graciously cured by Jesus, would go clean against his wishes and spread abroad the whole story of what had happened to him. The upshot for Jesus was that it became impossible for him to enter a town openly. Was this because it had become known that he had touched the leper and so breached the law and become unclean, so that like a leper was obliged to dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp? 

As for the leper's motive, the first impression is that, like many others in the narrative, he found it impossible to keep it to himself. His joy would not be contained. In fact these spontaneous outbursts of joy were the main engine spreading the fame of Jesus far and wide.  Maybe there's a lesson in that for us too. Later Jesus would say that you don't light a candle and keep it under a box.

In any case,  'the people kept coming to him from everywhere', and by so doing the people resolved the issue about Jesus keeping himself apart. People power at work to resolve a legal matter that should never have occurred in the first place. From here on we will often see the scribes and pharisees watching for Jesus to break the law again while the people welcome him as a hero and flock to him for he has shown compassion to all.