Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

February 11, 2024

Lev 13:1-2.44-46, Ps 32, 1 Cor 10:31-11:1, Mk 1:40-45

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• In one short sentence at the end of today’s second reading, St. Paul gives us a summary of the Christian life: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” Each of us is called to imitate to Christ and to set the example, like St. Paul, so that others may emulate us. St. Paul is one in a line of saints whose actions were a living commentary on the modern expression, “What would Jesus do?,” and he urges us to imitate him in seeking to glorify God in everything we do.


• In today’s Gospel, we see what Jesus did and what we’re called, with St. Paul, to reproduce. One of the most physically disgusting and repulsive human beings imaginable came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away their flesh and bones and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for basically the rest of their life apart from the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them — except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from work, from the synagogue and temple, and basically from love and mercy. They were outcasts, ostracized from all things human. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them easily from a distance. Whenever they needed to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law, as we see in today’s first reading, to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!,” as if their whole identified were summed up by that adjective. They were forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. Anyone who touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, ritually unclean. That the man in today’s Gospel broke all convention to come close to Jesus was a sign of just how desperate he was.


• What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature on his knees before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch the contagion. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. To the leper’s plea of faith, “If you wish, you can make me clean,” Jesus, filled with compassion, stretched out his hand and touchedthe leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched him in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “I do will it. Be made clean!” He was thoroughly and immediately made whole. Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure so that he, so long an outcast, could legitimately return to the human community.


• This is the Jesus we’re called to imitate. The Lord turns to each of us today and says, “Come, follow me!” (Lk 18:22 ) and, “I have done this as an example so that, as I have done for you, you also should do (Jn 13:15 ). We’re not called, necessarily, to imitate Jesus in caring for those with Hansen’s disease, because, thanks be to God and to the gift of modern medicine, leprosy has been mostly eradicated in the U.S. — with fewer than 200 cases per year — and in most of the world, where there are fewer than 200,000, located in 14 countries, with half still in India. Most of us — as far as I know — are not gifted with the Lord’s divine power to work stupendous miracles of healing, so we’re not called to imitate Christ the thaumaturgos. But what Christ is calling us to do is to love the outcasts with the same love that he does, the love which would make him go to the Cross again for them if he needed to.


• While thanks be to God there are fewer men and women with Hansen’s disease, there are still many outcasts. There are bodily lepers, whom the world considers ugly or unattractive, or whose illnesses are too long-lasting that few want to care for them or even to have society care for them at the end of life. There are psychological lepers, with mental illness or disabilities, whom some just relegate to institutions or allow them to live derelict on the streets. There are moral lepers, like drug addicts, prostitutes, death-row inmates, and those who have committed very public and embarrassing sins, who are shunned to the sidelines as practically irredeemable. There are economic lepers, like the homeless, the very poor, or those of a particular social class, who live ostracized from society and the things most of the rest of society take for granted. There are racial lepers, like gypsies and others, who, because of skin color or lineage are sent to the margins. There is a new class of “cancelled” lepers, who because of unpopular opinions or mistakes have been permanently excluded from enlightened society or even the possibility of employment. There are unborn lepers, who, because they’re unwanted by, or inconvenient to, parents, are left unprotected and able to be legally slaughtered. And there are many emotional lepers, who, because of their own psyche or others’ actions, feel complete alone and abandoned. All of these are among the ones Jesus wants us to reach out and heal through our very human touch, to bring back from the margins into communion.


• We see in the lives of the saints that very often their path to deep sanctity occurred when they cared for an outcast. One day St. Francis of Assisi was a carefree young man riding his horse outside of Assisi preparing to seek glory as a soldier in battle. He saw a leper on a path begging for alms. Francis’ horse jerked out of repugnance. Francis, himself, was filled with horror and disgust. Francis looked at the leper for what seemed like an eternity, but then dismounted, went to the man and took his emaciated, cold and inert hand and placed within it a coin. Then he lifted that hand up to his lips and kissed the wounded flesh of the abject man. As the leper withdrew his hand, Francis raised his head to look at him in the eyes, but the man was no longer there. Neither was the old Francis. Everything had changed. From that point forward he, and eventually the Franciscans around him, would visit the leper community two miles outside of Assisi to care for those present and he would seek to love everyone with the love with which they sought to love Christ in the disguise of a leper.


• In the life of St. Martin of Tours, a similar thing occurred. He was a Roman soldier approaching the gate of Amiens, France, on a frigid day. It was there that he met a homeless man, practically naked, shivering in the cold. Martin had no money to give him and so was just going to gallop on. But, moved by conscience, he got off his horse, took out his sword and cut his Roman cape in half, giving half of it to the poor man. When Martin went to sleep later that evening, Christ appeared to him in a dream wearing the other half of his cape and saying, “Martin has clothed me in his garment.” It was what led to his become Saint Martin of Tours.


• Likewise for us, the path to our sanctity begins with our loving those whom the world finds unlovable. As we learn from the examples of Saints Martin and Francis, Saints Vincent de Paul and Teresa of Calcutta, Saints Damien of Molokai and Marianne Cope, every time we care for an outcast, we are caring for Christ. The Lord himself told us that everything we do or fail to do to “one of the least of [his] brothers and sisters” we do, or fail to do, to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Christ takes on the disguise of the pariah and the amount of love we show the castaway is the amount of love we have for him. It’s easy to love those who are lovable, Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount. “Even pagans do as much” (Mt 5:46 ). But it’s hard to love those who are seemingly unlovable, and that’s the standard Jesus gives us. Like a leper, he himself became full of disgusting, open bodily wounds, was cast out of the city and left abandoned with other outcasts on crosses. As Isaiah wrote about him 700 years earlier, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely, he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. … The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Is 53:2-6).” If we would draw near to Christ, he waits for us on a modern Calvary in the disguise of contemporary outcasts.


• Today’s Gospel is a powerful one to have on this World Day of