When I was living at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in the early ‘90s there was a zen student named Dean who was dying of AIDS. He rented a house down the road at Muir Beach but he would come up every day to practice in the meditation hall. One day he asked if he could volunteer to work in the kitchen. The woman who was the kitchen supervisor didn’t want to allow it. “We all use knives,” she said—“What if he cuts himself?” One of the residents who was a medical doctor met with to her and reassured her she could keep everyone safe from Dean. She told her about sanitary procedures to follow if anyone cut themselves in the kitchen, and offered to do a training for the whole kitchen crew.
But the problems that Dean’s request to work in the kitchen raised weren’t just practical, medical medical. Ultimately, the supervisor was able to allow him to work there. But getting to that point involved a real emotional struggle, because his disease stirred up fears that were out of proportion to the real risks involved. Modern biological and medical science offers rational explanations for why people get sick, and straightforward mechanistic cures for disease. But in spite of that, some illnesses arouse dread in us in ways that bleed far outside the simple straight lines of cause-and-effect.
HIV/AIDS has lost some of the aura of menace that it had when the story I just told occurred. So we can forget about the stigma of shame, the sense of moral guilt, and the fear of contagion that it used to bring along with it. Some people said it was a divinely ordained, punishing scourge for sexual sin. Some people said it was a government conspiracy, genetically-engineered from a monkey virus by the CIA. The President of South Africa said it didn’t exist, and was a great hoax perpetrated by rich countries and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. These are radically-different interpretations of the meaning of the same disease, but all of them show us that AIDS had a symbolic significance that went far beyond its description as a bio-medical phenomenon. Looking into what people thought about AIDS, you could learn something about where they thought disorder and evil in the world comes from.
The ancient Israelites had a highly developed sense of purity and pollution. The first five books of the Hebrew bible, the Torah, lays out an elaborate code of dietary, ethical, and ritual laws. These rules were, it was believed, given by God to his chosen people to preserve them from defilement and enable them to be holy as God is holy. Among the things that cause pollution is any one of a number of skin diseases that our translations call “leprosy.” The thirteenth chapter of Leviticus contains detailed instructions to the priests of Israel concerning how they are to diagnose a so-called “leper.” The purpose of the diagnosis is not to effect a cure, but to protect others from the leper’s uncleanness. One who is pronounced a leper is expelled, made to dwell in isolation, away from the rest of the people—not to prevent the spread of disease, but to protect the group from the pollution that the disease represents.
This is important for our understanding of today’s story from the Gospel of Mark. The trusting vulnerability of the leper, the compassion of Jesus—these things are affecting and easy to grasp. But our English translation glosses over something important that comes through more clearly in the Greek text— Jesus is not just merciful in this episode, he is also angry. He doesn’t just “sternly warn” the man he has just cleansed, he harshly rebukes him. He doesn’t “send him away,” he “casts him out.” Our translation has Jesus telling him to go bring the prescribed offering to the priest “as a testimony to them,” but these words could as well be translated “as an accusation against them.”
It is significant that in this story the healing effect of Jesus’ touch is referred to repeatedly not in terms of the resolution of the man’s symptoms or the cure of disease. Instead, Mark repeatedly uses forms of the word that means “to cleanse, to make clean.” Jesus is not curing a skin disease. He is casting out the impurity, the uncleanness, that comes along with it. He is harshly rebuking social and religious isolation. He is accusing the socially-constructed boundaries that put human beings in categories of impurity and pollution and keep them there, that cut them off from the wholeness that is God’s will for them.
In this story Mark also sets another piece in place for the coming conflict with the religious authorities. It tells us that the site of the struggle, the place of the confrontation, will be the body of Jesus. Remember that in his compassion Jesus reaches out and touches the leper. According to the purity code, this act makes Jesus himself unclean. But there is nothing in the gospel to indicate that he gives that a second thought. And in the chapters that follow he will transgress the boundaries of the purity code again and again. He will be touched by a woman with a hemorrhage. He will touch a corpse. He will cross over into Gentile territory not once but twice. But Jesus will not show the least concern about catching the contagion of impurity. Instead, he will cross these boundaries to spread the spirit of holiness and health to the outcast, the excluded, the unclean. His body will be the sign of the contagious kingdom of God’s loving compassion.
The other thing about this story, of course, is that it is about discipleship. Mark doesn’t intend for us to sit on the sidelines, feeling smug because we don’t ostracize people with skin problems. This story is a challenge to us to take a good look at our own social norms and ask ourselves who threatens our sense of purity. Who are the people we think of as dirty? How are we responding to them with compassion? Do we will to pronounce them clean? Last week our Buildings and Grounds Committee Chair mentioned to me that it is becoming clearer and clearer to him that our first priority for our Parish Hall refurbishing project has to be to provide an accessible entrance and bathroom. I think he’s right. There are legal and liability reasons for taking this on, but even more important is our call to break down barriers of exclusion. When our hospitality extends only to those who can walk unaided, we are not offering the world a very effective witness to compassion of Christ.
But this kind of compassion is relatively easy to extend. Disability advocates, like advocates for people with HIV/AIDS, have made great progress in changing social norms and breaking down the boundaries of their exclusion. But there are other boundaries that are more costly for us to reach across. There is still a purity map in our society, and some people are trying to draw the lines thicker and darker. Laws to drive homeless people out of our towns and cities, laws to isolate undocumented immigrants and expel them from our country, law-enforcement that criminalizes members of ethnic and religious minorities—these things are on the rise, and they are not driven by rational social policy but by the fear of impurity.
As the body of Christ, we are called to confront that fear with compassion. We are called to reach across the barriers of exclusion and touch the untouchable. This may be the hardest work of Christian discipleship, because it involves personal risk. It risks taking on ourselves the stigma of the unclean, of being seen by others as “not normal.” But is the only path to knowing ourselves as completely whole. Because as long as we believe that God’s love leaves some people out, there is always the possibility that we are among the unloved. As long as we are afraid of being tainted, not by the intentions in our hearts, but by something external that we cannot control, we will not be free. The mission of Jesus was to overcome that fear, to reach across the boundary of our sense of vulnerability, and to say to us, and to everyone—“I will. Be clean.”
