Do you want a miracle in your life? – Thursday, 1^st Week in Ordinary time – Mark 1:40-45

This was Jesus’ third miracle in the Gospel of Mark. He has just concluded a preaching tour in Galilee (1:35-39) and is somewhere in the region of Galilee. He is where the people are (verse 38) God goes to the people. This is the Church we ought to be; a church that goes to where people are. He went to their synagogues and cast out demons….(1:39)

The miracle involves a leper. A leper who came to him ‘kneeling’ and ‘begging’. This disease had sucked the oxygen out of the leper’s lungs. He just needed this miracle today as perhaps some of you need a miracle this Sunday. He was tired of his physical condition but also of his spiritual ailment; so he asked for cleansing of his soul. The most painful wounds we carry with from the past are more wounds of the spirit than of the body.

For the Jew, physical suffering was a punishment by God for one’s sin. This man had rotting flesh due to leprosy but let us not exclude the possibility that he also had a rotten heart. The leper realized that both needed cleansing; not just a physical miracle, he needed a spiritual cleansing also. We need to ask the Lord to touch us too, touch the ugly bits of us that we do not like to look at.

But how do I approach the Lord in prayer? This leper was down on his knees, begging. Perhaps I need to do the same. I need to get off my high horse because I too am desperately in need of this miracle for myself. I am in need of cleansing; my sin is hanging on me like rotting flesh.

The law required that a leper stay away from others – a social and religious exclusion. The leper breaches this code by approaching Jesus, and Jesus breaches it by touching the leper. Interestingly the leper asked for cleansing not a ‘huggy moment’, he never imagined he would be touched. He wanted cleansing he got a brotherly hug and a healing. How sensitive and responsive Jesus is; he is “moved with pity” for the leper as he is with us.