Leprosy was a particularly frightful disease in the first century. Even today the word is a bit scarry. Physically it was a slow degeneration of the body but it also produced an end to all social and family contact. At the time disease and disabilities were seen as a punishment from God due sin, either due to the person’s sins or the sin of some ancestor. What we have in today’s scene from the Gospel is a tragic, hopeless situation. A man who is physically sick, isolated from family and friends, incapacitate for work and self-support, living only through begging, and justly condemned to pay a sin debt to God due to a transgression of an ancestor through his sickness. What a dramatically miserable and hopeless situation.
In many people the experience of sickness or tragedy produces a permanent state of anger and hopelessness. Hopelessness makes us anger at God and all those around us. Yet somehow this leper was able to maintain some faith and hope and approached Jesus with his request for healing. He was able to center his life on Jesus in the middle of all his suffering. His request was a prayer grounded in hope and confidence – not anger and despair.
In the Gospels, Jesus is not a miracle worker in the sense of a magician putting on a spectacle to impress people. Jesus’ marvelous deeds are associated with the faith of the individual who requests aid and they also serve to confirm his message and his authority. They show that he is the Messiah and that his teachings are truly the Word of God.
Today many people still experience sickness or difficulties as moments of abandonment by God that can lead to permanent anger. Many people still look to God as a magician or jinni who should cure all their problems and ills. Rather than have their lives centered on Christian conversion and service, their life with God becomes a relationship with a capricious God who needs to be controlled and placated. Their difficulties in life lead them to live separated from God.
Jesus comes into our lives to take us out of that type of hopeless life. He is the living presence of God the Father’s love and mercy for us. Additionally, as a Christian community, we are signs of hope and faith in the midst of despair, anger, and difficulties for others. Our way of living through difficult times in life is a public testimony of our faith.
Take some time today to ask yourselves about your relationship with Jesus. Is he just a magical wizard who you can use in the difficult moments of your life or is he the center of hope, conversion, and faith, all days of your life? Are you giving public witness to your sure hope in his action? That is true evangelization, true transmission of faith.
Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.
Image: CANVA CJ Dunn 17 May 2026 AI generated.