Thursday of the First Week in Ordinary Time

"How Can I Keep From Singing?"

A favorite video of mine is still carefully housed in my phone as an active text message. Now almost three years in, I can't completely entrust it solely to my larger photo gallery. It's just too precious to lose. In it, my granddaughter is waiting breathlessly at the maternity hospital bedside, beside herself with anticipation, waiting for the big reveal. Will she meet the sister she had longed for all these months? When the bedspread is pulled back, there is the new baby swaddled in a pink blanket! Seeing there once again her quivering, sheer embodied joy, the exuberant jumping up and down, can lift one's spirits for at least thirty minutes even on a dreary January day.

Our Gospel story today is another excursion in uncontainable joy. It concludes the first chapter of the shot-out-of-a-cannon flurry of activity in the opening of Mark's account of the Good News. With the groundwork prepared by his cousin John, Jesus has been baptized and has been tempted. He has called his first disciples, cured a demoniac and Simon's mother-in-law, and tested out his personal rhythm of ministry and time for renewal. Now a leper, on bended knee, has come to him for healing. It is poignant to see how the leper has recognized Jesus' power to do so but is still uncertain of intent. "If you are willing...," he begins tentatively, and Jesus responds, "I am so willing." Two miracles are launched: Jesus reaches out first to touch, and then to heal.

We can only imagine the potency of this touch and healing, a story recounted in all the Synoptic Gospels. 'Leprosy' is now better recognized as what we would label as psoriasis, but the impact for the sufferer is the same: ostracism, isolation, banishment from contact with others, including access to public worship and the ritual life of the community. (A recent essay in the New York Times shows that, sadly, not much has changed since Jesus' time. The physical pain is excruciating, writes the author, but, in a culture obsessed with physical appearance, the shame, the life in the shadows, the endless efforts to camouflage, make this illness a double-edged sword indeed.)

No wonder the cured man disobeys Jesus' admonition to tell no one. Joy this magnificent cannot be constrained or contained. It is 'pressed down, overflowing.' Its cup runneth over. It needs no sophisticated social media campaign for the telling -- only the sharing of the miraculous restoration of healing and the wholeness that comes from fellowship in the human family.

"How Can I Keep From Singing?" is a wonderful traditional hymn adopted by the Quakers in the 20th Century. "Thro all the tumult and the strife, I hear the music ringing; it finds an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing?"  It is a good question for us today. How will we express the joy in the Christ-centered life? Can we give ourselves permission to body-forth that joy? A soaring song, a prayer of praise, a hand outstretched in unexpected kindness to a 'leper' in our own community? Can we come out of the shadows to make present the miracle of a God who shimmers with delight in us?