One of the surprisingly memorable experiences in my heritage-honoring tour of Scandinavian countries a few years ago was a day we spent in Bergen, Norway, and our visit to the St. Jorgen’s Hospital Museum there. Dating from the 15th century, over the centuries the hospital housed the largest concentration of leprosy patients in Europe. The contemporary museum is a monument to the thousands of personal tragedies suffered within its walls. (The last two residents died in 1946, having lived there for fifty years!) The memory that haunts me…. Each of the small cubicles in the hospital/museum was filled with a muslin banner blowing softly in the windy drafts, complete with a pen-and-ink portrait of a patient/resident who had once been forced to spend a lifetime there.
But the museum is also a celebration of human tenacity and compassion. Bergen is the city where Doctor Gerhard Hansen identified the leprosy bacillus that would lead to a cure – and to the healing and restoration to community for many who had suffered so terribly from this pernicious disease and the forced isolation it caused.
The man in today's Gospel is miraculously cured of his leprosy centuries before the groundbreaking work of Dr. Hansen.The story is found early in Mark's Gospel as Jesus' public ministry is taking shape in the lake town of Capernaum. We can feel the burst of energy and excitement as Jesus, being at one with his God and God’s creative power, begins his curing ministry. A man tormented by a demon has been set free in the synagogue; Simon's mother-in-law has been cured of a fever in her home; a paralytic is able to walk; a man with a withered hand has had it restored; and the leper is now touched and cleansed.
The leper restored to wholeness is a microcosm of how Jesus will continue to use that power to cure. It will be a power never used in dominance, never imposed or flaunted for its own grandeur. The suffering man takes the initiative on bended knee, risking a reach past boundaries of cultural and religious taboos, and Jesus, breaking through those boundaries as well, sees, touches, and responds with compassion. His response is always extended as a gift in response to faith. Throughout the journey to Jerusalem and to the cross ahead, we will see Jesus use this power sometimes almost reluctantly, continuing to resist any temptation to make miraculous cures the sole identifying mark of his mission.
And in a culture where sickness or illness was deemed a sign of God’s disfavor, the cures were meant to usher in the healing that came with the restoration of the sense of community that would overcome isolation and separation – a foretaste of the fullness, the abundance of Thy Kingdom Come. Dr. Hansen might have discovered a cure for leprosy, but the real miracle was the healing that came from release and freedom for those who had spent their lives in those lonely cubicles.
What healing agenda awaits us in the New Year? A healing from bitterness or hardness of heart, or from a shriveled unwillingness to be generous to those cured ‘lepers’ in our own lives? Or, we might accompany another through crippling isolation or loneliness – the homebound and their caregivers; young adults searching for their life’s direction, unable to find meaningful work; those praying for a cure for a loved one that may not come this year — anyone needing a launch toward the healing presence of companionship and friendship.