In this Sunday’s Gospel reading, we will take a step back into the first chapter of Mark’s story of Jesus. After his first public deed of power and the raising of Simon’s mother-in-law, Jesus encounters a man with lepra as he and his disciples make their way around the Galilee (Mark 1:40-45).
There are a couple of background pieces that are helpful to know when approaching this healing story. The most important for this Sunday’s Gospel is a basic approach to ritual impurity in the context of the first century, Second Temple Judaism.
The long time assumption that Jesus is against the purity system in Second Temple Judaism is being challenged by scholars in a way that grants us a deeper understanding of what Jesus is doing for those he heals of ritual impurities.
Ritual impurities can be naturally occurring. Matthew Thiessen explains, “For instance, childbirth, menstruation, and sexual intercourse result in ritual impurity. These are natural human functions. The majority of Israelites would have at one time or another experienced such ritual impurities (Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 15).” There are practices in place - see Leviticus, Numbers, etc., - for removing these impurities.
In Mark 1:40-45, Jesus encounters a man suffering from lepra, most often translated as leprosy. There is a distinction between these two terms in Greek medical literature. The term lepra would be more accurately translated “a repulsive scaly skin disease,” according to E.V. Hulse. Joel Marcus translates this word as “scale disease,” and points out that this term “designates a variety of conditions in which the skin becomes scaly, but not what today is called leprosy (Hansen’s disease) (Marcus, The Anchor Yale Bible: Mark 1-8, 205).” There are also practices in place for removing lepra, specifically Leviticus 13 and 14.
Thiessen continues: “On the basis of ancient portrayals of those suffering from lepra, Milgrom argues that what these three sources of ritual impurity share in common is that they represent death: the corpse, obviously, is a dead body; the lepros– that is, the one suffering from lepra – corpse-like… From this observation, he concludes that in Jewish thinking ritual impurities represent the forces of death (Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 16).”
In other words, Jesus is confronting death and raising people to new life. Jesus is angry at the source, not the system.
While a broad-spread, common understanding of this is difficult to prove, this paradigm is helpful for our own understanding of what Jesus was doing and how we can mirror this in our own work as the Body of Christ.
While we may not abide by, or acknowledge ritual purity in our modern, Christian practices, there are other metrics by which we (corporate, american society) segregate our society - race, socio-economic, sexual orientation, etc. - legally, relationally, and economically.
I would argue that these labels can be, and are often used, to place people into circumstances that render them as good as dead - if not actually threatening their very existence. I will elaborate more on this concept in the sermon on Sunday.
This kind of textual study and application can go a long way in how we encounter others in our journey as the Body of Christ.
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