The last two “ordinary” Sundays before Lent begins tomorrow, 14 February on Ash Wednesday, saw us reading from the first chapter of St Mark’s Gospel. Here we see the beginning of Christ’s ministry of preaching, curing the sick and casting out demons, and there are some important features that we should note from these two Gospels.
On the first Sunday in February, the fifth of Ordinary Time, we read Mark 1:29-39. Christ leaves the synagogue in which He inaugurated His ministry rather dramatically by casting out a demon, and in a somewhat quieter moment He cures Simon Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever. The quiet does not last long, however: His fame has already begun to spread, and we are told that “the whole town came crowding round the door”(1:33).
We may imagine this to involve a little hyperbole on St Mark’s part – but perhaps not that much, after such dramatic events at the synagogue. Christ offers hope, a beacon of light in the darkness of lives overshadowed by Roman occupation – surely another instance of the power of evil, demonic possession writ large, if you will.
In these times of war and mutual hatred, it is hard not to reflect on the way in which that part of the world has been in the shadow of darkness for so many long centuries, and we know that it is Christ alone who offers the hope of a new dawn.
Naturally, then (and not for the last time) the people seek to detain Christ, but He must move on, because He came to preach to the whole region, not just one town (1:38). The great Anglican biblical scholar Austin Farrer, in A Study in St Mark, notices that in this passage Christ establishes a pattern that is repeated by the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles: the message is first taken to a synagogue on a Sabbath, where it encounters a mixed reception.
The missionary then withdraws to the house of a first or key convert (in this case, of course, Peter), and that house becomes the base for Christian activity in the area. The house, indeed, becomes as it were the local church, with its householder as the church leader. We should not be surprised that the first ever such householder was Peter, who went on to become the pre-eminent leader of the Church as Prince of the Apostles.
Thus, not only is Jesus established as the great light who brings hope and healing into the world, but the community – the household, we might say – of his followers, under the leadership of Peter, is established as a key feature of that mission. And his fame is spreading.
It is that fame that brings a leper to Christ in the Gospel for the following Sunday. “If you want to, you can cure me,” we read, and the reply is “Of course I want to; be cured” (1:40f ). This is a great example of where a better translation than the Jerusalem Bible offers a corrective.
The man does not ask to be cured but to be cleansed, because leprosy in the scriptures is not so much a medical affliction as a ritual uncleanness. So he simply says: “I want to, be cleansed.” And Jesus does not say “of course”. How does He reply? Our translations all tell us something like “moved with compassion”, which makes sense and is what splagchnistheis means.
But interestingly some older versions of the Greek have a different word, which means “angrily”. Is this just a mistake? Why on earth should Jesus be angry? Perhaps at the very suggestion implied in the leper’s words that Jesus might not want to cleanse him. He went through all Galilee preaching and casting out demons, we are told – how can anyone doubt that the will to cleanse, to heal, to exorcise, in short the will to save, is at the very heart of Jesus’s mission and identity?
This also explains, I think, why Jesus is described in verse 43 as snorting. Not in our translation, but it is clear enough in the Greek: embrimesamenos, which is very definitely snorting, like a horse.
Jesus is, at the very least, exasperated by this leper, and he drives him off after He has cleansed him. Perhaps because He knows that , despite His warning, the fame of Jesus will spread, a fame that leads Christ to become an outcast Himself. But this too is the nature of His mission: only by making Himself despised and rejected, only by provoking humanity to destroy Him, can Jesus make those who have eyes to see recognise that “ I will – be cleansed ” is the very meaning of His mission.
This article originally appeared in the “Devotional” section of the February 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald magazine. Photo: An actor portrays Christ in The Passion of Jesus in Trafalgar Square, London, England, 22 April 2011. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.)
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