Keeping Your Distance
Have you changed your behavior out of concern about the virus?
A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter. - Mark 1:40-45
In today's Gospel, Jesus is confronted by a man with leprosy. Even today, we would tend to keep our distance from such a man, and yet Jesus was moved to approach and cure him.
If someone comes to work today sneezing and coughing, should that person be sent home?
It is at times like these when people are afraid of contracting an illness for which there is no cure that we all become focused on ourselves. If we are the one coughing and sniffling, we feel shut out, while if we are the one working beside that person, we feel threatened.
In our houses of worship we are being told to take extra precautions, avoiding all forms of touching, and to stay home if one is sick.
There is good reason for these measures, especially when we hear of individuals in our own community who contract the virus, but how cold it all seems.
Jesus was not one to keep his distance from those others shunned, and yet we can rationalize that we don't have healing powers like Jesus.
But may be we do.
I remember early on in the onset of the AIDS epidemic, people who contracted the virus were isolated, kept at a distance. No one, not even the doctors and nurses wanted to touch them. Patients were not bathed or groomed for fear of contracting the disease.
Families were told to stay away.
How do you do that? How do you avoid contact with a loved one who is suffering and afraid of death?
Jesus didn't. I couldn't either. But we will follow the rules and take precautions until someone we love gets sick. Then we will decide if we care enough to take the risk and comfort the sick, visit the infirm, feed the hungry, show love.
The worst that could happen is not that we too become sick, but that we spread the sickness to people too weak to survive it.
No one wants to do that. But what about the ones who are sick and afraid? How do we comfort them?
More to come...