Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

The Journalism School at the University of Missouri is world-renowned. Consequently, you could not scratch your nose in class without elbowing a journalism undergrad. One principle of journalism they mentioned was this: If it bleeds, it leads. In other words, bad news sells papers (or gets internet clicks).
Bad news captivates us. Yet conspicuously good news can have an impact too. This is why Jesus tells the leper to tell no one that He cured him. Nonetheless, the cleansed leper cannot help but broadcast the good news bringing everyone to come to Jesus in droves.

The reading from Leviticus explains that lepers were to live outside of society. To be a leper was to be the walking dead, unable to interact with family or the religious community. They were marginalized because of the randomness of disease, but also there was a feeling that sin had caused leprosy.

Now consider what happens to Jesus: He heals the leper and then he becomes something of a leper himself! After the healing, “it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere.”

“For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that for your sake he became poor although he was rich,” St. Paul writes, “so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). This is the whole point of the Incarnation, that Jesus divested Himself of divine majesty in order to raise us into communion with the Trinity. And He is not just willing to lower Himself but to also assume poverty and rejection, living on the margins to not lose even those that the human family excludes. This was attractive nonetheless because “people kept coming to him from everywhere.”

The psalmist says today, “my guilt I covered not.” We all tend to cover over our sins – we rationalize it or we blame the circumstances. Explaining away, covering over our sin is an entitlement; I say I deserve this thing I know to be wrong because I had a hard day or need this pleasurable thing in order to be up to my service tomorrow. But Christ became poor so that you might become rich. Christ became sick to heal you. God became man so that man might become God. If I offered you a million dollars to spend an hour of prayer adoring the Eucharist you would surely do so. Why would you not, then, do that daily in order seek an eternity in heaven that outshines any momentary pleasure, power, or prestige?

The bad news is that you and I are sinners; the greatest good news is that Jesus swallowed up sin and death to save you. Come to Him from wherever you are.

Reflection by Fr. Pachomius Meade, OSB