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Curing a Leper

I think it's okay to question Jesus, even pigheadedly. Doubting Thomas did it, and he became a bishop. And a saint. Peter did it, more than once, and he became the pope. Maybe in Jesus' eyes, doubt is the path to advancement in the Church! Or maybe it's not Jesus I have a problem with in this leper episode; maybe it's with Mark's personal interpretation of what Jesus did, asking the leper not to reveal what had happened to him. My disquiet comes from the fact that Jesus often asked difficult things, but he never asked truly impossible things.

Imagine what the leper's life had been up to then. He was ostracized from society and from the Temple, even from his own family, unable to talk to anybody for God knows how many years. His life was lonely and wretched, his limbs putrefying and withering away. Then suddenly, breathtakingly, he's cured! He's free to go up to people, talk to them, even touch them! And he's supposed to keep quiet about that? Impossible.

If Jesus actually did forbid the cured leper to tell anyone but the Temple priests, I can conjure up a few reasons to justify it. One, he wanted to accomplish as much as he could before he aroused the jealousy of the Jewish officials. Two, he didn't want people to flock to the miracle worker instead of to the man with a message to change their lives even more radically than he'd changed the leper's. Third (and weakest), he didn't want to get the kind of notoriety that keeps an airhead like Tom Cruise from walking into an ordinary restaurant without a herd of bodyguards. All in all, none of them too satisfying.

Therefore, I root my confusion in Mark's personal interpretation of how Jesus conducted his mission, what the experts call Mark's stylistic / theological use of "The Messianic Secret."

Understandably, while they were with Jesus, the monotheist disciples had no clue he was THE Messiah, the one promised since time out of mind--much less that he was somehow divine. After all, how could he be? He smelled; he got tired; he occasionally lost his temper. A great man, to be sure, but no greater than the Buddha or Socrates. It was only after the resurrection that they had evidence Jesus wasn't just great. He was THE ONE.

But 30 years later Mark wrote his gospel already totally convinced of Jesus' divinity. Therefore, all the gospels are mixtures, on the one hand, of what the disciples knew about events as they were happening, and on the other hand what the disciples knew after the resurrection. It's somewhat similar to what painters do to Jesus: gussy him up in clothes that would have embarrassed him, surround him with unearthly light, picture him with eyes gazing into forever. They all show Jesus, not as he looked at the time, but as Jesus actually was, without anyone's realizing. Thus Mark works through his gospel an elaborate plan whereby Jesus tries to keep his messiahship secret-revealing it only very slowly, toward a final climax, when the High Priest asks him "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed," and Jesus answers, "I AM.."

I don't pretend to understand that fully, but it's a lot more satisfying than Jesus telling the leper to keep quiet because he didn't want to become notorious. After all, Jesus did come to proclaim the Good News, and you can't proclaim something from anonymity. What's more, Jesus placed on us the same burden: to proclaim it from the housetops--which you can't do if your most ardent desire is to escape notice.

More important, as with the leper finding himself suddenly restored, once you've really comprehended the Good News--that our sins can be forgiven, that we needn't fear death, that we're immortal, here and now--how can you possibly keep quiet about that?

Maybe the reason so many of us remain silent about the Good News is that, although it was discussed many times in our presence, we never really heard it. In their rush to be sure you were religiously brainwashed, well-meaning catechists drowned you for years in a stupefying cascade of answers for meaningless questions. And by the time you were old enough to understand sin and death, you'd left all the Church's incomprehensible answers behind you with your Barbies and Legos. So it's quite possible you've never really heard the gospel, not with the same intensity that we hear "You've got three cavities" or "And I love you, too." Not with the same exhilaration a lifetime convict feels when he hears, "You're free. Go home."

Last Sunday's Times reported that the Bishop of Rockville Center on Long Island dismissed 22 full-time staffers in the offices of catechesis and laity-family. The reason given by his spokesman was, "We have about 20,000 baptisms and 20,000 marriages every year in this diocese, but why do only a fraction of those people come to church?" That is a very penetrating question. It's difficult to comprehend why those people, other than baptisms and marriages, would avoid involvement in a movement whose core convictions were "that our sins can be forgiven, that we needn't fear death, that we're immortal, here and now." Why would they shun freedom from guilt and fear?

Unless those absentees never really heard that message? Unless they never truly comprehended sin and death--and freedom from them? Unless they thought being a follower of Christ meant something far different? Maybe we've kept this Messianic Secret too long and too well.

Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit