A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief

Sermon 15 February 2009
2Kings 5:1-14, 1 Cor 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities, and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted…and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all…For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken.”

Today’s readings very definitely want us to think about leprosy. It isn’t a pleasant thing to think about, even for those of us who have never to their knowledge seen a leper and are in no danger of catching the disease themselves. But given the fact that we are so used to the Cross that it leaves most of us unmoved, it is no bad thing to think about something which is still painful to us, in connection with the Lord. But leprosy? In connection with the Christ? Why not? The idea dates back to the Isaiah passage I have just quoted, although most versions – the Douay version is an exception – do not use the word itself. The Douay has “We have thought him as it were a leper” for “We considered him stricken by God”; and the phrase “One from whom men hide their faces” is simply a euphemism for a leper.

I don’t suppose many people now remember the novel “Christ Recrucified”, but it was much read and discussed some forty years ago. I must have been thirteen at the most when I read it, and I remember very little about it, except that the hero Manolios (Emmanuel), the “Christ” of the title, was suffering from a mysterious disfiguring disease – not leprosy, but something very like it – and this was one of the reasons why he was persecuted. Indeed, the only reason I now remember. That idea, and its connection with Christ himself, has remained with me ever since.

I’ve often thought, in this connection, of the way in which Jesus dealt with lepers. It is striking that he never touched the possessed – or not until he had cast out the demon – but touching was his normal response to the sick, and his normal way of healing them, including the lepers. He did not hesitate to do what would not only have put him, in the view of the time, at great risk of contracting leprosy himself, but would have also made him ritually unclean. It’s obvious that he didn’t care much about ritual uncleanness, but didn’t he care about the risk of leprosy? I’m not one of those who believe that Jesus, being God, had a perfect knowledge of all arts and sciences, and so would have known, as we do today, that leprosy is in fact not very contagious. He would have had the same belief as everyone else, and no doubt the same instinctive horror of leprosy and lepers. And, I think, more so, because he knew who he was and he knew Isaiah. Just as I’m sure he thought of Nebuchadnezzar and his madness while he was himself in the wilderness with the wild beasts and was wet with the dews of heaven, and may have consciously accepted the possibility that madness, at least temporary madness, might be the will of the Father for him too (and did he not feel that also in Gethsemane?) just so he may have lived consciously with the possibility that Isaiah’s prophecy might be fulfilled literally.

He certainly did nothing to avoid it. That doesn’t just show that he was an extremely courageous and selfless man – though he was – and it has nothing in common with the heroics, admirable though they are, of Francis of Assisi or Catherine of Siena. It was simply a total openness to the will of the Father. Jesus had a human nature like ours: there were things from which he shrank, and things he preferred to other things. But he never protected himself against any thing unless he knew it to be contrary to the Father’s will for him. He did know it was contrary to the Father’s will for him to be thrown off the cliff at Nazareth or stoned in the Temple. And as his consummation approached, its nature became ever clearer to him until the point at which he saw it as clearly as if it had already taken place, though even at that point his openness to the Father’s will received its final proof. And it was then, in Gethsemane, that he understood Isaiah’s prophecy. Because his treatment of lepers, his willingness to lay himself open to leprosy, even, perhaps, a sense that it might be decreed for him, was in a deep sense an entirely sound instinct: no, he was not to contract physical leprosy, but at the time when he was most the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief, he was to experience the most terrible form of leprosy as belonging to him, as forming part of his being.

Because physical leprosy is no more than the shadow of sin, though not in the sense that it follows upon sin, but in the sense that there is a natural connection of thought between them. Leprosy is the epitome of physical loathsomeness and sin is spiritual loathsomeness. The real fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy was when the Lord was faced with that loathsomeness not outside him – which was bad enough – but as it were within him, as it were a disease of his own spiritual organism, as if he, like the rest of us, carried within himself the seedbed of sin, the fomes peccati as Thomas Aquinas calls it. He was a horror to himself and must have felt that he was a horror to all the righteous, not to speak of his heavenly Father.

I make no apology for leaving the greater part of the rest of this sermon to John Henry Newman, who not only understood this, but could express it with a force which we of the twenty-first century have lost.

“There, then, in that most awful hour knelt the Saviour of the world, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of his foe – a foe whose breath was a pestilence and whose embrace was an agony. Here He knelt, while the fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind and spread over Him like a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He could never be…He looked, and did not know Himself, and felt as a foul and loathsome sinner…He found His eyes, feet and lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One and not of God!...Of the living and the dead, of the yet unborn, of the lost and the saved…all the sins are there…They are upon Him, they are all but His own; He cries to the Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, all but the real sinner.”

The Synoptic Gospels call the wonders that Jesus did “miracles”; St John calls them “signs”, and he is right, for so they were. And I think that one of the most fundamental signs is his healing lepers by laying himself open to contracting the disease – for that, precisely, is what he came to do for our souls.