Healing Hands
15 February 2009
If you are the sort of person who quite enjoys Casualty, Holby City or one of the many other television medical dramas, which is to say if you are not squeamish, then you might quite enjoy reading the bit of Leviticus that was left out today - that is, verses 3 to 43 of chapter 13. It concerns various kinds of skin disease - lumped together under the term ‘Leprosy’ - and gives the levitical priest a precise guide in how to deal with whatever is presented to him, be it the appearance of raw flesh, boils, swellings and spots of various colours. The priest’s attention is particularly drawn to the condition of the hair around the af-fected area, whether it be yellowing, whitening or (be ye warned) thinning.
Scholars suggest that this close interest in skin disease, and the periods of confinement enforced upon the hapless victim, had little to do with the risk of contagion. We may well not be talking about leprosy in the strictest sense. The priest was not fulfilling a medical role; he was not interested in treating the pa-tient for their condition, or protecting others from it. The priest, as ever, was fulfilling a purely religious function. His job was to declare whether that person was ‘clean’ or ‘unclean’, and where there was doubt, the person could be confined for 7 days to see whether the disease would progress or not. Clean and unclean are not, in any sense, medical terms - they are terms that de-scribe the ritual and therefore the sociological status of that person. Clean would mean fully included in the social and ritual life of Israel; unclean would mean wearing tattered clothes, hav-ing dishevelled hair and crying out ‘unclean, unclean.’ And but for the crying of unclean, that could, of course, describe a sig-nificant portion of the student population in this city - I’m not sure I want to know what manner or sores and itches they may be concealing.
I suspect we all feel that this way of dealing with sick people, inspecting them and declaring judgement on them, appears pretty callous. There is no compassion here, no tending to their needs, no offering of basic charity, just a blunt judgement about purity, and then the humiliation of those deemed to be unclean. But the levitical priest did not have pastoral responsibility for the welfare of the people in the way we might understand it. The levitical priest was concerned not so much with the people’s welfare but with their identity. The levitical priest was not there to ask the question ‘how can we help those in need?’, but the question ‘how can we be a people that are pure, chosen and set apart for the worship of God?’ The fate of those declared to be unclean served as a sign to the people of what they must not, as a whole, become. The humiliation of the leper reminded the people what life apart from God might look like.
We still rightly feel that this is no way to treat people who are unwell, but there is an important principle here that we can learn from the levitical priest, because the way he treats an in-dividual diseased person is absolutely consistent with his un-derstanding of what kind of people Israel is called to be - a na-tion that is pure, set apart for God. There is a link here between practical action and the larger religious questions of identity - who we are, what we are called to be. Both are important, and to neglect either one will necessarily undermine the other. In an age and a culture largely dislocated from any coherent religious account of identity it is a struggle to establish a coherent groun-ding for how we should treat each other - secular western indi-vidualism does not provide a terribly convincing base on which to build the kind of compassionate society that most of us would want.
Of course what the levitical priest cannot do is make people clean. He can declare them to be one thing or the other, but he can only bear witness to the status quo he can’t change any-thing. So the leper in the gospel story sees something very dif-ferent in Jesus - ‘If you choose’, he says to Jesus, ‘you can make me clean.’ Having made him clean, Jesus sends him to the priest, in accordance with the Levitical Law, to be publically declared clean. Presumably the priest would have seen this man before - would have followed the instructions, and duly de-clared him to be unclean. That same priest, seeing the man made clean, would have been alert not only to the miracle of an individual healing, but of a far wider significance. Here is a le-per, a symbol, a reminder to Israel of what it would look like to turn away from God, to no longer be his people, pure and set apart - here is a leper made clean. This does not just change one man’s life, this changes the whole matter of Israel’s identity - of who they are, and who they are called to be in relation to God. If this leper represents Israel, then Israel is made clean. If this leper represents the Gentiles, the nations against whom Israel asserts her identity as clean, pure and chosen, then those same Gentiles are made clean.
This is a powerful sign, hinting at the entire reconfiguration of Israel, shifting the ground of Israel’s identity - no longer just wit-nessing, through her priests, to a static status quo of clean or unclean, but witnessing to the making clean of a leper; the mak-ing clean of all that leper represents. Indeed, the new Israel, in Christ, receives a new priestly role - a role that the levitical priest would never assume to have - the role of making clean, extending the bounds of those called to be God’s people, pure and chosen. There is a new, expanding dynamic, which lies behind all the evangelistic work of the Church - for we are called to be a new, a royal priesthood, making clean a whole world for the glory of God.
As you already know, I work at Helen and Douglas House, just up the Cowley Road, and we provide respite and end-of-life care to children and young adults with life-shortening diseases. We were founded 26 years ago by an Anglican nun, Sister Frances Dominica. Some of you may have had a chance to hear her speak; if not, it would be worth taking any opportunity you can to hear her. The children and young adults are impor-tant individuals in their own right, and every effort is made to honour them as such, but they also represent some wider as-pects of our cultural identity, in the way the leper did within Is-rael. They represent disability, fragility, dependence, let alone dying - some of the things that our culture finds most frightening - not so much unclean as uncomfortable - things that most of us would rather not have impinging upon us.
By offering a privileged place to those children and young adults, I hope we are doing something like what Jesus did for the leper - making them clean in the sense of putting them and their families at the centre rather than leaving them, humiliated, at the periphery of society; treating them not as objects of pity or dread that we distance ourselves from, but as brothers and sisters, in whom we see Christ, and with whom we are being changed from glory to glory.
The priestliness of the Church of God, of each one of us, is rooted in Christ, in his ministry of reaching out with healing hands to make clean. We share in this ministry by the Holy Spi-rit. By reaching out to those who are declared unclean, those whom our culture finds disturbing or uncomfortable, we are doing Christ’s work, extending his Kingdom, his new Israel - we will be claiming our true God-given identity, and our actions will contribute to the healing of all creation.
The Rev'd Mark Birch Chaplain, Helen & Douglas House