Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

These last several Sundays we have seen the work of Jesus with new eyes. Jesus has received his calling through baptism. With that calling came the power of the Spirit and his identity as the beloved Son. According to Mark, Jesus wasted no time getting into his vocation, to proclaim the message of the kingdom of God. That message announced that the kingdom has already drawn near. Many must have thought that they needed to bring in the kingdom through their own works of power. Jesus announced that the already present kingdom was the very work of God and the power that brings about God’s will. The people needed only to turn to God and trust this good news.

We then saw how the preaching of Jesus challenged the Galilean social and political structures. First, Jesus is presented as a rival to the powerful class of officials known as the scribes. They were the writers and the readers in a society that may have had a literacy rate as low as 5%. The scribes operated out of texts. The texts were their authority. But when Jesus preached, he had a charisma that reflected his vocation and identity.

Jesus is confronted by forces that stand for the social structures as they were. The demon possessed represented those who were in real life possessed of the social, economic, and political realities. It is no wonder that the demons rail out at Jesus. He is the one who can exorcize them, casting them out of those who lived in bondage. The work of exorcism is a work of liberation, and it is a threat to the establishment.

Jesus then goes about healing and exorcizing demons everywhere he preaches. His work of healing and exorcizing is the work of restoration. The sick may go home. The exorcized are set free from captivity. All of this is due to the preaching of Jesus whose work is to make all aware that the kingdom has broken in. It may still be hidden from the eyes of many. But many also are seeing the kingdom at work and believing.

In the Gospel reading for today. A leper approaches Jesus, begging Jesus to heal him. In order to understand this story, one must know what the curse of leprosy meant for people, not just in Jewish settings but all around the world. The disease is not really just one type. The word leprosy referred to any number of skin disorders that would be obvious to the public and would cause concern for contagion.

Leprosy was an automatic condemnation to a life of isolation. No one was to touch a person declared to be unclean. The so-called leper was sent to live outside the city. Lepers could beg for food at the city gate. According to Torah the leper was to deliberately dishevel his or her hair, wear torn clothing and to cry out, “unclean, unclean,” should anyone approach. If someone touched a leper, then that person was declared unclean. There probably was no more painful life than that of a leper.

Now the Levites, the priests of Israel, were put in charge of determining who was clean and unclean. One reads about their duties in Leviticus 13-14. The priests’ job was to declare who was clean and unclean, but it was understood that God was the one doing the afflicting or healing. The priests often exacted heavy offerings from the lepers when the lepers were examined and found to be clean or unclean. The leper’s life was made even more burdensome so that the Levites would have their share in society’s goods.

We have only to recall the opening of the Gospel of Mark who quotes from Malachi. Hear what else Malachi has to say.

And he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the LORD in righteousness. (Malachi 3:3b)

Ah Oh! We have another social confrontation in the works. The leper begs Jesus to make him clean. Jesus is filled with compassion for the leper and does the unthinkable. He touches the leper and commands him to be clean. Immediately the leprosy was gone.

The leper is relieved, but Jesus is angry at the situation. Jesus commands the man to go to the Levites and show himself since according to the law only the priests can declare that one is clean or unclean. The translation here is inadequate. The Greek says that Jesus is snorting mad, not just stern, and Jesus does not send the man to the priests. He compels the man to go and show himself so that the man would become a testimony against the priests.

Does it have to end this way? Couldn’t Jesus have simply healed the leper and then gone to brunch with him? Instead he uses the healing to confront the established leadership with Jesus’ own authority and power.

Now the man disobeys Jesus and elects to skip that step altogether. He went out announcing publicly what Jesus had done. Now Jesus could not go into a town openly. Why? Was it because he had attained such fame and notoriety. Well, yes. But it is also the case that Jesus is technically unclean. He touched a leper before the leper had been officially pronounced clean. He may not go into towns openly because he is a “marked” man having challenged yet another group in society.

We should see in Jesus a boldness that not only brings freedom from the demonic and heals diseases. We also witness his courage to confront all that is structured in human society that does more to keep people sick, isolated and suffering than it does to bring them healing.

Dear congregation, we are the church of Christ. We are a public church who often cannot figure out whether we have a role in the public domain. Are we to speak the word of the gospel whose character we know through the stories of Jesus? We seem to swing widely between those who believe that the church should say nothing about society and those who believe that the church has an obligation to speak and to advocate on behalf of those too marginalized in our society to speak for themselves.

Yes, I know that there is a danger that the church would also try to use the poor and marginalized in order to gain power for itself. Our task should not result in helping people stay in a state of victimization. Our calling is to help people be free so that they may drop the chains of bondage and be free to live, to struggle with responsibility, and to love through self-giving. This is the work of the Spirit driving Jesus into the waters of the Jordan, into the wilderness of temptation, and into the public sphere of home, work, market and synagogue. Those of us who have also been washed in the Jordan are driven by that same Spirit.

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.