Homily: Friday of the 12th Week in OT - "He stretched out his hand..."

In Matthew’s Gospel, there is a repeating pattern in the Gospel’s structure.  Discourse is followed by narrative—teaching is followed by action.  Immediately after giving his meatiest discourse, his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus acts. 

This attracts us to Jesus.  He doesn’t just stay up on the mountain to teach.  He comes down the mountain, gets his hands dirty, shows us just what his teaching put into action looks like.

Over the next two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, chapters 8 and 9, Jesus performs a series of 10 miracles. 

He cleanses a leper, as we heard today. He heals the centurion’s servant, Simon-Peter’s mother-in-law, and many people possessed by demons.  He calms the storm at sea, then goes back to healing more demoniacs, a paralytic, the royal official’ daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage, two blind men, and a mute.

Where in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explained the values of the kingdom, now in the miracles stories, Jesus is going display the power of the kingdom, and the power of the love of God for the poor and afflicted. 

“Lord, if you will, you can make me clean,” the leper in today’s Gospel says. “I do will it. Be made clean.”  But Jesus didn’t just heal the man by word.  At a distance, Jesus could have snapped his fingers and cured the man.  But Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.

.  In the Old Covenant if a holy person came in contact with a defiled, unclean, or sinful person, the holy person would become defiled, and the unclean person would not be sanctified. 

In Christ, rather, God’s love is shown to the afflicted through personal touch. The power of the kingdom of God is such that God comes into our lives and touches us and sends us into the lives of others to touch them. I think of Pope Benedict and Pope Francis both going into prisons, meeting with abuse victims, laying their hands on the afflicted, drawing near to them.

Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel is often so critical of the Pharisees because the Pharisees believed they needed to remain separate from anything unholy—the word Pharisee in fact comes from the Hebrew word, Parush, which means “holy by separation”.  Jesus shows however that true holiness doesn’t keep itself at a distance, aloof from the afflicted, rather, it enters in, it lays its hands on the afflicted, helping the afflicted know that God has not abandoned them.

There are people in our lives, our families, our neighborhoods, who are hurting, physically and emotionally, who feel alienated, and we are called to show God’s love for them, by drawing close, by stretching out our hands, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.