REFLECTIONS ON THE HEALING OF A LEPER (Mk 1: 40-45) V
We are coming closer, step by step, to the passage that we set out to meditate upon from the beginning. The healing of the leper appears in the final verses of the first chapter of St, Mark, specifically in verses 40 - 45. Immediately before this, the Evangelist has drawn us a scene of the greatest intimacy: “In the morning, before dawn, Jesus got up, went out and went to a desert place; there he was praying. ” (v. 35) This is a beautiful image.
The first chapter of the Gospel of St. Mark conveys a feeling of frenetic activity. Jesus had returned to Galilee after his baptism in the Jordan and the sacred text tells us "his fame spread throughout the region". (v. 28) People came from all over to hear him speak and to be healed by his miraculous hands. St. Mark tells us that the whole city of Capernaum was crowding at the door of the house where he was, (v. 33) and Saint Peter even says: "Everyone is looking for you." (v. 37) So the contrast between the crowd that followed him through the city and the solitude of his prayer in that deserted place is even more striking.
Let’s contemplate the Lord praying. The evangelist gives us the detail that it was very early, "before dawn". Let's imagine Jesus, in the darkness of the night, taking advantage that the whole city still lay dreaming to get away to pray. When his prayer is finished, the Lord will begin an apostolic journey through the "nearby towns" (v. 38) of all Galilee (v. 39) and it will be in that journey that the encounter with the leper takes place.
Jesus' activity is nourished in prayer and so should ours be. This is what the Church should also do since without the light of the Holy Spirit, and without listening to the Father who speaks to us, we cannot make the right decisions.
When I was a young man and in Catholic Action, the chaplain of the group, Don Grati, used to repeat a phrase that St. Bernard wrote to Pope Eugene III: "Damn the works of the Church if they are not impregnated with a deep interior life." When, in the Church, we forget the example of the Lord of withdrawing to pray in a remote place, and we allow ourselves to be devoured by activity, we draw the condemnation of God on us. Our works, without the life-giving sap of grace, are dead works, no matter how good our intentions are.
When we pay more heed to the world than to the voice of God in his Word, when we dive into the ocean of our obligations without resting in the Lord, when we forget "love first" (Rev 2:4) for Jesus, and let our hearts fill with worries or tasks that always seem more urgent to us than the life of prayer, then our works are cursed by a spiritual leprosy from which only Jesus, the physician of our souls, can heal us.
Yesterday I invited you not to read disturbing news over the next few days in order to recover the inner peace that is a sign of the presence of the risen Christ. Today I invite you to withdraw with Jesus, into the privacy of the night, at the top of the mountain, and be with him. That you contemplate him with his gaze raised to heaven, that you listen to him sigh in prayer, that you learn from him to escape from the current that pulls us away, and withdraw with him into the solitude of prayer.
Remember that the branch must be attached to the vine to bear fruit. (Jn 14:4) Remember that God is the “light silent sound” that is barely heard. (1Kgs 19:12) Remember that we cannot overcome if the One who “conquers the world” is not in us. (Jn 16:33) Over these days, leave the noise and confusion of Capernaum along with Jesus, and escape to solitude and intimacy with the Lord, to the abode in the inner castle of your spirit "where things of much secrecy between God and the soul happen." (St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, Moradas I, chap. 1).
God bless you.
