Our readings today give us an insight into what things were like before penicillin and before modern medicine generally. Specifically, we hear about a disease that is rare nowadays but is still around. Leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, is easily treated by antibiotics if caught early enough, although it can still cause nerve damage and disfigurement in more advanced cases. In the ancient world, though, leprosy was more than a disease – it was a social stigma of the entire person, a visible affliction that eroded one’s health and one’s relationships. Because they were thought to be contagious, people were shunned from the community, as we hear in the first reading. Social distancing works when nothing else will.
Because of its physical and social effects, leprosy was seen by the ancients to be a mark of not just physical illness but also of spiritual impurity. For them, it was a sign of sin. Like leprosy, sin starts slowly and invisibly, but it progresses with time, eventually causing distortion and isolation. It’s fashionable today, even among some Christians, to minimize the notion of sin – or even to dismiss it entirely. Some want to attribute human faults merely to weakness or ignorance. But while much can be said for those explanations, they don’t completely suffice. Our faith teaches us that there is – within each of us, and within us collectively – something that has fundamentally gone awry from how God created us to be.
Fortunately, God has provided a remedy for our sin. What he gives us is not penicillin but his mercy, through the person of his Son. In our Gospel we hear how Jesus comes to heal the discord and dysfunction of our sinfulness. We know, with our 21st century scientific knowledge, that the man was afflicted with leprosy not because of sin but because of a bacterium. But the power of Jesus to heal him of the physical ailment is indicative also of his power to heal him of the deeper illness that beset him. The dysfunction of sin besets us too – dividing us from God, from each other, and even from ourselves. But that affliction is precisely what the Lord has come to heal, if we will turn to him and allow him to make us clean.
Sometimes the talk about God’s mercy can begin to sound a little rote. So let me share with you a brief story that I think might illustrate it better. A few weeks ago, the Diocese of Honolulu sent to the Vatican in Rome a very large package – 2000 pages about the life of a man who is now being considered for canonization. Ira Dutton was born in Vermont in the middle of the 19th century. Eventually he made his way to Wisconsin and enlisted in the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. After the war, he was married for a time, but Ira slowly began to descend into alcoholism and his marriage failed. Not much is known about this period in his life, but it lasted some ten years; he referred to it as his “degenerate decade.”
Eventually, in 1881, Ira swore off alcohol entirely. He began studying Catholicism, and in 1883, he was baptized a Catholic in Memphis, Tennessee, and took the name of Joseph. For a while he considered religious life, and spent time with the Trappist monks in Kentucky. But eventually he felt called to a more active means of penance for his past sins. He had heard about a Belgian priest who was working among the leper colony in Molokai, Hawaii. Joseph went there and soon became the priest's assistant. When the priest – whose name was Fr. Damien, better known today as St. Damien of Molokai – fell ill with leprosy himself, Joseph ministered to him, and when he died, he carried on his work among the sick for some 35 more years until his own death in Honolulu in 1931.
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| Joseph Dutton in 1922 |
In his journey to the Church, Joseph Dutton surely must have heard the story of today’s Gospel. And when he did, perhaps he recognized himself in that leper whom Jesus healed, and perhaps in that moment he was given insight into why he had suffered for so many years. Perhaps it was in that moment that God planted the seed of the idea that would one day lead Joseph to the leper colony in Molokai. A few weeks ago, at a Mass in Honolulu, Bishop Larry Silva said about Joseph Dutton, “For 44 years, he, who could have decided to leave at any time, stayed to minister to the most vulnerable, so that they would change course from a path of desperation and despair to a path of hope and joy.” Friends, that’s what God’s mercy looks like – that’s what it means to be cured of the bacterium of sin and to be restored to the fullness of spiritual health. That’s how a man who had been as down and out as Joseph Dutton could one day be canonized as a saint.
This coming week, we begin the season of Lent – a time for us to wrestle with our own brokenness, and to admit, like Joseph Dutton did, our own need for conversion and healing. It’s a time, if we need it, to experience the fullness of the Lord’s healing in the sacrament of penance – and then having been healed, to consider, as Joseph did, how to share that mercy with others. As we prepare for this Eucharist, let’s ask the Lord to fill us with the same trust in his power, which heals every infirmity and division.
