“A leper came to him, . . . and kneeling, he said . . .

         ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.”
Jesus said . . . “I do choose.”

Mark is showing us Jesus.
It is a simple portrait – so simple
         it may have been airbrushed a little.
The original version of Mark says something peculiar
         about Jesus motivation

         – so peculiar that when Matthew and Luke
         retold the story, they left it out.

And when someone made later manuscripts of Mark,
         they changed it, they niced it up.
They said, “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand
         and touched him . . . .”

That’s what you’ll find in your Bible

         – not the language of the earliest manuscripts

         – because we want Jesus to be nice, and not peculiar.
But that isn’t what St. Mark actually said.
The earliest manuscripts read this way:

         “. . . (K)neeling he said to him,

         ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’
         Becoming angry, Jesus stretched out his hand
                and touched him, and said,

                ‘I do choose. Be made clean.’”

In Matthew and Luke there is no stated motive for this healing.
In the revised version of Mark, Jesus is “moved with pity.”
In the original version, Jesus is “angry.”

One might wish that if Mark were going to say Jesus was angry,
        he would have gone on to say what he was angry about.
As it is, we are left to guess.

There is a host of reasons Jesus might have been angry.
But two of them make more sense to me that the others.
He may have been angry at the way the question was asked,

        “If you choose, you can make me clean.”
Maybe he was angry at the implication he might not choose
        to help a fellow human being.

When people say that disasters, illnesses, suffering and sorrow
        have been sent by God or that they are God’s will,
                 they are slandering God.
And I would imagine that makes God pretty irritable.

Or maybe Jesus was angry at leprosy.
Maybe he was angry that the world is the way it is,
        that people suffer disfiguring, disabling illnesses
        that lead to isolation and carry social stigmas.
Anger about suffering is both human and holy.

The one thing we know from the text
        is what Jesus did about his anger.
“Jesus stretched out his arm and touched him
        and said, ‘I do choose. Be made clean.’”

If anger inspires us to touch people with kindness and mercy,
        if anger inspires us to help people in need,
        then maybe we should be angry more often.
Several decades ago,
        a priest at St. Francis named Woody Bartlett
        put up a poster in the church office.

The poster showed people raising their fists in anger
        protesting something.
I don’t know what it was.
But knowing Woody, it was probably war or poverty or prejudice.
And some folks were offended by that poster.

I don’t know enough about the situation to say
        whether they were right or wrong to be offended.
But I do think Woody’s poster raises something
        very important about Christianity.
It isn’t about being nice.

Jesus, especially in Mark’s Gospel,
        isn’t always sweet and gentle.
He is aggressively fighting against the powers and principalities
        that corrupt and destroy God’s people.

The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche held Christianity in contempt
        because of its pusillanimous niceness.
And when I go to large gatherings of church people,
        I must confess, it turns me a bit Nietzschean myself.
The collective niceness makes me want to rush out to a hockey game,
        if not a wrestling match.
I would feel bad about that except that I think
        Jesus would be at the hockey game too.
A Christianity that isn’t angry at violence,
        exploitation of the powerless,
        and neglect of the poor
                 isn’t worthy of the name of Jesus.

Not long ago, I was talking with a young woman
        whose friend had been sexually assaulted.
The victim was still traumatized and afraid.
Her friend, the woman with whom I was meeting, was angry.
We talked about her anger, and how her friend
        probably needed someone to be angry on her behalf
        until she regained the strength to be angry herself.

Anger is energy – strong, hot energy, like fire.
Energy can be used for good or for evil.
Because anger is such powerful energy,
        we are often afraid of it.
We are afraid of other people’s anger,
        and even more afraid of our own.
So we devise a religion and codes of social behavior
        to suppress it.
That’s part of why it upsets us if we come to church
        and see Woody Bartlett’s poster expressing anger.
And it’s why someone air-brushed Mark
        to take replace Jesus’ anger with pity.

But if our Christianity is to be worthy of the name of Jesus,
        it needs some anger in it.
And it needs to refine that anger into something holy.

So we would do well to look at today’s lesson
        they way Mark wrote it – the director’s cut

        – the unrated version –
        not the censured version in your service leaflet insert.
Then we’ll have a Gospel lesson that can teach us something.

The first thing we see is what it is that makes Jesus angry.
It isn’t the breaking of a rule or a custom or a social norm.
Not once in the Gospels does Jesus get exercised
        over violations of purity regulations or rules of etiquette.
Jesus gets angry at diseases that make people suffer,
        at self-righteous judgements that put people down,
and at caste systems that separate the in-group from the out-group.
Like the prophets before him, he gets angry
       when the poor and the weak are neglected.

The second thing we see is what Jesus does with his anger.
He stretches out his arm and touches the person who is suffering.
Jesus could have healed the man by saying a word.
Later in Mark he heals people from miles away
        by saying a word.
But he touched this leper.
Lepers were untouchable.

To touch a leper was to risk contracting the disease

        – and the crucifixion make is quite clear that Jesus
                 was not superman –
        he was not immune to physical catastrophes.

So Jesus risked becoming a leper medically,
        and he absolutely became a leper socially and legally.
He made himself ritually unclean.
He took the part of the leper, joined the ranks of lepers,
        made himself one with the leper.

For example, the National Episcopal Aids Coalition
        prints a lapel button that says “The Church Has Aids.”
That is isn’t a shocking confession.
It’s a shocking claim of solidarity.
If anyone has AIDS, the Church had better have it too.
That’s a religion worthy of the name of Jesus.

The next thing we see about what Jesus does
        with his anger is that he heals the person who is suffering.
Anger doesn’t have to be acted out in violence.
Christian anger is never acted out in violence.

Violence can only be inflicted on other people
         or on the creation.
And those are the wrong targets.
People and the creation are not evil.
The principalities and powers that corrupt them
         are the real evil.
The principalities and powers are like the Emperor
         in Star Wars Episode 6: Revenge of the Jedi.

Remember how the Emperor tried to provoke Luke
         into attacking him
                  because that would convert Luke to his side.
Our violent acts only make the principalities and powers stronger.

Christian anger is refined into action
         for healing and strength,
         for courage and transformation.
We need our God-given anger
         to resist the forces that would put us in our place,
         hold us down, keep us from becoming who God
                  intends us to be.

And we need our God-given anger
         to put is side by side with the wounded and broken people
                  God loves and cherishes.
When we clothe our anger with faith in God
         and hope for redemption,
                  then our anger will not be violent or despairing.
It will be empowering and transforming.
We can hold our anger and direct it wisely
         and compassionately for the sake of God’s kingdom.

 

                                                                Amen.