Healing and Community Coherence: Mark 1:40-44, A Case Study
Tia Jamir, PhD, BCC, Boston, MA
The Healing of the Leper in Mark 1: 40-44 (compare with Luke 17: 11-19) provides a distinct illustration of “Clean” and “Unclean” from the Classical Period. The text is not simply about a cure but also about rituals, social boundaries, and perhaps an alternative (social) body making as part of the healing process. As such, this involves not only the physical body but also the patient’s relationship and coherence with the broader socio-cultural body. Perhaps, this is a coherence that is missing in our contemporary clinical spaces. Healing has to involve restoration and coherence in both the bodies. This has clinical implication (social determinants of health?) within the 21st Century medical practices.
We could consider the ways that the most important healing in the Leper story may be not a personal/health healing, but a social healing, that is, bringing the leper and the social body back together, again. In this construct, I find Mary Douglas’s fruitful analysis of Dirt and Purity to be a helpful lens (1). I will describe 6 themes to describe how Purity rituals work, anthropologically and theologically, as Jesus brought about a great coherence in the Gospel of Mark.
So, contextually speaking by touching the leper, did Jesus make a physical change in the leper’s skin condition? Or did Jesus do something that in his time was at least equally as profound: daring to touch someone who had been declared ritually impure, thereby demonstrating — as had the Hebrew prophets before him — that God cares much more about inner purity, right intention, and acts of loving-kindness, than God does about (masks of?) outer righteousness that conceals inner deception, selfishness, and corruption?
There is difference in the meaning of the word leprosy today and lepra in Jesus’ day. This is one reason we see a distinction being made in the Gospels between “healing” the sick and “cleansing” the lepers. The lepers were unclean (that is, ritually impure according to the holiness codes), but not sick per se. So, the concern in Jesus’ day concerning what they called leprosy was less about physical contagion and more about the social stigma attachment to those with skin ailments.
We will explore: Was Jesus curing the disease through an intervention in the physical world, or was he healing the illness through an intervention in the social world? Judging by Jesus’ other actions of eating and being with the “unclean” in the gospel accounts, he was bringing healing by refusing to accept the disease’s ritual uncleanness and social ostracization. Stated differently, to accept coherence and healing through Christ is to welcome the unclean entourage with him. In a sense, as he was healing illness without curing the disease, Jesus was acting as an alternative boundary keeper. Perhaps, we can read these coherence deeds and cleaning as subversive acts to the established (temple/medical?) procedures/precint of his time and society. This is a revolutionary idea. After all, the socio-cultural grid dictates, even today, how we see, use, and explain disease and illness, or who is accepted/clean or rejected/unclean.
We could consider the ways that the most important healing in the Leper story may be not a personal/health healing, but a social healing, that is, bringing the leper and the social body back together, again. In this construct, I find Mary Douglas’s fruitful analysis of Dirt and Purity to be a helpful lens (1). I will describe 6 themes to describe how Purity rituals work, anthropologically and theologically, as Jesus brought about a great coherence in the Gospel of Mark.
So, contextually speaking by touching the leper, did Jesus make a physical change in the leper’s skin condition? Or did Jesus do something that in his time was at least equally as profound: daring to touch someone who had been declared ritually impure, thereby demonstrating — as had the Hebrew prophets before him — that God cares much more about inner purity, right intention, and acts of loving-kindness, than God does about (masks of?) outer righteousness that conceals inner deception, selfishness, and corruption?
There is difference in the meaning of the word leprosy today and lepra in Jesus’ day. This is one reason we see a distinction being made in the Gospels between “healing” the sick and “cleansing” the lepers. The lepers were unclean (that is, ritually impure according to the holiness codes), but not sick per se. So, the concern in Jesus’ day concerning what they called leprosy was less about physical contagion and more about the social stigma attachment to those with skin ailments.
We will explore: Was Jesus curing the disease through an intervention in the physical world, or was he healing the illness through an intervention in the social world? Judging by Jesus’ other actions of eating and being with the “unclean” in the gospel accounts, he was bringing healing by refusing to accept the disease’s ritual uncleanness and social ostracization. Stated differently, to accept coherence and healing through Christ is to welcome the unclean entourage with him. In a sense, as he was healing illness without curing the disease, Jesus was acting as an alternative boundary keeper. Perhaps, we can read these coherence deeds and cleaning as subversive acts to the established (temple/medical?) procedures/precint of his time and society. This is a revolutionary idea. After all, the socio-cultural grid dictates, even today, how we see, use, and explain disease and illness, or who is accepted/clean or rejected/unclean.