Avoiding contagion

 Over the last years of the pandemic, we have been very conscious of seeking to protect ourselves and our communities from a virulent disease. This saw people being isolated from each other through lockdowns and the inability to make meaningful contact with others. After these years of enforced isolation, we can some of the trauma and fears that caused people to shape their lives around outbreaks of the disease. Yet even as we emerge from those days we can still be conscious that while the disease has disappeared we have adopted a very different lifestyle. While there is less suspicion of each other there can be a lingering doubt of how we are called to live in this modern age. 

In the reading from Leviticus, there is the belief that moral corruption led to physical illness that caused people with leprosy to be pushed to the margins of their community. The belief that a person suffered sickness due to sin can still linger in our own imagination. We know from modern medicine that there are some links between lifestyle and disease but they are not as explicit in identifying a person with their disease. This can be seen that there have been many public health campaigns to change people's behavior that bring into focus the dangers of what we allow to enter our bodies. Yet it is a person's choices that make the greatest difference. What emerges from a person's heart most shapes their own commitments and how they think through issues that affect their own health.

This is probably why the virtue of mercy is at the heart of faith. Jesus sees the heart of the person who desires to be clean. He acknowledges the desire to be cured. Yet as we see in the Gospel this is not just seeking Jesus as a healer of sickness but a person who calls people to a profound encounter with God. In our own age, this is a challenge for our own times. How do we seek out the good of another that acknowledges the need for healing at all levels of society, personal, social, and communal? The call is to be people who not only recognize our humanity but how we are called to model ourselves on Christ. To see the divine life that sustains our human life. This allows us to be people who rather than focusing on the cause of suffering can seep into the heart of the person and isolate them but rather see the heart of the person who seeks to alleviate suffering. In this, we see the transforming power of the love of Jesus who seeks to heal the person rather than see them consumed by their suffering.