Thursday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
January 13, 2022
Daily Reading from the USCCB: Mark 1:40-45
Jesus cures a leper. This man–formerly a social outcast–now became acceptable again among God’s people. He wasn’t just cured of his disease. He was welcomed back into respectability.
Jesus tells him not to tell anybody, but to go get certified as clean by the priests. It wasn’t that Jesus didn’t want anybody to know what had happened. Rather Jesus didn’t want false ideas about himself spreading around. Jesus was the messenger of the kingdom–of a new relationship between God and humanity. If people saw him exclusively as a kind of medical magician, they might never be able to understand his true meaning.
As we experience Jesus in prayer and reflection, we need to be careful to be dealing with the real Jesus.
