Leviticus 13:45-46 and Mark 1:40-44. "The leper who has the disease shall ... cry out 'Unclean, unclean!' ... he shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp." (Leviticus 13:44-46). "And a leper came to him beseeching him, and kneeling said to him, 'If you will, you can make me clean.' Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, 'I will; be clean.'" ... [A]nd he was made clean ... [He] said to him ... '[G]o, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded.'" (Mark 1:40-44)

I wanted to do the readings from Mass today because we were talking yesterday at Gospel Group about leprosy as a metaphor for sin, and I have been thinking a lot about that I want to explore it further. It was not someone's fault if they contracted leprosy, but it made them unclean nonetheless, exactly like how we are born with original sin through no fault of our own. Unless and until a person's leprosy is cleansed, he has to be kept apart from the Chosen people, just like we are not fully welcomed into the Church until we are baptized. If a leper has a relapse, he must abide by the rules of separation until he is again clean, just as we cannot participate in the Sacraments in a state of mortal sin, we must first go to confession - we must kneel down before Him and beseech Him saying "If you will, you can make me clean", and He will make us clean.

If a leper were to try to deny or hide his leprosy, and refuse to announce his uncleanliness, he would not only be making a choice to sin by willfully disobeying God's rules (meant for his and others' safety), he would also be putting himself further away from any possible healing and reconciliation with the community. This is us when we deny our sin, or refuse or neglect to examine our consciences in a spirit of humility. We so easily tell ourselves we are fine - we're not sinful, we don't need confession, and even if we had sinned, why should we have to tell our sins to a priest? We can just talk to God, like the leper did (but note that the leper met Jesus in the flesh, and still had to show himself to the priest afterwards!). If we will not approach Jesus, in persona Christi with the priest, and beg for healing for a sickness we do not acknowledge we have, or if we will not follow the prescribed way of having our sickness healed, we will not be healed. It is that simple.

This also led me to start thinking about Purgatory again. I am thinking of the lepers being separated from the people on the outskirts of town, or in an encampment apart from the main encampment of the people. They are not banished forever, they have hope of returning and they are, or should be, treated with dignity, so they know they are still loved by the people and by God. This is like Purgatory. If we die in a state of sin, and almost all of us will, we will see God face-to-face and see that we are unclean, that we are not ready to be with Him in eternity. We will feel our sickness then, if we haven't before, and we will know that we have to be set apart until we are made well. At that point, the only way we can be cleansed is through the prayers and sacrifices of others, which is why it is so important to pray for the dead. How much better would it have been if we were in tune with our sinfulness while alive, and made regular use of Confession? Any suffering we go through here is exponentially preferable to that in Purgatory, and we can no longer help ourselves once we're dead!

Finally, I am thinking that the people who see God face-to-face and still refuse to acknowledge their sin, who pridefully keep insisting that they are fine, it is God's rules that need changing, are the people who choose hell. They are given every possible chance to admit, even in the smallest way, that they have been wrong, and they still refuse to do so. They therefore cannot stand to be in the sight of God, because they feel His presence as nothing but unjust judgment on them. They would be like lepers who, when it was learned they were trying to hide their leprosy, refused to live apart in hopes of eventual cleansing, and instead ran off to live utterly alone, in bitterness and anger at the community that found them out and tried to impose God's rules. They would choose complete separation from any possibility of the love and care of others. They would choose hell.