The Road to The Cross
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B Mark 1: 40-45 12 February 2012
Father Hugh Bowron, 2012There is a famous poem by the American Poet Robert Frost. It is called, "The Road Not Taken." Perhaps you know it:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In our everyday lives we are offered choices that may appear routine but in fact carry a heavy freight of consequences for us. Our response, spontaneous and characteristic of us, sets off a chain reaction which carries us to goodness knows where. Looking back we think, "If I hadn’t done that everything would have turned out so differently."
In the film "Patton" the famous general of that name is kneeling before the altar reflecting on the personal calamity that has come his way. In the heat of the moment he slapped a shell-shocked soldier at a forward medical station. Now he must apologise to the whole army for what he did. A long period in the wilderness is about to begin as he is denied the operational combat command for which he has hungered all his life. Wonderingly he asks God, "How can this one trivial act have such devastating consequences?"
Things turning out differently because of the road not taken - the film, "The last temptation of Christ" caused something of a sensation when it was released. In it Martin Scorsese speculated that Christ did not die on the cross. Instead he lives into old age, married and surrounded by grandchildren. This idyll of domestic bliss would have involved walking away from certain situations that came his way.
One such was this morning’s healing of a leper. What could be a more straightforward than an itinerant healer and exorcist being kind to a desperate person? But this one act changes everything. From now on the storm clouds of opposition begin to build up. One by one Jesus starts to fall foul of all the major religious groups. Not much further into the story and he could ruefully agree with that famous remark of Otto Von Bismarck, "the longer I live the more enemies I make."
Visiting Quail Island just out of Lyttelton harbour a few years back I came to understand something of the fear that leprosy inspires. This former quarantine station came to be New Zealand’s last leper colony. Lepers were confined there for the rest of their lives, left to literally rot away. It was low tide, and as we looked out over several miles of mud flats to the shore at Teddington our guide told us that this was the route taken by the one leper who had made an escape bid. I imagined the desperation feelings that motivated the lone escaper to pull himself over miles of sucking mud racing to escape the incoming tide.
To the contemporaries of Jesus leprosy was more than a health problem. Theirs was a society governed by rules of ritual purity - clean or unclean - onside or offside with your neighbours, and with God. It was the priests who made the rules. They had the power to decide whether you were acceptable company with other human beings - whether God regarded you with favour. That was the worst thing about leprosy - the total isolation. Nobody wanted to know you, and even God regarded you as damaged goods. That is the ironic thing about today’s story. At the end of it the leper is cleansed and back in the bosom of Abraham. Now it is Jesus who can no longer go into a town openly, but has to stay out in the countryside. The roles have been reversed. The healer is now the cursed one.
The priests had got the message. Jesus didn’t agree with the rules of ritual purity that isolated and oppressed the people who most needed the milk of human kindness. He was prepared to upset the apple cart in his own low-key way. Here was somebody they would have to do something about.
But it needn’t have come this. If only the leper had kept his trap shut. If only he had kept quiet, as Jesus asked him to. It was the power of irresponsible gossip that set off the avalanche of opposition. Yakkity, yak, yak, yak - talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Wagging tongues have the power to destroy communities of faith - to end the careers of religious leaders. How well we understand the seductive temptation of this form of behaviour. "I am such an important person because I have inside information, the real oil, on what is going on around here. Listen to me. Pay attention to me. I matter."
A series of indiscrete information disclosures - a secret widely shared about an apparently random act of healing. This is the trip wire that sets off the inner dynamic of the gospel story. The possibility of an honourable retirement after a long and satisfying ministry is rapidly fading. Jesus is setting off on the road to the cross. No looking back now. No time for regrets. No "if onlys" or "what ifs." It is an example to us. When we also have set off some land mine in our life through an apparently routine choice, we too need to embrace the follow on reality with courage. "Stick with the what is rather than the what might have been." It is one of the best pieces of advice I ever received. It has carried me through a disaster or two. And the thing about the road to the cross is that it brought Jesus to the place of his greatest opportunity in ministry. As we shall be hearing on Good Friday he accomplished there the greatest act of healing possible for all of humankind. Thanks be to God.
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