Word of the day

A reading from the Letter to the Hebrews
Heb 3:7-14

The Holy Spirit says:
Oh, that today you would hear his voice,
“Harden not your hearts as at the rebellion
in the day of testing in the desert,
where your ancestors tested and tried me
and saw my works for forty years.
Because of this I was provoked with that generation
and I said, ‘They have always been of erring heart,
and they do not know my ways.’
As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter into my rest.’”
Take care, brothers and sisters,
that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart,
so as to forsake the living God.
Encourage yourselves daily while it is still “today,”
so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin.
We have become partners of Christ
if only we hold the beginning of the reality firm until the end.

From the Gospel according to Mark
Mk 1:40-45

A leper came to him and kneeling down begged him and said,
“If you wish, you can make me clean.”
Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand,
touched the leper, and said to him,
“I do will it. Be made clean.”
The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean.
Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once.
Then he said to him, “See that you tell no one anything,
but go, show yourself to the priest
and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed;
that will be proof for them.”
The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter.
He spread the report abroad
so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly.
He remained outside in deserted places,
and people kept coming to him from everywhere.

You can’t build a community without closeness; you can’t make peace without closeness; you can’t do good without drawing near. Jesus could have said to him: “Be healed!”. No: He drew close and touched him. What’s more: at the moment that Jesus touched the unclean man, He became unclean. And this is the mystery of Jesus: He takes upon Himself our uncleanliness, our impurities. St Paul says it well: “Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself”. And then, Paul goes even further “Jesus became sin”: Jesus became sin, Jesus became excluded, took impurity upon Himself to draw close to us. (Santa Marta, 26 June 2015)