Bishops far from the Gospel, not no-vax: when Jesus “healed” the leper
As the vaccination campaign carried out by the Italian government in an increasingly "forced" manner, even if behind the appearance of the "voluntary" choice, proceeds towards still unknown goals (third or fourth dose? Emergency limited to two years or extended? ), there are convictions (to put it mildly) of people who do not share health policy, even if only for the fact that it is based on compulsion and not on responsible choice. To the repressions of intellectuals, opinion leaders, small and big stars of entertainment and social media , to those (more serious) of the highest representatives of the institutions, the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister, as well as politicians from almost all sides , the declarations of the Italian Bishops' Conference were recently joined.
The CEI affirmed, not explicitly, but in any case clear in its reference to those who do not share the government's health choices, that "these behaviors and speeches have expressed a vision of the human person and of social relationships very far from the Gospel". The affirmation deserves some reflections, even if these will lead us, with all due respect, to conclusions different from those expressed by the bishops.
Today it is not very fashionable to take the Gospels as a touchstone for examining and evaluating public policies, but doing so is instead a very useful thing, because in the Gospels, in addition of obviously the fundamental principles, those relating to the relationship between God and men , there are also some rules of practical wisdom and common sense concerning human relationships, relating not only to private life, but also to public life. One of the worst services that can be done both to those who wrote them and to the one who is the protagonist, is to consider the Gospels as a set of ideal, very abstract statements, which contain "heroic" rules, made for moral supermen and which are therefore destined to be set aside in everyday private and public life.
Not so much from the general statements expressed by Jesus, which often according to rabbinic usage are only paradoxes, made to make listeners reflect ("whoever does not hate his father is not worthy of me"), but above all from the parables he narrated and in fact, from the episodes of his life emerge a series of "pearls of wisdom", some of which concern in particular the way in which in private and public life one should face illness and above all the fear of illness. Here, too, a premise must be made: with all due respect to "traditionalist" scholars, I personally think that we can better understand the stories about Jesus' life and his relationship with illness if we give up believing that he possessed a sort of "superpower", and was able to physically heal with a touch of the hand or with a breath. From this point of view the Gospels are more like novels than chronicles, and in their text they try to express in an "imaginative" way the reality, indescribable in words, of a man not different from all the others – except in sin, as it is used to say – in which the Word of God was incarnated.
Epidemics have always existed and unfortunately always will exist: one of the great virtues of Western civilization is that it has created modern medicine, thanks to the principles and techniques of which millions of people around the world have been snatched from a premature and often full end. of suffering. In the ancient Mediterranean world certain diseases had become endemic and always smoldered "under the ashes", ready to explode when nature or human behavior created even a small triggering cause. To combat these diseases, ancient societies had developed a series of preventive rules, generally derived from common sense, which had to serve to "monitor" in concrete cases the possible rekindling (or spread) of an epidemic disease, trying to stop the possible spread of infections.
The link between medical rules and religious ones that was typical of all ancient societies also meant that their application was left above all to the priests of the various cults, and the same alternative between state of health and state of illness was described in religious terms. as the alternative as "state of purity" in the first case and "state of impurity" in the second. With the passage of time, however, what were originally only common sense preventive rules aimed at preventing the healthy from getting sick tended to be applied not only mechanically, but in an increasingly oppressive way even beyond the original justifications: this a partly because of the excessive scruple and zeal of the priests, partly because of the human tendency to increase one's power, sometimes even for not very noble reasons. This had led to automatically including in the category of "impure" people who, on the basis of common sense, could very well have considered themselves not at risk of contracting the disease, with the consequence that such people had to submit to the strict rules that came up to to exclude them from social life.
This was, for example, the situation of the treatment and prevention of leprosy in first-century Palestine. Leprosy in the strict sense spread in waves and unfortunately it was difficult to cure, but beyond that there was an important social problem, that of all people who had only small skin alterations (eczema, psoriasis, etc.) that according to the rules of book that we call Leviticus (chapters 13 and 14) were considered in a preventive way as lepers, and were essentially excluded from all human contact and placed on the margins of society. Reading the famous episode recounted in the Gospel of Mark (chap. 1, vv. 40-44) in which Jesus heals one of these "lepers" and, instructing him not to say anything, invites him to present himself to the priests so that they declare the lack of its "impurity", we can reasonably assume that we are facing the case of a person who had been expelled from the community and forced to wear special clothes only because of some minor skin disease, a case in which a judgment of common sense would have almost certainly ruled out a risk of contagion of actual leprosy.
If read in this perspective (as said with all respect for traditionalists) the miracle of Jesus is transformed from a physical event (modification of the body situation) into something perhaps even more important: the modification of mentality, of the way in which to confront with diseases and epidemics, and in a certain sense it represents an invitation to return to the proper meaning of many rules, which originated as prescriptions of common sense, were applied with the presumption (in the etymological sense of pre-supposing) to consider them absolute, almost competing to fulfill (often only in theory) their prescriptions in the most restrictive way possible. In this sense, the invitation to priests to declare the leper "pure" sounds like an invitation to return to the original common sense in applying the rules of prevention of leprosy: "I did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it".
I know that I have overlooked the fundamental meaning of the episode (and this time all the scholars of the Gospel excuse me) which is that of liberation from sin, expressed by the condition of impurity, but as said my speech is limited to considering the principles relating to civil life that can be derived from it. In this sense, for decades some scholars, for example the Irish transplanted to America JD Crossan (b.1934), relying on cultural anthropology research related to diseases, have distinguished between physical illness in the strict sense ( disease ) and discomfort ( illness ) individual and social caused by the first, and they affirmed that the miracles of Jesus did not so much cure the first, but rather taught how to deal with it by healing the second instead, and healed it by indicating the way to follow, that of the continuous verification of one's positions and respect for the personal situation of others, a road devoid of excesses of zeal and devoid of preconceptions, if we want a "liberal" road.
In a recent interview, former minister Antonio Martino said that "The Eternal Father is the greatest liberal". If by liberalism we mean a humble attitude in fact (in words they all are), capable of learning from one's mistakes, always far from dogmas and excesses (health, but also economic – political) and always respectful of the choices of others when they concern personal life and do not impose anything on others, if by liberalism this is meant, then I believe that (that is, I have faith that) the master of Nazareth, the living incarnation of the Word of God, would have kindly said to him: "You are not very far from truth".
In these days, where one is shocked to hear "people of the street" in general mild and good invoke exemplary punishments on senseless villains who are opposed to vaccination restrictions, where government decisions are less and less democratically legitimized (prepared by a few and approved by the Parliament with votes of confidence when already in force for some time), and they seem to find no limits to their content and duration, only a change of mentality could solve the situation.
It would take a miracle capable of changing the way in which in our country the coronavirus disease has been faced from the beginning, a miracle capable of changing the mentality and putting an end to the social unease ( illness ) that it has created . But for the miracle to happen (and in this I believe that no dogmatist can disagree) the faith and commitment of those who receive it are required. Jesus tells the leper to present to the priests the offer prescribed for his purification as a "witness to them": the miracle is therefore a gift, but also a challenge, a challenge to believe that a wrong mentality that leads to overlook to the personality of others and leads to marginalization of the healthy and not to cure the sick, we must and can change.
The Gospel passage does not tell us how the thing ended, that is, whether the "leper" probably suffering only from eczema, was considered "pure" or not, and therefore readmitted or not into the social community by the priests, and in this way it seems to tell us that the gift and the challenge brought by the miracle are always before each of us. A challenge that should lead everyone, even the man in the street, but mainly those who govern us and those (lay people or ecclesiastics) who contribute to forming public opinion to take the principles of the Gospel, before being a yardstick of judgment of the choices of others, as a guide for their way of behaving and as a criterion on the basis of which to adopt for their own decisions. Even if considered only from the human point of view, as principles of social and public ethics, they would make it possible to take many steps forward both in better dealing with the pandemic ( disease ) and in putting an end to a social unease ( illness ) that risks dragging on. for a long time to come, with incalculable damage to the physical and moral health of all Italians.
The post Bishops far from the Gospel, not no-vax: when Jesus "healed" the leper appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/i-vescovi-lontani-dal-vangelo-non-i-no-vax-quando-gesu-guari-il-lebbroso/ on Sat, 27 Nov 2021 03:49:00 +0000.