In today’s world, we can all use help with our prayer life. Without prayer, we do not have a relationship with God, the very thing we are all created for. And yet many of us fail to pray for various reasons. Some find it difficult or may not think it necessary, while others struggle to fit it in their busy schedules. The leper in today’s Gospel passage reminds us of two key elements in a healthy life of prayer: confidence and humility.
The first thing to note is that this leper has no doubt that Christ can cure him. He says to the Lord, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” It is often hard for us to have so much confidence. Our secular culture is constantly sidelining God. This tends to make us think that we can solve all our problems ourselves, through science, technology, or hard work. We can do it all, it seems.
It is considered admirable to try to be self-contained and to manage all by ourselves without help from anyone. But if we think that, then we don’t really have faith in God; if God is irrelevant, he’s not much of a God, after all. The leper recognised the reality of sin and evil, and the need of God’s grace to overcome them. And so he came out of his isolated and self-destructive bubble of self-sufficiency and exercised his faith.
The second thing to note is that the leper also recognises that he has no right to demand a cure. He doesn’t act like a spoiled child and say, “Cure me!”. Instead he says with humility, “If you wish …” It’s as if he were saying, “You know what’s best; if curing me will give you glory, please do so, but if not, I will still believe and trust in you.” Only the humble heart can tap into the roaring stream of mercy that flows from Christ’s Sacred Heart, mercy which not only cured the leprosy, but touched the leper, something no one else had done since the disease began. If our prayer weaves together confidence and humility, God will be able to do wonders in us as well.
There is another detail about this encounter that we should not overlook. St Mark tells us that the leper “came to Jesus”, close enough to kneel in front of him. Why would he do that when everyone knew that the law required him to keep his distance? Something about Jesus must have inspired confidence. The leper must have sensed that Jesus would not be repulsed by his disgusting disease. And the leper was right. Jesus smiled at him, as we can tell from his choice of words (“I do will it.”), touched him, and healed him — something no one else could do or would do.
Do we have that kind of confidence in Jesus? Do we believe that he can and he will help us? He has chosen to stay as close to us as he was to that leper, by giving us the Eucharist. In every Catholic Church, Jesus is truly present in the Tabernacle, body, blood, soul, and divinity. There, Jesus is calling to us as he called out to the heart of this leper. He won’t force his way into our hearts, but he is always inviting us into his heart. He is inviting us to come up close to him, kneel down in front of him, and pour out all our miseries, hardships, confusions, and needs, praying the same beautiful prayer that this leper prayed: “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean, you can give me strength, you can give me light.”
And when we do that, do you think he will be less generous with us than he was with this poor leper?
