Reading: Mark 1: 40-45 I just want to offer some background to this story in Mark`s Gospel which may be helpful to thinking our way through the event.There are three areas I want to present and try to link them together.The first one is - The body very much features in this story. We often hear people speaking of The Body Politic, meaning society in its largest sense - a macrocosm of society. We should note that our bodies are symbolic of society and common to all of us � our bodies are a microcosm of that larger or macro society. Symbols based on the body have been and are still used to express different social experiences. Peoples of all nationalities have adorned their bodies for different purposes.

• Body painting and symbolic markings at times of war or for celebratory occasions.
  
• Sometimes permanent body incisions or identifying tribal markings are used.
  
• The adornment of the body with feathers or the like which may symbolize authority.
  
• Look at any important sporting occasion to see body painting or adornment by ardent spectators.
  
• In this day and age expensive surgery is common place to enhance or prolong one`s body image.

  
  

I`ll risk a question here - What do you think is the current popular method to express through the body your place or attachment to your position in society? (Tattooing)

But whilst Mark`s gospel story is about healing the body it is much more than that.

The second area is to remember, historically, the tiny country of Israel had had its fair share of political upheaval and military action with the effect upon its culture, religious life and changing boundaries.

At a macro level its leadership had become intensely concerned about the danger of being over run by a more powerful culture, and so was very boundary conscious. Perhaps as we listen to or see the news graphics in Israel and Palestine today we note the constant argument and violence literally over boundaries.

As a consequence, that leadership placed an emphasis on social boundary protection at the micro or personal level, symbolized by bodily boundary protection, leading to massive priestly legislation of bodily boundaries . So if you read the regulations imposed upon people with leprosy in Leviticus 13 and 14, it raises the boundary problems of clothing, hair, the walls of houses and much more - anything that could be ritually unclean.

So we can note the interaction of the body and society as this Gospel story speaks of Jesus the healer.

The sufferer in our story is mourning for his lost life because in an honour-and-shame society, in the eyes of others he is now quite dead.

Modern scholars inform us that both the Hebrew and Greek words for the disease in this story have been incorrectly translated as leprosy. (Whilst leprosy may have been present the responsible bacillus was not identified until 1868.) We are not talking about leprosy but rather a severe skin disease such as eczema or psoriasis. In other words holes or orifices that appear in the body where holes were not meant to be - that is, unnatural disfigurement of the body, - these persons with skin diseases did not necessarily threaten infection or epidemic, but because of the symbolic contamination threatening, in microcosm, the integrity of society.

The third area is - We should also note the difference between disease and illness.

Disease is something wrong with our body. We go to the doctor and expect it to be fixed. In this day and age we expect to be given a pill and all will be instantly OK. But this does not take into account the entire social dimension of the disfunction - our family, our employment and many other responsibilities.

Illness on the other hand takes on a wider view, - the psychosocial experience - the reactions of the disease on our personal, social and cultural wellbeing.

So what about if the disease could not be cured but the illness could be?

John Crossan presumes Jesus did not and could not cure that disease, but he could heal the man`s illness by refusing to accept the disease`s ritual uncleanliness and social ostracism. In doing so Jesus` action forced others either to reject him from the community, or accept the leper within it as well.

So Jesus becomes a boundary breaker and a subversive to the established procedures of society.

We do read in the story what seems to be an intense effort to bring Jesus in line with traditional biblical and legal practice and to show him as an observant Jew by demanding that the (`leper`) sufferer show himself to the priest and make an offering as prescribed by Moses.

Crossan suggests the visit to the temple is not to be an observance of the law, but rather Mark sees the suffering man to be a confrontationist against the priestly rejection. A better translation is `to be a witness against them.` As Kerry suggested earlier, Jesus tells him to act for his own well being and for others.

So what is the miracle here? It is that Jesus is prepared to respond to the request of the man with the illness and to challenge the priestly rules that ostracized and placed him outside the boundaries which they had set up.

So now, to move 2000 years to the present age and to the images shown on the screen - The Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia.. Catherine Hamlin and her husband went to Ethiopia in the 1950s for a limited period of 3 months. Although her husband has since died Catherine is still there. I think she is in her late 80s. The Fistula Hospital was established some years later and now services several thousand women each year as well as being a training Hospital.

If you are not aware of how terribly these women with the fistula ailment are affected by their condition, a few enquiries will reveal their plight.

Without treatment the women seeking help for their condition, would be excluded from their village, often deserted by their husbands and left in total isolation and despair. Their appalling physical condition becomes an illness with social and cultural repercussions. The cure is delicate surgery developed by Dr Hamlin. The story of the Fistula Hospital gives us a wonderful combination of curing both a physical condition and a psychosocial experience of acceptance and ongoing caring after the experience of total rejection.

So now we invite you, in quiet reflection to focus on the screen and on the music, as well as the responses from women who have attended the hospital.