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Commentary on the Gospel for Saturday, January 11, 2025
The texts from today’s Mass, beginning with the Collect prayer, emphasize the central event: God became human flesh. As the First Letter of John says, “And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.” The post-Communion prayer asks that the faithful receive both the present and future help of God’s love, sustained by the comfort we need in temporal matters.
**This comfort is precisely what the leper in Luke’s account—gravely ill and “covered with leprosy”—humbly and trustingly asks of Jesus: “Lord, if You are willing…” We can imagine the leper’s overwhelming emotion and joy as Jesus touches him and responds, “I am willing. Be cleansed.”
To some extent, we all need the comfort of temporal things at various points in our lives, even as baptized Christians. Whether in sickness, grief, financial or job insecurity, we are always in need of healing and the Lord’s mercy to restore us. We also need healing for spiritual ailments—resentment, envy, deep-seated habits, or addictions that harm us. Physical leprosy, with its disfigurement, isolation, and stigma, serves as a metaphor for spiritual fragility, weakness, or moral poverty.
**The lives of the saints remind us that no matter how heroically they practiced virtue, they always saw themselves as sinners, poor and in need of forgiveness and healing. We all need to ask to be healed, even of those things we may not recognize as wounds. We must seek the compassionate and redemptive gaze of Jesus and say with faith, “Lord, if You are willing, You can heal me.” Perhaps—if our request is made with faith—we too will hear and experience that beautiful and joyful response. We may even feel, in some way, that Jesus touches us and says, “I am willing. Be cleansed.”