Thursday of the First Week in Ordinary Time, Memorial of St. Anthony, abbot
(Mark 1:40-45)
Fifty years or so ago, a journalist named John Howard Griffin performed a shocking social experiment. He had his skin dyed black and toured the South to see how people would treat him. Predictably, he had trouble finding a public restroom that he could use. In general, wherever white men had easy access, he was treated with suspicion. We might say that the insider became an outsider. Eventually, Griffin published the account of his travails in the book Black Like Me which helped soften white resistance to the American civil rights movement.
In the gospel today we witness a similar event and its reverse. After Jesus cures the leper, his fame as a healer spreads so widely that he cannot any town without being overwhelmed with petitions for healing. He is the insider who becomes an outsider. Ironically, the cured leper who by law had to remain outside populated areas but now can enter any town freely. Thus, the outsider becomes an insider.
St. Anthony takes after Christ in making himself an outsider. He left his family and community to become a hermit in the desert. In a sense this is the vocation of all Christians. We should never get too comfortable in the world. Its many distortions may lure us into sin. Rather, we make ourselves outsiders by an intentional option to love all and to find our treasure in the legacy of Christ.
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