30 June 2023 - Martyrs of the Church in Rome - Friday of the 12th week in Ordinary Time - Matthew 8:1-4

    The fifth thru seventh chapters of Matthew’s Gospel contains the Sermon on the Mount, a long discourse of Jesus’ teachings that include the Beatitudes and the Lord’s prayer.  Right after the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew records a series of miracles and healings, demonstrating the authority of Jesus’ teachings. That is the context in which we hear Jesus healing the leper in today’s Gospel.

      When I read this story of the leper, I thought of the Louisiana Leper Home located on the banks of the Mississippi River, founded in 1894 in Carville, Louisiana on the site of an abandoned sugar plantation. I remember the first year I was a priest at St Richard, I was planning a funeral with the sons of an elderly parishioner who had passed away. We had picked out all of the readings, choosing traditional ones from the funeral planning guide, when we started talking about their father’s life. The sons mentioned that their dad had been an occupational therapist. The thing he was most proud of in his career was serving several years as a young man working with the lepers in Carville. I told the sons that we should pass over the Gospel reading we had originally chosen and pick this Gospel reading from Matthew about the healing of the leper. Their father had been devoted to helping the lepers function as best they could through the effects of this terrible disease. The sons thought that this Gospel of the healing of the leper reflected their dad in a wonderful way. 

       As we hear about this miracle of healing, we commemorate the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome. In the early years of the Church, a large Jewish population grew in Rome. Due to infighting between devout Jews and the Jews who also converted to the Way of Jesus, the Emperor Claudius expelled all of the Jews from Rome in 50 AD. After Claudius’ death a few years later, the Jews started returning to Rome. After much of the city of Rome burned down under the reign of the Emperor Nero in 64 AD, Nero put much of the blame on the Christians, putting many of them to death. Condemned to death by the Roman senate, Nero himself took his own life a few years later.

      May the example of those First Martyrs of the Church of Rome give us courage on our own journey. Pope Francis proclaimed: “We must not be afraid of being Christian and living as Christians! We must have this courage to go and proclaim the Risen Christ, for he is our peace; he made peace with his love, with his forgiveness, with his blood and with his mercy.”