TRADING PLACES

In the 1983 movie, “Trading Places” an upper-crust executive Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) and down-and-out hustler Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) are the subjects of a bet by successful brokers Mortimer and Randolph Duke. The bet was a social experiment on how, through a moment of misfortune, framing Winthorpe for a crime he didn't commit, would turn him into a violent social outcast and by installing the street-smart Valentine in Winthorpe’s former position, would lift the street-smart Valentine into a polished business socialite.

Jesus stretched out his hand, touched [the leper], and said, “I do will it.  Be made clean.” (Lk 5:13) The Torah taught that a leper was to be excluded from the community’s worship (Lv 22:4). Leprosy made a person ritually impure and so it was for anyone who made physical contact with them. Jesus effectively traded places with this man. He tells the leper to “Go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed; that will be proof for them.” (Lk 5:14) restoring him to the community and Jesus would be considered ritually impure and outside the community. 

Our passage from the first letter of John speaks eloquently and passionately about God’s love without sentimentalizing or romanticizing it. The writer talks of it in terms of water, spirit, and blood. Because in the end, God’s love is revealed through a great miscarriage of justice resulting in a death, accompanied by terrible physical and psychological pain, that reveals the depth of His love made manifest in Jesus Christ.[1]

Unlike the Duke brother’s social experiment bet, Jesus demands that we reach out to people who were regarded as unworthy participants in the community’s worship: public sinners, nonobservant people, and all the lepers of our time. To find ways to reach out to those on the margins of the community, because this is the mission of the Church, this is what makes visible the incarnation of God’s love. Jesus, who possesses us, is the means by which God touches the lives of people excluded from the community, enabling them to experience the love of God.

Do you believe Jesus is able and willing to reach out his hand to touch you, to heal you, to possess you and you to possess Him? (1 Jn 5:12) How would we know someone possesses the Son?  Mass attendance may be an indication. Maybe an active and visible prayer life is a good indication. Pope Francis offers this suggestion in Frutelli Tutti, “Each day offers us a new opportunity, a new possibility … to take an active part in renewing and supporting our troubled societies. A great opportunity to express our innate sense of fraternity, to be Good Samaritans who bear the pain of other people’s troubles rather than fomenting greater hatred and resentment. We need only to have a pure and simple desire to be a people, a community, constant and tireless in the effort to include, integrate and lift up the fallen.” (FT 77) Let us foster what is good and empathetically place ourselves at the service of God’s love

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[1] Weekday HomilyHelps, Exegesis by Leslie J. Hoppe, OFM.