Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an

encounter with Christ and his church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's word where it is most needed.

Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Please be with you. Friends, we continue reading from the marvelous Gospel of Mark.

We're still in Chapter 1 as we make our way through it.

And this is that marvelous passage about Jesus curing a leper.

Listen, a leopard came to Jesus and kneeling down, begged him and said,

if you wish, you can make me clean. Move with pity, he stretched out his hand,

touched him and said,

I do will it, be made clean.

The leprosy left him immediately and he was made clean.

Stayed so deeply in the imaginations of the first Christians, these moments of healing.

It's one of the clearest things we know about Jesus, is that he engaged in this kind of work,

and they're so vividly remembered and so vividly told in the

Gospels. What do we make of this? Well kind of looking at it from from three angles

now. The first one is reaching out to the leper. I mentioned

last week how the church as the mystical body of Jesus is the continuation of Jesus work and presence down through the ages.

We do what he did.

So last week we heard about praying and about evangelizing and caring for the poor.

That's what Jesus does.

But now in this specific case, he reaches out to a leper.

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