This is Cardinal Francis George, and I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to reflect with Father Robert Baron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire.

Father Baron will challenge us to open our hearts to the Word on Fire, which is God's Word of Love for each of us.

If our hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us, clearly might speak with love about the one who is love.

The Archdiocese of Chicago through the generosity of Sacred Heart Parish in Linnica now presents the Word on Fire.

Peace be with you. Friends for a Jew of Biblical times, there was scarcely anything more frightening or repulsive than leprosy.

We can hear this if we look in the Biblical book of Leviticus.

In fact, I recommend you read Leviticus. It's a very interesting strange book. It's the kind of legal code of the ancient Jews.

And a passage from Leviticus is our first reading for this week. Let me read to you just a brief section of it.

The one who bears the sore of leprosy shall keep his garments rent and his head bear and shall muffle his beard and he shall cry out unclean, unclean.

As long as the sore is on him, he shall declare himself unclean since he is in fact unclean. He shall dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp.

You see how severe this prohibition is. If someone has leprosy, this disease of the skin, this disfiguring problem, they are excluded from the circle of Jewish society.

And I'll mind you, in an age prior to welfare, prior to unemployment insurance, prior to any kind of social safety net, to be excluded from the circle of the community was to be condemned to a kind of slow death.

Whatever physical suffering was involved in leprosy, and that was certainly true and real, far greater was the social suffering caused by this ostracization.

Why do we read from Leviticus today? Because in our gospel, Jesus confronts a leper. Jesus confronts one of these excluded marginalized people.

Friends, it's a sad fact, but a fact that very often human communities define themselves through ostracization, through scapegoating, through exclusion.

Look, we know who we are because we're not them. We know who we are because we've excluded the likes of them.

Jesus comes as the incarnation of the second person of the Blessed Trinity, which means Jesus comes as a representative of that divine communion, father, son, and spirit, that divine social circle, that does not define itself over and against.

That does not define itself by exclusion. And so when Jesus preaches and acts and ministers, he does so as an instantiation of this divine community.

What's the upshot of this? The upshot is that when Jesus comes, he moves like a magnet to the margins.

To include precisely those who have been excluded from the circle. Jesus goes to the sick, the lepros, the suffering, the sinner, the tax collector, the prostitute, all those who have been sent outside the social circle, those are the ones above all to whom Jesus goes.

Let's be fair about it too. Jesus eats and drinks with Pharisees as well, because look, from the standpoint of the sinner, the Pharisee is the outsider.

Jesus' ministry and task, look, is to draw into the circle, everyone that God loves.

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