The mystery of the sin
January 11, in Christmas Time
Now there was a man full of leprosy in one of the towns where he was; and when he saw Jesus, he fell prostrate, pleaded with him, and said, “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.” Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I do will it. Be made clean.” And the leprosy left him immediately. Then he ordered him not to tell anyone, but “Go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed; that will be proof for them.” The report about him spread all the more, and great crowds assembled to listen to him and to be cured of their ailments, but he would withdraw to deserted places to pray. Lk 5,12-16
In the Tuscany country of Mugello it is said that Leonardo from Vinci needed more than twenty years to paint the famous Cenacolo, which represents the last dinner of Jesus with the apostles. It seems that at the beginning of the work he needed a lot of time because of the searching of the person who could be the model to depict Jesus. Then he found a young man, with a nice face and bearing a good expression and a clear glance and he was able to start the work. Leonardo depicted Jesus and the last eleven apostles, then he interrupted the activity because he was not able to find a person bearing an expression sufficiently grim and elusive who could be the model to depict Judas. Eventually he found an adequate person and he resumed to work to complete his wonderful Cenacolo. While he was representing Judas, the man who was in front of him started to cry. Leonardo asked him: “Why are you crying?” He answered: “Because I am the same person who twenty years ago was for you the model of Jesus”. “Really? Why are you in this way?” And he confirmed: “It was because of the sin!”.Perhaps this story is one of the several Tuscany legends of which my grandmother Rita was very fond and she used to narrate to her scholars, however it well describes the effect of the sin over the man. The sin is like the leprosy: it destroys the face of a person to the point to make him unrecognizable. The today gospel shows a leprous who asks to Jesus to heal him and Jesus does it. It is a miracle which locates us between the Christmas period, during which we meditated the mystery of the incarnation and the Lent, which will be over with the death and the resurrection of Jesus. It speaks about the mankind, which needs to be liberated from the leprosy of the sin. This slavery, which is intrinsically linked to the nature of the man, remains a mystery. It is a mystery the fact that the man is satisfied by the false concept of freedom which is hidden in the “transgression”. It is a mystery that some young persons, by night time, are satisfied to destroy and to deface the city, as the several behaviors of aggression against themselves and the others, which fill the pages of the newspapers, are also a mystery. The sin, although Jesus has won it on the cross, remains in the world and it is a mystery, as the leprosy which, sly and destructive, defaces the human countenances and make the persons unrecognizable.