Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

"A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down, begged him and said, 'If you wish, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched the leper, and said to him, 'I do will it. Be made clean.' The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean."

Welcome back to Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. Today is January 15th, 2026, Thursday of the First Week in Ordinary Time. Today we are joined by clinical psychologist Dr. Peter Malinoski, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts and host of our sister podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics.

I am so glad to be with you. We are talking about lepers and leprosy. Mark 1:40-42. This is the focus. It reads as follows. "A leper came to Jesus, and kneeling down, begged him and said, 'If you wish, you can make me clean.' Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched the leper, and said to him, 'I do will it. Be made clean.' The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean." Okay, we are addressing our inner lepers today. I often think of leprosy as like this visible manifestation of shame. I often think of shame and leprosy kind of along the same lines, analogously. And what happened when you were a leper back in these days is you were rejected. You were considered almost like a non-person. There could be no communication with you. Really there was this isolation. People protecting themselves against, you know, the fear that you would infect them. And this is what happens with our parts that are lepers, especially those that carry shame, are exiles that are shame bearers. And so for you exiles that feel like you're untouchable, unlovable, alienated, isolated, condemned and abandoned, let's take a look at how Jesus responds to this leper. First of all, the leper came up to him, which he shouldn't have done, because if he gets too close, he's going to make Jesus unclean.

That's the idea back in those days. Kneeled down, begged him, and said, "If you wish, you can make me clean." Moved with pity. All right, so let's go look at these words. "Moved with pity." This isn't a great translation here. Some translations will say things like, "deeply moved with compassion." If you go to the Greek, we're going to find that the noun here is splánkhna. My Greek isn't that good, but it's splánkhna, and the participle is actually what's used here in the original Greek, splánkhnastheus. And according to John Donahue and Daniel Harrington and their commentary, The Gospel of Mark from Sacra Pagina, they say that the root of the verb designates the seat of affective feeling and emotion. Our guts, and is often translated as heart. This is like the seat of the affective feeling. This is like the core of our feeling. This is what Jesus was moved by, his heart was moved by. And with that movement of his heart, he reached out and touched the leper. You don't do that. You don't do that. Normal people don't do that. He reached out. He touched the leper. He touched the leper and said to him, I do will it. Be made clean. Think of that. That's his approach to our inner lepers, too. To all of you exiles who have been treated as though you are lepers, this is the way Jesus reaches out to you.

I do will it. Be made clean. And then what happened? The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean. This wasn't some healing process. He didn't have to go to physical therapy. Blah blah blah. No. Boom, immediately. So the goal here is for you exiles to come into contact with the love of God in a way that you can tolerate it. Managers, this is so important. Your exiles are part of you. You will not be able to cut them off and abandon them and make them go away. That doesn't work like that. So together, right? This is the goal, but in a way that's tolerable for all parts, in a way that is cooperative and collaborative. That's what we're really looking for here in Souls and Hearts, here in this SFYIO podcast, in the Resilient Catholics Community. This is what we're focusing on, is how can all of our parts experience the love and compassion? How can all of our parts experience the love of God? The splánkhnan of our Lord Jesus Christ, the seat of his affective feeling, his guts moving towards us so that he reaches out to each of us, not just to the "acceptable" parts, but to all of us, all of our exiles.

Many of our parts carry distorted and untrue perceptions of who God is, and these are sometimes called God images. If you'd like to learn more about this concept, I'd recommend you check out our sister podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics episodes 23 through 29, which is linked in the description of today's show.

And with that, we'll draw this to a close by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.