We all know what it means for something to be contagious. Someone in the family catches a cold, and pretty soon everybody is trying not to catch it. We keep our distance. We wash our hands. We don’t want whatever that person has to spread to us.

There is an interesting background to the mindset of today’s Gospel. In the Old Testament there were careful rules concerning what was clean and unclean. Contact with some diseases, bodily fluids, or the dead could render a person ritually unclean. The idea underlying these purity rules was clear: uncleanness could spread through contact, and so boundaries were maintained between what was unclean and what was holy. But when Jesus arrives, something remarkable begins to happen.

Simon’s mother-in-law is suffering from a severe fever. Jesus stands over her and rebukes the fever, and immediately she is restored. Then, at sunset, people begin bringing the sick to Jesus. Luke tells us that Jesus “laid his hands on each of them and cured them” (Lk 4:40). Jesus does not keep his distance. He gets close. And as Luke’s Gospel continues, this pattern becomes even more striking. Jesus will reach out and touch a leper. He will allow a woman suffering from hemorrhages to touch him. He will approach the dead. But something has changed.

The leper does not make Jesus unclean. Jesus makes the leper clean. The sick do not infect Him with their sickness, rather Jesus communicates healing to them. Death is overcome and life restored by Jesus. There is no contagion. In Jesus, holiness has become contagious flows into the world as healing, forgiveness, mercy, restoration, life. And perhaps that gives us another way of thinking about what it means to be a Christian.

Sometimes we can become rather concerned about what we might “catch” from the world around us. And certainly there are things from which we should protect ourselves. But Christians cannot spend their lives simply trying to remain safely separated from everything that is broken. Jesus didn’t. Jesus moved toward brokenness, the sick, sinners, the rejected, people carrying the burden of sin, toward people whom everyone else had decided were better kept at a distance. And instead of their brokenness changing Jesus, his holiness began changing them.

That raises an interesting question for us. What happens when someone comes into contact with me? When I encounter someone who is angry, does their anger infect me so that I become angry too? Or does something of Christ’s peace begin to spread? When I encounter someone who is lonely, do I keep my distance or does Christ’s compassion begin to spread? When someone has failed badly, do I add to the shame or does something of Christ’s mercy reach that person through me? When someone has lost hope, do I join in the despair or does the hope Christ has given me become contagious?

At the end of today’s Gospel, the people of Capernaum want Jesus to stay with them. But Jesus tells them: “To the other towns also I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God, because for this purpose I have been sent.” (Lk 4:43) Jesus will not allow the Kingdom to remain safely contained in Capernaum.

Holiness goes outward so that the Kingdom grows. And that is still the Church’s mission. The Church has long spoken of evangelization happening through the ordinary witness of Christian lives: through the way we love, care for those in need, treat our neighbors and strangers, and live our faith in ordinary circumstances.

Today, we will receive Christ in the Eucharist. The same Christ who laid his hands upon the sick, approached the outcast, forgave sinners, and brought hope to people who had lost it will come to us. And then we will leave this church carrying Christ into the world. So perhaps today’s Gospel invites us to worry a little less about what we might catch from the world and ask a different question: what might the world catch from us?

May the holiness of Christ become contagious through us. May we infect the world with Christ’s compassion, mercy, peace, hope and love.

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Image credit: Created in Dalle-3 | Aug 31, 2026 | prompt: image with vibrant colors that portrays Jesus’s holiness going outward for healing, casting out spirits, and such.| CC-BY-NC