Sixth Ordinary

Mark 1: 40 – 42

A leper came to Jesus, begging on his knees, “If you want to, you can cleanse me”. Deeply moved, Jesus put out his hand, touched him, and said, “I want to. Be clean”. Then and there the leprosy was gone, his skin smooth and healthy.

“I just want my $1500 dollars,” the man complained to the agent answering the compliance hotline. “It’s reimbursement for my petrol and mileage. The clinics I service are refusing to pay even though it’s in my contract, and now they’re calling into question my job performance. It just doesn’t seem fair that I can’t get my measly 1,500 bucks when the doctors collect their money, and they don’t even show up at the clinics.”

“Excuse me, what did you just say?” the agent asked.

“I want my $1,500?”

“No, after that – about doctors collecting pay and not showing up.”

Thus, another ghost-payrolling scandal was uncovered. The doctors were fired for accepting $120,000 salaries to head clinics they never visited, and the unwitting whistle-blower got his $1,500.

For most whistle-blowers it’s not that easy. They are lepers in corporate society. Once they are identified as snitches, they are abused, ridiculed, and ignored. People will say they want to root out cronyism and incompetence, but when someone takes measures to do so, everyone backs away. Why? Shear fear.

The sad thing for those so willing to live outside the truth is that they always seem to end up worse off than if they had taken the risk to set things right. Truth is meant to be told – even Jesus couldn’t stop the leper he cured from spreading the good news.