40 And
there came a leper to him, beseeching him, and kneeling down to him, and saying
unto him, If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.
41 And
Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith
unto him, I will; be thou clean.
42 And as
soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was
cleansed.
43 And he
straitly charged him, and forthwith sent him away;
44 And
saith unto him, See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way, shew thyself
to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded,
for a testimony unto them.
45 But he
went out, and began to publish it much, and to blaze abroad the matter,
insomuch that Jesus could no more openly enter into the city, but was without
in desert places: and they came to him from every quarter. (Mark 1:40-45)
In this story a leper comes
to Jesus, asking to be cleansed.
The way the leper risks the
scorn and disgust of the people around him in order to get to Jesus tells us a
little something about how people might feel coming to Jesus among Saints. They might worry about not fitting in,
about not being as good. They
brave rejection of society on the chance that they might be helped. It tells us a little about how
determined one has to be to come to Christ when the environment is disapproving
or forbidding. But we see it is
all worth it.
That the leper asks to be
cleansed is instructive to us.
The leper had spent much time calling, “Unclean! Unclean!” to warn people away from him;
it was the dearest wish of his life to someday be clean again. His request to be cleansed can make us
remember that without Jesus, we would all be unclean forever, outcasts from the
presence of God, and that the hope to be cleansed of our sins and remain clean
is one of the most important desires of our lives.
I love that the man knows
that Jesus CAN cleanse him. The
question is WILL Jesus choose to cleanse him? When we suffer disease, this idea of divine prerogative can
help us in our faith. God
definitely CAN heal us. The
question is always WILL He? If He
chooses not to, can we maintain our trust in Him?
The neat thing to me is that
Jesus’s compassion for the man caused him to touch him, knowing that he had not had normal human contact ever
since he’d been diagnosed with the disease. It is a compassionate act, and a healing one; the leprosy leaves
the man. It is a teaching miracle,
meant to show Jesus’ power to cleanse and purify even the most virulent of
diseases, and is meant to help people learn to believe Jesus can cleanse from
terrible sins as well. Just as
Jesus’ touch cleanses physically, it cleanses spiritually. Jesus could not be
contaminated. Rather, He could
sanctify.
In a different reading of
this story, Jesus is not moved with compassion, but with indignation by the leper.
This is jarring, but we can understand why Jesus might be indignant—the
leper is endangering others, risking contaminating others by violating the
societal quarantine restrictions in the Law of Moses. Healing the leper also saved others from being exposed to
the same infection. We can then
understand why Jesus so carefully charged the man to go show himself to the
priests. The man broke the Law by
coming in the city, so he was to demonstrate his healing by now keeping the Law and fulfilling all the
forms set down for achieving reestablishment into society. The forms made it official.
Jesus had technically gone
beyond the Law of Moses to touch the man, and perhaps He asked the man to keep
quiet that He had touched him. In
spite of this, the man blazed the matter abroad and Jesus could no longer
openly enter the city. Perhaps
Jesus had to go through a form of quarantine by staying out of the city for a
while. Still, people knew He
hadn’t really been contaminated by leprosy, so they followed Him out into the
desert places where He stayed. One
could say that from a certain point of view, Jesus took on Himself the penalty
of the leper for a time, and this anticipated and testified of how Jesus would,
in His atoning sacrifice, take upon Himself the pains and sickness and
suffering of His people.
Jesus’ instruction to the
man to not tell anyone what was done have always seemed to me to be odd. He does this over and over when He does
miracles, and so often He was disobeyed.
We know later He wanted His disciples to preach the gospel to every
creature, so you’d think stories of miracles done would help that cause. Sometimes it almost seems as if
requiring silence was a ploy to get more
attention in expectation that they would do the opposite. But seeing it this way doesn’t
work because we must believe Jesus
spoke the truth, so we must suppose that somehow Jesus felt the cause of the
gospel would not be helped by spreading
stories of miracles. How and
why? In thinking about it, I
thought of a few problems that Jesus was seeking to prevent.
First, Jesus was trying to
avoid self-aggrandizement. He gave
the glory to His Father, and He focused on His mission of saving souls. He wanted people to believe in His
saving power, but He didn’t want the wrong kind of publicity, and He didn’t
want notoriety based on sensation.
He wasn’t a circus or an entertainer, and the spreading of miracle
stories would have drawn people eager for sensation. (We might ask ourselves, “In ways can I bring others to
Jesus without drawing undue attention to myself?”)
Second, He needed freedom to
move from town to town. Preaching
to a town at a time meant the numbers were controllable and He could be fairly
confident of reaching just about everyone, and the weak or hesitant wouldn’t
have to fight crowds to reach Him.
In short, Jesus was
concerned that spreading the news would attract the wrong kinds of people and
end up creating too great an obstacle for the right kinds of people to reach
Him (“Right kinds” meaning “humble and repentant”). We see later that He was justified in this concern; stories
after this point speak of people who had to be pushy, or yell loudly, or tear
up roofs of other people’s houses, or climb trees, or just squirm in close
enough to touch His garment, and we can only dream of the people who might have
been saved if they hadn’t been intimidated or discouraged by the huge
press. We see the huge crowds
alarmed the Jewish leaders and they felt they had to keep an eye on Him and
check His power with the people in any way they could, and He had to spend
valuable preaching time parrying their attacks.
It is interesting that Jesus
commanded the former leper to go show himself to the priests “as a testimony to
them,” even as He commands him not to tell anyone else. It sounds like Jesus privileges action
and fulfilling the Law over telling of miraculous stories of change.
The Law of Moses gave
directions regarding how the priests were to diagnose skin diseases and declare
someone cleansed or not, but it didn’t give any power to actually heal. It was diagnostic, not
therapeutic. But having provisions
for declaring a person clean shows that the Law had been given in implicit
faith that the Messiah would come and heal people and healing was
possible. Who knows how long it
had been since the leper-cleansing testimony provisions of the Law had been
performed? It would tell the
priests in an unmistakable way that the Law was being fulfilled, even in
little-known points, even in anticipatory senses. They would see there was a healing power at work in the
land, greater than the power of mortal priests.
Sadly, we have no mention
that the leper went to the priests as a living testimony as instructed. It is possible that he felt he could
skip this step, reasoning that he
knew he was healed so there was no point in being ceremonially declared
healed. There’s a lesson that is
suggested by this speculation—it is important to go through all the forms
required for repentance because they demonstrate our full willingness to submit
to God. Talk is cheap, and
obedience is not.
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