Like Real People (2)

Jesus understood lepers too. We read:

A man with leprosy came and knelt in front of Jesus, begging to be healed. "If you want to, you can make me well again," he said.

Moved with pity, Jesus touched him. "I want to," he said. "Be healed!" Instantly the leprosy disappeared--the man was healed. Then Jesus sent him on his way and told him sternly, "Go right over to the priest and let him examine you. Don't talk to anyone along the way. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy, so everyone will have proof of your healing."

But as the man went on his way, he spread the news, telling everyone what had happened to him. As a result, such crowds soon surrounded Jesus that he couldn't enter a town anywhere publicly. He had to stay out in the secluded places, and people from everywhere came to him there. (Mark 1:40-45)

We’re not sure what sort of "leprosy" the man of Mark 1:40 had. There were several skin diseases all classified under the same label. It hardly matters, though, because this man's problem was less the disease than the rejection that came with it. He'd been banished by law from human society, from home, family, friends, even places of worship. The Jewish rabbis of the time considered people like this to be the living dead and believed that any miraculous cure of them was a "resurrection."

How this leper got through security and entered the town is anyone's guess, but suddenly there he was, loathsome in appearance, on his knees before the Messiah-King, begging for healing. You have to admire his courage, because he was not supposed to be there, and he knew it. The one thing that drove him was recognition that no one but Jesus could heal him. The Master was his only hope of ever finding his way back to life again. There wasn't much for him to lose, even if he got a beating for his audacity.

Jesus was moved, but with what? Here the ancient manuscripts disagree. Some read that he was angered, others that he had compassion. It seems so obvious that the Master would have compassion that one wonders why we would even consider another option. But the scholars ask us what would cause a scribe seeing a manuscript with the word "compassion" in it to change it to "anger." They argue that “anger” was probably in the original.

I'm inclined to go with "anger," not just because the commentators tend to agree with me (or me with them) that the manuscript evidence supports it, but because it makes sense. This was a disease no one deserved, no matter how far from God they'd traveled. It removed them from everything that made them human - acceptance, a future, relationships, the integrity of their own bodies. It counseled them just to go off and die because they were as good as dead anyway.

If we have even an inkling that a disease like this was the Devil's work, we should have no trouble grasping the fact that the Holy Son of God, who came to earth to save us, was angry. There's no contradiction with compassion here. The two emotions are sides of the same coin. One merges into the other. Unless he'd been angry at the monstrosity of a human condition that allowed the plight of this leper to happen, Jesus could not have expressed the compassion that shone through his actions.

He reached out his hand and did the unthinkable, the impossible. He touched this wretched creature, a touch that burned with deep fury at all the forces of darkness, but was as gentle as the kiss of child. He put is own bare hand on the leprous man, skin to skin, absolute purity to utter corruption. The deed automatically made Jesus ceremonially unclean, himself now a reject too, at risk to catch the disease himself. Was there a hint here of the corruption he would one day bear for all of us?

For the leper the big question was whether or not Jesus was inclined to help him. "I am willing," The Master said. "Be clean." Then what we'd expect happened - the leper was instantly cured, the purity of the Messiah passing to the unclean one.

This leper today would have been described as a man with attitude. Not only had he broken all the rules by approaching Jesus in the first place, but now he ignored Jesus' instructions to get the healing recognized by priest and even the Master's very strict admonition that he tell nobody what had happened to him. Instead, there's every reason to assume that he by-passed the priest and started preaching the gospel far and wide, proclaiming the good news of the prophet with the healing touch.

Jesus had not protected himself from personal revulsion, ceremonial defilement nor the risk of acquiring a deadly disease. But he did try to shield his ministry by having those he healed keep a lid on their experience so as not to attract the wrong kind of attention. Scholars call this the "Messianic Secret," and write endless numbers of books on the topic. Yet there's nothing very complicated in the way Mark presents it - the Master sought to keep the news of his spectacular healings quiet, but the more he did so, the more his audacious patients blurted the news to the world.

Was it just the reality of healing that turned such formerly sick and depressed people into bold evangelists? Or was it the fact that Jesus, King though he may have been, was not afraid to touch them, to recognize something everyone else had forgotten - that they too were created in the image of God?

He made them believe again that they were real human beings.