I was reading in Mark about Jesus healing the leper. The leper asked “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Why would Jesus not be willing? Because he would have to touch the leper! Touching a leper meant that Jesus would be quarantined for 14 days outside the city, and be ceremonially unclean as well.
We know that Jesus could heal from a distance. He could have said, “be healed,” and never had to touch the man. But the Bible tells us that Jesus was “filled with compassion” for him. The leper didn’t just need physical healing – he needed emotional and spiritual healing as well. He had been a social/spiritual outcast for who knows how long. So when Jesus said, I am willing, he meant, I am willing to touch you. I am willing to pay the social/ceremonial price for healing you. So he touched the man, and the man was healed!
Now why didn’t Jesus want him to tell people about his healing? (Mk 1:43-44). I have mostly heard this explained that the large crowds would keep him from being able to go into the city. But I’m not sure that is it. I think that Jesus knew that if the word got around that he had touched a leper, he would be quarantined and forced to stay out in the waste places for 14 days. Jesus healed the leper. Jesus was NOT contaminated. He knew it, and the leper knew it. But did the people in the city know it? NO, the religious leaders and those who did not believe in Him would not believe that he was undefiled. They would insist that Jesus stay outside the city. And that is just what happened. The healed man told everyone what had happened, and Mark tells us that Jesus “could no longer publicly enter a city, but stayed out in unpopulated areas; and they were coming to him from everywhere” (Mk 1:45). Yet the next chapter tells us that he was able to come back to Capernaum “several days afterward” (Mk 2:1). Did his power to draw crowds become any less? No. Than why was he able to come home when before he needed to stay outside the city? Such is the power of legalism and unbelief (and ceremonial law), that even though Jesus was obviously NOT going to become leprous or spread the disease (he healed the guy), he was forced to remain in quarantine. But those who needed healing and who were desperate for the true spiritual life came to him anyway. They got it in a way the religious leaders did not.
This insight really touched me, in that it showed the depth of Jesus’s compassion, and the utter wordliness of the Pharisses and other religious leaders of the time. He was willing to minister to the leper’s deepest needs, even at the cost of being misunderstood by the religious elite, and of great inconvenience to himself. Do I have that kind of compassion? Alternatively, am I as wordly as those who completely missed Jesus’s life-giving power because of religious prejudices?
