Ep. 22: The Leper
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MATTHEW 8:2-4, MARK 1:40-45, LUKE 5:12-16
Significantly, his work began where that of the Rabbis ended. Whatever remedies - medical, magical, or sympathetic - Rabbinic writings may indicate for various kinds of disease, leprosy is not included in the catalogue. They left aside what even the Old Testament marked as spiritual death, by insisting that those so stricken avoid all contact with the living and even to take the appearance of mourners. There was simply no hope offered for them! As the leper passed by, his clothes rent, his hair dishevelled and the lower part of his face and his upper lip covered, it was as one going to death who reads his own burial service, while the mournful words, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ which he uttered, proclaimed that his was both a living and a spiritual death.
Again, the Old Testament and even Jewish traditions saw leprosy primarily as a moral, spiritual issue rather than a sanitary issue. The isolation they suffered from the world, stopping them from entering any walled city, could not have been merely prompted by the wish to prevent infection.
Although the sacrificial ritual for the cleansed leper implies at least the possibility of a cure, it is in every instance traced to the direct agency of God. The possibility of any cure through a human agency was never contemplated by the Jews. Rabbinic law teaches us how to recognise true leprosy from its symptoms. Anyone might make the medical inspection, although only a descendant of Aaron could formally pronounce clean or unclean. Once declared leprous, the sufferer was soon made to feel the utter heartlessness of Rabbinism.
To banish him outside walled towns may have been a necessity, which, perhaps, required to be enforced by the threatened penalty of forty stripes save one. Similarly, lepers were to be the first to enter and last to leave a synagogue and that they should occupy a separate compartment (Mechitsah), ten palms high, and six feet wide.
The Old Testament mentioned eleven principal kinds of defilement. In the elaborate code of defilements in Jewish tradition, leprosy was not only one of ‘the fathers of uncleanness,’ but, next to defilement from the dead, stood foremost amongst them. Not merely actual contact with the leper, but even his entrance defiled a home and everything in it, to the beams of the roof. The Rabbis loved to trace disease to moral causes. ‘No death without sin, and no pain without transgression’ and ‘The sick is not healed, till all his sins are forgiven him.’ These are much-repeated sayings.
We can now in some measure appreciate the contrast between Jesus and his contemporaries in attitudes towards the leper. There was no Old Testament precedent for the healing of the leper in the Gospel accounts, not in the case of Moses, nor even in that of Elisha and there was no Jewish expectancy of it. But to have heard him teach, to have seen or known him as healing all manner of disease, must have carried to the heart the conviction of his absolute power. Surely nothing is beyond this power?
The leper approached him, something he would have never dared to do to a Rabbi. If you want, you can make me clean. This is not a prayer, but simple faith in his Power and an absolute commitment to him of his helpless, hopeless need. And Jesus touched with compassion, responded.
It is not quite so easy at first sight to understand why Jesus should instruct the leper to tell no one of this amazing miracle. The Kingdom of God was not to be promoted through ostentation and bluster (as it tends to be these days), but as we study the character of Jesus we see that the opposite is true. Yet the nature of this miracle was such that word was going to get out in one way or another! But what it now meant was that he could no more enter the cities, but remained outside, where people came to him from every quarter.
In the meantime, the ex-leper had to present himself to the priest and conform to the ritual requirements of the Mosaic Law as they examine this claim of this impossible healing! This was, in fact, going to be a testimony to them. There were to be consequences of course, for Jesus. The open rupture between Jesus and the Jewish authorities, which had commenced at the Unknown Feast at Jerusalem, was to lead now to active hostility. The synagogues of Galilee are no longer the quiet scenes of his teaching and miracles; his word and deeds no longer pass unchallenged. Now. He has to deal with the presence and hostile watchfulness of the Scribes and Pharisees, who for the first time appear on the scene of his ministry. It is through their influence that the Galileans, so accepting of him before, were being subtly poisoned against him.
Now we find him accused of blasphemy and now it became sinful for Jesus to extend mercy on the Sabbath to him whose hand was withered and people began to question why he was consorting with publicans and sinners. The religious ‘spin doctors’ were plying their trade to some success. ‘Fake news’ was around even in those days!
This is an extract from the book, Jesus : Life and Times, available for £10 here (Finalist for Academic Book of the year at 2023 CRT awards)