A Man Nobody Would Touch

This one only works if you know what the man's life had been. The law in Leviticus is specific about a person with a serious skin disease. He wore torn clothes and let his hair hang loose. He kept his mouth covered. When anyone came near he had to call out the word himself, unclean, unclean, and he lived alone outside the camp for as long as it lasted. So the man who turns up here is not only sick. He is somebody nobody is permitted to touch, who has spent his time announcing his own condition to keep people at a distance.

Then a leper came to Jesus, begging on his knees: “If You are willing, You can make me clean.”

There is no doubt in that sentence about what Jesus can do. Not one word of it questions whether he is able. What the man does not know is whether Jesus wants to, and that is what being the person everyone steps around will do to somebody.

Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man.

He did not have to. A word would have done it, and nobody standing nearby would have seen anything out of the ordinary; the touch was the part he chose. Under the law, touching an unclean person made you unclean, and the traffic always ran that way, outward from the disease onto whatever it met. Here it runs backwards. The man does not make Jesus unclean. Jesus makes the man clean. Only after that does he speak, and what he says answers the question the man actually asked. He is willing.

Then Jesus sends him off with a stern instruction to tell nobody, and to go and show himself to the priest with the offering Moses prescribed. The instruction is not a formality. The law has a whole ceremony for a person coming back from this, and until a priest has examined him and said the word, he cannot go home. The man does not obey. He tells everyone he meets.

Consequently, Jesus could no longer enter a town in plain view, but He stayed out in solitary places. Yet people came to Him from every quarter.

The man who had to live outside can walk into a town again, and the one who made him clean is out in the empty country where people have to come looking for him. Mark sets the two facts down beside each other and offers no comment on the trade.