What to make of his touching a leper

What to make of this touching a Leper?

Written by Dan McDonald

            I am trying to learn to blog.  If I read enough of my newfound millennial friends’ blogs they might lead me by example.  In a pre-cell phone era long ago in a forgotten galaxy (somebody made a star wars comment) I wrote essays in philosophy classes and argued for perspectives in history classes.  I thought I was heading to seminary to study theology where I would write more papers arguing for the summation of all things pertaining to a subject.  That isn’t the way of the blog.  A blog, well it can be just about anything, but usually it is something personal rather than detached.  It is an insight instead of the summation of all the evidence heretofore presented for the jurors to decide.  Perhaps it is expressed best by one of the millennial bloggers whose blog is among my favorite to read.  She presents it as “my truths.”  The philosopher-historian-theologian in me always wanted “The, with a long e at the end of the in “the truth.” But the millennial blogger I mention is content to speak of “my truth” as if in the end it is God who grades our thoughts and determines which ones are “the truth” out of all the writings we present as “my truth”, even when we pontificate as if we are speaking “the truth.”  Another millennial has reminded me that we all get to have our assumptions challenged in life.  I am beginning to learn that there is a reason for wisdom to be associated with old age.  It is not only that we have so many experiences by that time, but also because it takes that long for the children to grow up who will lead us.  I really am not trying to be funny.  The children of a next generation have insights we could never have as part of our own generation and they speak them as a matter of fact, and if we listen in our old age; fresh thoughts will take shape because a child has been appointed to lead us.  I am reaching the age when I am growing content to realize this is becoming their world now and I am here more for the ride and to encourage them and not to tear them down.

            Every once in a while I get a thought bouncing about my noggin and for me that sort of means I have to write, like when an allergy gets up there and I have to sneeze.  A thought in the noggin and I imagine I am called to write something.  Once in a while it works, any time else the readers wisely move on to the next blog.  These millennial kids have to budget their time.  In order for them to have as much time to spend on being narcissistic as my generation claims them to be, they have to keep their time reading bad blogs to a minimum.  So they concentrate their time on good blogs and then spend time developing their skills in narcissism.  (The first clear cut example of sarcasm is a sign to get to the real message of your blog, so here goes).

            I have been thinking a lot lately about how Jesus reached out and touched a leper saying he was willing to heal him.  If you want to read the story for yourself it begins at Mark, chapter one and verse forty.  Otherwise you will trust yourself to a guy, who usually has at least “some” and most often “several” errors he misses in proof-reading the things he writes.  We could look at so many things about how Jesus heals the leper. But really one thing captured my attention.  Jesus touched him and then healed him.

            That has always been something of a mystery to me.  For if we know our Old Testament Scriptures the moment someone touched an unclean person, and a leper was an unclean person, that person became unclean.  What about Jesus?  He touched this unclean leper and the leper became clean.  The woman with that blood issue touched the tassel on his rabbi’s cloak and her issue was healed.  How did Jesus remain clean?  That was the question that forged my former answers to such passages.  Surely it was because he was our appointed Savior.  Surely it was because he was fully God as well as fully man.  That was my answer to the mystery for all my years.

            But lately as the lady in her newsroom told me, we all have to have our assumptions challenged.  One day, I don’t know why it seemed that as I was thinking about this leper that Jesus healed I thought of how the text never tried to explain how Jesus kept from becoming unclean.  Then one day a new thought challenged everything I had ever assumed about the text.  What if, instead of Jesus remaining clean while he healed everything around him that was unclean . . . what if he actually did not remain clean, but instead became unclean?  Does that sound like something horribly sacrilegious?  Thoughts began to accumulate and encircle this seeming contradiction to my more safe more accepted perspective I had always embraced.  I had imagined that the one solid truth to be accepted was Jesus had the power to touch a leper and remain clean.  But here was this thought, so unordinary and so seemingly sacrilegious.  I tried to put it away from my mind.

But I read from Hebrews 5:8 that though he were a son (God’s son) yet he learned obedience through the things he suffered.  I learned, by reading St. Paul’s gentle letter to the Philippians; that he learned this obedience and then he went the distance to the point of death, even death on a cross.  (Philippians 2:8)  Then I read Isaiah speaking of how he looked at a suffering servant whom we despised and esteemed not.  In fact Isaiah’s suffering servant became acquainted with grief.  For that reason when we saw him, we hid our faces from him.  I know that is not our response when we put on our Sunday school tinted shades.  For then we talk about sweet Jesus.  But if we saw him like Isaiah or the disciples saw him, we would all have hidden our faces from him.  He had become something horrid to look at.

            That is when I saw something in the leper account I had never seen before.  Jesus touched him and became unclean.  Could that be the key to understanding the Gospel’s description of Jesus’ touching a leper.  Maybe that was his mission on earth, nothing else makes sense when you think of the Gospel message.  He came to heal the broken, to protect the bruised reed, to be legs for the lame, eyes for the blind, ears for the deaf, healing for the leper, and righteousness for the depraved and the sinner.  How did he do it?  He did it by reaching out and touching a leper and internalizing into his own body and blood our infirmities, weaknesses, sins, and grief and owning them as his own.  He set his face thus to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, to the cross and to death.  He had taken everything of ours worthy and descending towards death and made it his own.  Here was this one priest of a different priestly order than all others who presented no bulls or lambs or goats for our sins but his own body and blood.  He spent a lifetime gathering into his own body and blood, the corruptions of a human race.  He learned obedience through suffering.  He learned obedience through such suffering even to his death on a cross.  He became acquainted with our grief, and even became sin for us.  This is how we understand the Gospels.  The Son of God is taking man’s troubles into his own soul and taking them into his own body and blood.  He is taking them in until the day comes when he will go all the way in his obedience to the point of death, even death on a cross.

            The ancient theologians called his becoming man an assuming of the flesh.  They agreed that if Christ did not assume a true humanity in all its faculties then we remained in our sins.  So he assumed our nature and then he assumed and gathered into his body and blood, our sins, so that he became sin for us.

            By the time he reached the Via Dolorosa, the path of suffering remembered in the ceremonies marking the Stations of the Cross he must have been feeling as full of our sins as a pregnant woman trying to give birth, feeling as if she were near ready to explode.  I am a man I know nothing of such a feeling.  But our Lord Jesus was also a man but he knew the fullness of such a feeling multiplied I would dare to say.  He now contained in himself the sins of the world which would be nailed to the cross in him.  He had gathered the pain, anguish, sin, death, and grief of a human race for all his years so that he now moved forward to his date with destiny, his death on a cross.

            But Jesus was a mediator.  He represented not one party but two parties.  He represented man in all his ugliness and sin, in his weakness and infirmity, the unclean and the truly arrogant claiming cleanness.  But also he represented the living God, who wished salvation for all men and that no man would perish.  Our Lord Jesus had given his perfect obedience to him as well so that he who became sin for us never sinned.  There were twins vying to be born from him.  For even if all of our sin and death had accumulated in Jesus, so too was God’s desire for us to know life and to know life eternally.  Jesus learned obedience in his suffering, obedience to the point of death, death on a cross.  He suffered on the cross.  He died.  One of the twins trying to be born died with him.  Our sins, our death, our infirmities, our evil that had yearned to be born in the Son of God died as he died for them.  For three days the universe mourned the death of the Son of God.  But then his body and blood’s other twin rose from the death which had encompassed it on Calvary.  This was the Christ representing the interests of God who yearned for men and women of all nations, tribes, and tongues to participate in divine life.  The divine life energized the dead Son of God, for it had been gathered into his body and blood as well.  It had taken time to mourn for a solemn death.  But on the third day He rose and no stone could entomb him.  He burst the gates of hell wide open and led captive saints freely into the celestial city.

Our sins were no longer there, neither were our infirmities, nor was there any sign of death, just five wounds to hands, feet and side.  So on a Sunday morning when bread and wine are set apart to remember and reenact this death and be presented to us, I will partake remembering it was my sins that died in his death that he had taken into his own body and blood.  It is also the divine life that God wanted to give us when our sins had separated us from his desire for our good.  In the same body and blood in which our sins had been gathered so that they might die in death’s death in his death and in that same body and blood was contained also the desire of God than no man would perish but that all would come to partake of divine life.  I will eat and drink for I will partake of the divine life still contained in the body and blood of our dear Lord and Savior.  The cup from which I will drink will have no death in it like the cup he partook, but only divine life.  I will partake realizing the amazing truth that in his body and blood I died, so did my sins, so did death; and in his body and blood an eternal divine life was issued to me as a replacement for my sin and my death.

Now I understand how the leper was healed.  The divine life reached out and touched him, even as the Son of God absorbed all that needed healed within his own body and blood.  There is but one more truth to be understood and this lesson of the touched leper can be finished.  The ones who are now in Christ, who are members of His body and are in fellowship with brethren everywhere in Him are part of his body.  The High priest still is collecting the sins and grief of a world of sinners and making intercession on their behalf.  He is collecting the burden of sin and grief through men and women in his body who are filling out the suffering of Christ upon the earth until the day when sin and death will be banished from this divine blood purchased earth of ours.  We are roaming the earth as members in him and are taking in the sufferings of others and are crying out to heaven for our fellow men and women on this earth.  In the heavenly places saints, spirits of just men made perfect, martyrs, apostles, our Lord’s mother are all likewise praying.  All these prayers are captured up in the body and blood of Jesus Christ so that even if they are too deep for words our prayers are given voice by Our Lord seated upon the mercy seat in the highest realm of heaven.  He needs to present no words for arguments, but five glorified wounds.  He prays.  On earth we also pray for mysteriously we are his body on earth.  We fill out his suffering by taking to him all our desires to see men and women around us know life and that the sort of life that is described by our participation in divine life.  The leper knew the power of the divine life.  So do we, who have been granted life in Christ and to know likewise Christ in our lives.  That is my truth that I have learned in a Savior’s touch of a leper.  One day we all will be able to greet that same leper with a sanctified and holy kiss.  But for now we simply remember this:  The leper’s uncleanness did not just disappear.  It was taken up by the one who owned the leper’s cause as his very own.  The leper’s healing flowed from the mystery of divine life given to us.  I cannot really explain it, but this is my belief and my truth.  I hope you will find it worthy to be a part of your belief and truth as well.