It wasn’t the fact that leprosy in its worst form
was a disfiguring disease that made lepers outcasts. True, most
people are at first a little uncomfortable in the presence of
someone whose fingers and toes and nose and ears are rotting away.
But the disfigurement accompanying an advanced case of leprosy
wasn’t what made people avoid the leper. Every Galilean town back
in our Lord’s day probably had one or more people in it who’d lost
an arm or leg or been crippled in some way, and these people were
still received into society. But with the leper it was different.
What made leprosy different was that it was highly
contagious. God’s Law dictated that lepers in Israel were to be
excluded from society until they could be healed. It was a total
exclusion too. Lepers had to leave their homes and live outside
town and village and city. As long as their leprosy was active,
they couldn’t enter the synagogue to hear God’s Word. They
couldn’t come to the temple to offer sacrifice. According to the
Law of God, lepers were unclean. Cut off from synagogue and
temple, they were cut off from fellowship with God’s people. They
were outcasts, allowed to keep company only with other lepers like
themselves.
Imagine having to tell your family and friends
goodbye because you’d come down with a medical condition that
excluded you from human society. Imagine not being able to go to
work, or out to eat in a restaurant, or go to a high school
football game because of your disease. Imagine every time you
came in sight of another person you had to cry out, “Unclean!
Unclean!” Imagine that people forgot you were a person with hopes
and dreams and emotions, but instead looked upon you as some
hideous, loathsome, disgusting scrap of humanity. That’s what it
was like to be a leper in Jesus’ day. It made you feel like you
were no longer a person. You’d become the disease that was
killing you.
We can read today’s Gospel about the healing of the
leper in one of two ways. First, we can read it as a reminder of
how important it is for us Christians to reach out to society’s
outcasts with love and kindness. There’s a whole world of
hurting, lonely people out there. They live down the street from
us, or maybe even next door. Sometimes they live under the same
roof that we do. Do we pray for and visit the sick? Do we speak
words of encouragement to those who are troubled? Do we help out
those who’ve fallen on hard times? Do we extend God’s love to
those who feel as isolated as any leper of Jesus’ day? Do we draw
near to those to whom no one else will draw near?
That’s one reading of today’s Gospel. It’s a valid
reading too. But it’s not Gospel. It’s not “Good News.” It
tells us nothing of what God has graciously done for us in Jesus
Christ, but rather tells us how we are to act, what we are to do
as God’s redeemed people. But let’s ask ourselves – how
consistently do we show other people the love that our Lord showed
the leper in today’s Gospel? What would we have done if that
leprous individual had come running up to us seeking our help?
What do we do when today’s lepers ask us to help them?
Good questions. Valid questions. But there’s
another way to read the account of our Lord’s healing of the
leper, and that’s as pure Gospel. Gospel is what God does for us
for Jesus’ sake. God doesn’t have to do it; He’s under absolutely
no obligation at all – except perhaps for the obligation of His
own gracious nature. But because He is a God of grace, He shows
grace and mercy to the undeserving. He goes out of His way to be
kind to sinful people who have absolutely no right to His
kindness. But God does it anyway. That’s the kind of God He is.
To read the story of Jesus and the leper as Gospel
you have to understand yourself as the leper. You have to see
your sin as the leprosy from which you suffer. Sin isolates just
as leprosy does. It isolates us from God. As the Scripture says,
Your iniquities have separated you from God; your sins have
turned His face from you. Sin is a chasm, a gulf, a great
divide. You’re on one side. And God’s on the other. And nothing
you do can bridge the gap. Not being religious. Not being nice
to animals and polite to little old ladies. Not even thinking
that you’re okay just the way you are. To fail to understand that
there’s a gulf between you and God shows just how wide that gulf
is.
So sin isolates from God and makes us His enemy,
Scripture says. But it also isolates us from each other. Even
the happiest marriages are troubled at times by conflict. There
are hurt feelings and half-buried resentments that sometimes rise
up to the surface. When Adam and Eve sinned, Adam blamed his
wife. And ever since blame’s been passed back and forth like a
hot potato. Sin isolates us from each other. Husband from wife.
Parent from child. Friend from friend. Nation from nation.
Sin also isolates us from ourselves. Because sin
has stuck its blinders on us, we fail to understand what we’re
really like deep down inside. The heart is deceitful above
all things and desperately sick; who can know it?
Scripture says. We all have an inflated opinion of ourselves. We
all think we’re far better than we really are. And when we see
ourselves as basically being okay, we’re denying our need of the
Gospel. We’re like a leper whose finger and toes are dropping off
one by one and who persists in asking,
Leprosy? What leprosy?
But when the Law of God does its work and shows us
what we’re really like, and how desperately, mortally ill with sin
we really are – that’s when we appreciate the Gospel. No, we
haven’t loved our neighbor as we love ourselves. In fact a lot of
times our self-love does a pretty good job of crowding out love
for neighbor. Neither have we loved the Lord our God with all our
heart, soul, mind and strength. There’s not a whole lot about us
to recommend us to God. We’re moral lepers of the first order.
So what can we do but cry out to God for His mercy and grace and
help.
What did the leper say to Jesus? If you are
willing, you can make me clean. Notice that the leper
recognized his true condition. Leprosy had left him smeared head
to toe with filth and uncleanness and he knew it. But he also
knew that Jesus could make him clean if it was our Lord’s will.
And it was our Lord’s will. He said so. Moved
with compassion, He reached out His holy hand and He touched this
man whom no person in their right mind would dream of touching.
That’s significant. You weren’t supposed to touch lepers. To
touch a leper made you as ceremonially unclean as the leper was.
But Jesus touched the leper anyway. He sympathized with the
leper. He broke through the isolation. He bridged the gap. Jesus
became the leper’s friend. He spoke the cleansing Word. And the
leper was cleansed of his leprosy. As far as being a leper was
concerned, he was out of a job.
Where did the leprosy go? The best answer to that
question is that it was now on Jesus. All the uncleanness of
leprosy was on our Lord. After all, Scripture says, He took
our illnesses and bore our diseases. Imagine a doctor who
makes his patients well by catching their disease. That’s Jesus.
He takes our afflictions, our sickness, even our death upon
Himself so we can ultimately be made well.
He takes our sin upon Himself too. He became
sin for us so that in Him we might become the righteousness of
God. . . He redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a
curse for us. That’s what the Cross of Jesus is all
about. It’s the hand by which Jesus takes hold of our sin and
smears it on Himself. Our sin is carried away by the Lamb who
goes to the Cross to die there for every leprous, sin-sick soul in
the world.
To see yourself as a leper is to look to Jesus who
died for you, and to see in Him your forgiveness and salvation.
It’s to be like the tax collector in the temple who cried out,
God, be merciful, to me the sinner! It’s to be
confident that Jesus has bridged the gap for you, that His Cross
has completely taken care of the sin that once separated you from
God, and that in Baptism your leprous rags have been replaced by
the spotless robe of Christ’s perfect righteousness.
When we know and rejoice in this is when we can
reach out in love and compassion to others – once we get it
through our thick skulls that in His love and compassion God has
reached out to us through His Son, Jesus Christ. That’s when we
can show mercy to others in need – once we realize that God has
shown mercy to us in our desperate need for cleansing and
forgiveness. God gives. We receive. We receive. And then we
give to others. And it all begins with God reaching out to us in
our need.
That’s what the Means of Grace are – God reaching
out to us again and again through Word and Water and Bread and
Wine. God doesn’t turn us away on account of our sin. He
cleanses us of sin in Holy Baptism, just as surely as He cleansed
Naaman. He speaks the Word of saving kindness to us in the Gospel
of Christ crucified and resurrected. He feeds us with the Bread
of wholeness and life in the Sacrament of our Lord’s Body and
Blood. He cleanses us and forgives us and erases the gap. And as
His redeemed people we can’t help but spread the Word of what God
has graciously done for us and the whole world through Jesus
Christ.
So don’t ever hesitate to see yourself as a leper.
That’s the place of grace. To be sick with some awful, incurable
disease is the place of grace if it helps you realize your
continual need of Jesus who will one day make you completely new
and whole. To be on your deathbed is the place of grace for the
person who knows their need of the life that Jesus alone gives.
To be troubled and anxious on account of your sin is the place of
grace for those who are ready to hear that Jesus has forever taken
their sin away. Jesus is the friend of lepers. He’s the friend
of sinners too.
In Nomine Patris. . .
