A Special Spot
We went to my brother and sister-in-law’s house in my hometown for July 4th. They live out in the country on the same piece of land that my grandfather grew up on. It’s a piece of property that’s been in our family a long time and is a special spot for our family to gather.
But the sentimental aspect aside, my favorite thing about going out there is that there’s not much out there! Their nearest neighbor is several hundred yards away. You have to drive on a road only wide enough for one car to get there. It’s far away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
I love going out there because it feels more like the world as God intended it to be. Out there, when the sun goes down and you look up, you see these things called stars. When you sit quietly on the porch, you only hear the wind in the trees, the birds singing, the cicadas doing whatever they do, and the frogs croaking. I love it out there because there’s no light or noise pollution. Out there, God’s creation isn’t corrupted by man’s pollution.
The Pollution of Sin
Pollution corrupts God’s good design. Whether it’s noise, light, water, air, or soil pollution, it’s all a result of adding a foreign element into something that wasn’t designed for it. This is why oil spills in the ocean or the smog that hangs over our cities or the trash that litters our creeks is so tragic. Those things aren’t supposed to be there, but they are, and their presence pollutes.
One of the ways the Bible describes sin is by calling it pollution, or something that defiles our hearts. This is what Jesus teaches in Mark 7:14-23. He’s saying that our hearts are factories creating all kinds of pollution. All these sinful things that come out of our hearts “defile,” or contaminate or pollute or dirty us. Which means, of course, that changing your behavior without a changed heart isn’t enough. Our hearts need cleaning. The pollutant of sin needs to be purged.
Jesus Came to Cleanse the World, and Our Hearts, of Sin
Today we’re going to meet a man who was polluted and needed cleansing. He was a leper, which in ancient Israel meant you were unclean or defiled. When Jesus meets this man, he does something astounding, something that should make our hearts skip a beat, especially when we realize that what he did for this leper is also what he came to do for us.
The world is suffocating under the pollution of sin; our hearts are dirty and defiled because of sins corrupting influence. But, in mercy, God sent Jesus to cleanse the earth and cleanse our hearts of sin. Luke 5:12-16 is an encounter that shows us what God is up to in the world and in our hearts.
The main point of this text is that Jesus will cleanse anyone who understands their pollution and comes to him for cleansing. We’ll see the pollution in verse 12, the cleansing in verse 13, and the result in verses 14-16.
The Pollution
First, in verse 12, we see the pollution. The pollutant in this man’s life was leprosy. In the ancient world, there were seventy-two distinct diseases of the skin that fell under the broad term “leprosy.” Luke doesn’t tell us which one this man had. Perhaps it was what we call Hansen’s disease, the worst form of leprosy. Regardless of what form of leprosy he had, the consequences for his life were tragic for people in those days.
God gave Moses laws about leprosy in Leviticus 13 and 14. If you were a Jew in the ancient world and you woke up one morning with something unusual on your skin, your heart would fill with terror. You were required to go to the priest who’d use God’s word to determine whether the outbreak on your skin was leprous or not. If it was leprous, not only did you face a physical malady that you’d probably have the rest of your life, you were also faced with the worst possible scenario with respect to your home, family, community, and worship at the temple. If you were declared leprous, you were considered unclean, not just unwell. And because there was no cure for leprosy, and in order to prevent your disease from spreading to others, you were required to live separate from everyone you knew and loved. You couldn’t go to the temple or even enter Jerusalem. You had to live alone, apart from your family and friends (Lev. 13:46). You were separated from all the blessings of common life, consigned to a living death. You were not allowed within fifty paces of another person. If someone was approaching you, you had to call out, “Unclean, unclean” (v. 45).
Lepers were the ultimate pariahs, or outsiders, in Israel. This man’s physical condition had serious spiritual and social consequences. He’d been examined by the priest and the verdict was leprosy. So he’d left his home, his wife, children, and friends and lived as a homeless man.
But when the man heard that Jesus was in the neighborhood, he broke the law and ran up to him and fell down before Jesus, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” Notice that he asked to be cleansed, not just healed. He longed to be free from the stigma and isolation and rejection of leprosy, not just the disease. His deepest need was cleansing, not healing.
Think about what this leper knows and what he doesn’t know. He knows that Jesus is able to heal him, “you can make me clean.” But he doesn’t know if he’s willing, “Lord, if you will.” He knows that Jesus is able to heal him but doesn’t know if he’s willing to heal him.
We also must make this distinction when it comes to praying for healing in our lives and in the lives of those we know. We must distinguish between Jesus’ sovereign power and his sovereign will. Jesus is all-powerful so he can heal anyone of anything at anytime, but he isn’t always willing.
When we pray for healing, sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no. For example, the Lord wasn’t willing to heal Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7). So we must trust both the power and the wisdom of God.
We shouldn’t doubt that he’s absolutely able to heal. This is why the leper says, “you can make me clean.” This is remarkable because it was believed that leprosy was incurable. Healing leprosy was like raising the dead. But this man heard the reports about Jesus and correctly assumed that Jesus could do something about his leprosy.
The leper knew Jesus was able to heal him. The question was whether Jesus was willing to heal him?
The Cleansing
For this leper, the answer was yes, Jesus was willing to heal him (v. 13). Notice what Jesus did as he healed this man. Verse 13, “Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.” The law of Moses said that if you touched a leper you became unclean (Lev. 5:3). It wasn’t necessarily against the law to touch a leper, but the law said that if you did, you made yourself unclean.
The “law,” or social norm, was not to touch lepers, or even go near them. Jesus, however, was willing to break the unwritten law of his culture in order to help this man. Why? Because he loved him. He understood that the governing principle under the law is love. The law of love takes precedence over social norms. This is what Paul is getting at in Romans 13, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (v. 10).
Jesus Does What the Law Cannot Do
Mark’s account of this encounter says that Jesus was “moved with pity,” or “filled with compassion” (NIV), when he met this leper. When Jesus saw his condition and heard his plea for help, his heart welled up with compassion. To voluntarily touch a leper was unheard of in that day. No one would even consider such a thing. But Jesus did so without hesitation. By touching him, Jesus was saying to him, as Sinclair Ferguson says, “I’m prepared to become what you are – a man under the judgment of the law – in order to share with you what I have – freedom and life.”[1] Out of compassion, Jesus does for this man what the law could not do.
Touching this man should’ve made Jesus unclean, but it worked in the opposite direction. Instead of the man’s uncleanness coming on Jesus, Jesus’ cleanness came on this man. Jesus’ purity overtook his impurity. Jesus’ power was stronger than his disease. And Jesus’ compassion overcame the social taboos of his day.
The Miracle of the Gospel
This is what happens when we come to Jesus, confess our condition to him, and ask for his touch. He takes what we have and we get what he has. He takes our sin and we get his purity. No sin you bring to Jesus is stronger than his ability to forgive, cleanse, and restore. When we come to him in faith, his heart swells with compassion, his hand stretches out, and he says, “I will; be clean.”
This is the miracle of the gospel. In an inexplicable way, the holy and pure God takes our sin without becoming sinful and makes us righteous without losing any of his righteousness.
Are you trying to remove your sins and make yourself clean? How is this even possible? How can we remove from the ledger things we’ve already done? How could our good deeds make God forget our bad deeds? How would we know if we’ve done enough good things? Can we be sure that we won’t do anything in the future that won’t cancel out all the good we’ve done?
How can keeping all the rules remove the deep sense that something isn’t right in our hearts? Only the healing grace of Jesus can take away our guilt and clear our conscience. Only his word is powerful enough to heal our uncleanness. Just as Jesus healed this man of an incurable skin disease with a simple word, so he miraculously heals us of our incurable sin disease with a simple word, “I will; be clean.”
The Man is Restored
Jesus was willing to take this man’s uncleanness on himself. He could’ve just said the word and the leprosy would’ve been gone. But Jesus touched him. And when he did, the man’s uncleanness retreated and he was restored.
Jesus comes into contact with the physically, spiritually, and ceremonially unclean and he doesn’t turn away, rather he engages. This is so typical of Jesus, as one scholar says, showing us his “characteristic concern for those who are ritually outcast from the people of Israel,” and therefore cut off from the life of the community.[2]
Jesus wasn’t just healing this man’s disease, he was restoring him to his community. Isn’t that what happens when Jesus changes our lives? When he touches us with his healing grace, there are ripple effects out into our relationships.
Jesus identifies with this leper in order to make him clean. This is a foretaste of what Jesus will ultimately do on the cross, when he took our uncleanness on himself. We all stand before God dirty and stained with sin. We have things in our lives that make us feel untouchable – maybe things we’ve done, or things that’ve been done to us. We stand unclean before a holy God.
But on the cross, Jesus identified with our uncleanness, taking the pollution of our sin on himself in order to make us clean.
The Result
After Jesus cleanses this man from the pollutant of leprosy, what happens? Verses 14-16 give us the results of this encounter. Jesus first tells him not to tell anyone, which Mark tells us he did anyways (1:45)! Jesus knew that people were waiting on a champion to rescue them from the Romans, not on a Suffering Servant who’d rescue them from their sins. Jesus wanted to avoid theological misunderstanding of who he was, so he told the man to not tell anyone.
But the more Jesus tried to keep things quiet about himself, the more the news about him spread (v. 15). Commenting on this passage, Matthew Henry said, “Honour is like a shadow, which flees from those that pursue it, but follows those that decline it.”[3] Jesus was trying to humbly conceal himself, but his word and works couldn’t be contained.
Notice in verse 16 that as Jesus’ reputation grows, he continues to retreat in prayer. His popularity threatened to sidetrack him from his mission, “a threat that was thwarted through prayer.”[4] Prayer is one of the ways God keeps us focused on why we’re here and what we’re supposed to be doing. This is one reason why we devote so much time to prayer in our public services, and why I’d encourage you to pray regularly with your spouse and children, and privately. Prayer is one of God’s means to help us keep things in perspective.
Lastly, what’s this little bit here in verse 14 about the man going to the priest and making a sacrifice? Contrary to the charges of the Pharisees, Jesus didn’t encourage infidelity to the law. Rather, he wanted this man to honor the law that said he needed a priest to inspect him before he could be officially welcomed back into the community. And he needed to express his gratitude to God by making an offering for his cleansing. All of this was because the law commanded it and would serve as “proof” that he was really healed.
With this healing of the leper, the question begins to surface, whose approach to the law, Jesus’ or the Pharisees, represents true faithfulness to the law?
The approach of the Pharisees looked good on the outside and seemed intuitive: if we keep the rules then God will bless us. But Jesus started unmasking this approach so that we can see that our problem is much deeper than we think, so deep that following the law can’t even touch it. We need something the law can’t give us. We need grace. We need new hearts.
Jesus Ready to Cleanse
The law exposes our hearts, showing us how polluted they are. The laws about physical uncleanness teach us about our spiritual uncleanness. The uncleanness of the leper is meant to show us our uncleanness. Sin has defiled and polluted us and left us outside the camp, isolated, rejected, with no hope or future.
But in mercy, God sent Jesus to cleanse our hearts of sin. Jesus is able and willing to cleanse from sin. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn. 1:9).
Like this leper, if we’re aware of and ashamed of our pollution, earnestly desire cleansing, firmly believe in Jesus’ ability to cleanse us, and understand that only he can bring the relief we need, we’ll be cleansed. No matter how sick we are, Jesus is able to heal us with one word, one touch. Those who fall before him in humility and faith will hear the same words as the leper, “I will, be clean!”
As the hymn says:
Come, ye sinners, poor and needy,
weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
full of pity, love, and pow’r.
Let not conscience make you linger,
nor of fitness fondly dream;
all the fitness He requireth
is to feel your need of Him.
I will arise and go to Jesus;
He will embrace me in His arms.
In the arms of my dear Savior,
Oh, there are ten thousand charms.
[1]Sinclair B. Ferguson, Let’s Study Mark (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1999), 21.
[2]Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina, vol. 3 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991), 95-6.
[3]Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. 5 (Old Tappen, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, n.d.), 633.
[4]Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 238.