Jesus Heals the Leper: The Significance of Matthew 8:1-4

 When Jesus came down from the mountain, large crowds followed Him. 2 And a leper came to Him and bowed down before Him, and said, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.” 3 Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing; be cleansed.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. 4 And Jesus said to him, “See that you tell no one; but go, show yourself to the priest and present the offering that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”

In Matthew 8:1-4 we read that Jesus healed a leper. This was a remarkable event for various reasons. In focusing upon them, we can hone in on two people: the leper, and the Lord Jesus.

As to the leper, the event of his healing was remarkable for a number of reasons. First, lepers were the equivalent of the walking dead. King Uzziah, for his pride, was struck by leprosy. Till the day he died, he lived separated from the people, unable to fellowship with them or to function as a normal Israelite (2 Kg.15:5). When the king of Israel received a command from the king of Aram to help Naaman the leper, the king of Israel cried out:

“Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man is sending word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? But consider now, and see how he is seeking a quarrel against me.”

Secondly, leprosy was often a mark of God’s displeasure. King Uzziah was punished for his pride and was struck with leprosy (2 Chr.26:16-21). Miriam, for her pride against God and Moses, was smitten with leprosy, too (Num.12:9-10). And we know that certain physical ailments were visited upon Jews as punishment for sin (John 8:11; 9:3)- which should not surprise us given that death is the ultimate punishment in the body (Gen.2:17; Rom.5:12). Thirdly, it is possible that leprosy could not be cured except God intervened to do so (see 2 Kg.5:14; Num.12:11-14). Fourthly, any Jew with leprosy was cut off from the main community of Israel. Leviticus 13-14 records numerous laws and commandments concerning the treatment of a person with leprosy. In order for a priest to declare the leper clean and healed, the leper had to go through a complex series of washings. The cleansed person also had to offer up sacrifices. Again, very elaborate, very involved. Only after this intense and detailed ceremonial process could the healed person return to the Israelite community. The intense, ceremonial, and legal nature of the laws of leprosy are drawn out in Leviticus 14:54-57:

54 This is the law for any mark of leprosy—even for a scale, 55 and for the leprous garment or house, 56 and for a swelling, and for a scab, and for a bright spot— 57 to teach when they are unclean and when they are clean. This is the law of leprosy.

 Fifthly, the implication is that anyone physically in contact with a leper was unclean. The general rule for touching an unclean thing is laid down in Leviticus 5:2-3:

2 Or if a person touches any unclean thing, whether a carcass of an unclean beast or the carcass of unclean cattle or a carcass of unclean swarming things, though it is hidden from him and he is unclean, then he will be guilty. 3 Or if he touches human uncleanness, of whatever sort his uncleanness may be with which he becomes unclean, and it is hidden from him, and then he comes to know it, he will be guilty. 

It was imperative that every Israelite understood those things which were clean and unclean (see Lev.10:8-11). For example, there was the command given to Israel that if anyone touched the carcass of a dead animal (one set apart for food), that person was unclean until evening time (Lev.11:39). You had to observe this command regardless of the discomfort and inconvenience involved. Not to do so was sin. Lastly, the leper that Jesus healed was bold enough to come near to a crowd and call upon Jesus for healing. This entails that the leper was breaking the letter of the leprosy laws, for he was not separating himself from the people,  “Anyone with such a defiling disease must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ ” (Lev.13:45). Luke 5:12, recording the same event as Matthew, assumes that the leper was in the town. Whereas, we read in Luke 17:12 that as Jesus approached a village, ten leprous men met him, “standing at a distance.”

            The healing-event was remarkable in regard to Jesus, too. Firstly, he completely and instantaneously healed a leper. Secondly, Jesus healed the leper by touching him. Elijah kept his distance, knowing the letter of Moses’ law, and spoke healing to Naaman, rather than touching Naaman. Yet, Jesus touched the leprous man. This made him unclean…at least as far as the plain force of the laws on leprosy were concerned. Third, it meant that Jesus violated the leprosy law and the laws for ceremonial purification.

            The last point made, concerning Jesus violating laws, is a hard one to swallow. I ask in all honesty, how else do we interpret Jesus’ action? Jesus ignored the fact that the leper did not observe the Mosaic law and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ Jesus touched the leper. Jesus did not quarantine himself, or go to a priest. 
            We could say that he did not violate the laws because he is the Lord and he can do as he likes. But this bare statement causes a tension: why would Jesus at one moment care little for the leprosy laws, and in the next care very much for the laws of leprosy, for he asked the cleansed leper to show himself to the priest and present an offering just as Moses commanded? Was this really about Jesus’ right to do anything because he was God? I think in one sense it was, but this bare statement is not enough; we must fill in the detail. If the bare statement were true, why did he give authority to his disciples to heal lepers (Matt.10:8)? For there is every reason to believe they healed lepers in the same way as Jesus, having watched him, by touching. Men healing leprosy. That being said, Jesus’ divinity is on display in his miracles; but even this is too simple a statement, too bare. To be precise, Jesus’ miracles were evidence of his Messianic authority; Jesus himself declares his Messianic credentials to John the Baptist, saying, “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Matt.11:5). What did all these miracles stand for, then? They stood for Jesus’ Messianic office or role, that he had come to save Israel and the world from sin. We read in Mark 2:1-13 that Jesus forgave the sins of a man brought to him. The whining Pharisees complained that Jesus was blaspheming, for only God could forgive sins. How did Jesus answer? He said, “ “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” ”, then Jesus healed the man of paralysis (Mark 2:10). Jesus here uses his self-designation for his Messianic job, “the Son of Man”. The Son of Man came to…heal? Kind of, only to the extent that the healing did what? Only to the extent that the healing demonstrated his authority to forgive sins. It was all about the forgiveness of sins. Likewise, in Matthew 8:14-17 a similar healing-event occurs, in which Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, touching her hand, and he casts out demons and heals the ill. Matthew caps this account in verse 17 by stating, “This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet: “He Himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases” ” (Isa.53:4). So, Jesus’ miracles were ‘filling out’ his Messianic duty of removing sickness. Isaiah 53, as we all know, is about the Servant of the Lord who gives himself to death, even the death of the cross. He suffers much and is rejected by many. Yet, snuck into that chapter, as it were, is a comment about removing illness and sickness. Why? Because sickness and illness are rooted in sin, ultimately. Adam sinned and God cursed humanity, bringing death and its gang of physical evils- namely, all kinds of bodily sicknesses. In healing man in a miraculous manner, the Son of Man was declaring that the curse was being reversed, that the Lord was present among mankind, and that salvation was there for those who had spiritual ears to hear the Gospel.

To be pointed, the Lord was ‘filling out’ the Law of Moses in its entirety, including the laws on leprosy. He allowed the leprous man to violate the law of leprosy because Jesus was introducing life from a new world, forgiveness from heaven. What did the leprosy laws of Moses ultimately amount to? This: they pointed to God’s holiness and man’s need of God for healing and ‘cleansing’. Jesus cuts through the Mosaic red-tape, for he is the Messiah, God in the flesh coming to redeem mankind. Jesus is not a son of Moses, as if he came as Messiah to obey Moses’ Law. Rather, he is above Moses, for Jesus was greater than Moses and fulfilled his role as the Messianic Son over the house of God, ministering to it, saving it; whereas Moses was part of the house (Heb.3:1-11). Moses bows the knee to Jesus and witnesses to him (Luke 24:25-27; John 5:46). Jesus does not witness to Moses, nor obey him. Jesus is God in the flesh for us!

So, even though Jesus told the leper to go show himself to the priest, Jesus did not do this in obedience to Moses. He was telling the leper to be obedient to Moses because Moses pointed to the Messiah. If the leper had have done as he was told, something like the following would have happened. The priest would have heard the testimony of the healed man, declared him healed, and then he would have been forced to conclude that the man was healed by God through this fellow called ‘Jesus’, and that this man performed the healing in such a way that he violated, nay, broke, various leprosy and ceremonial rules, in executing a miracle. There is only one person who can do that, one person who can suspend or ignore the laws of this world, even the Law of Moses- God! Then the priest would be ‘forced’ to testify that God was in the midst of Israel and that his kingdom was present. At least, that’s how it should have happened…but it didn’t!

            What is the significance of the healing of the leper? The significance is that Jesus demonstrated that he was the Son of Man, the Messiah who had come to bring salvation from the kingdom of heaven. He alone had authority to forgive sins and heal men from sin’s power evidenced in illness and death. And he would win this victory by taking upon himself the illness of men, taking upon himself sin, and going to the cross as the Servant of the Lord to suffer and die for many. The healing also signified that God was in the midst of Israel, for the Laws of Moses were receiving their true meaning, their fulfillment, in the life, teaching, work, death, and resurrection of the Son of Man. By his life and work, he cut through the red-tape of the Mosaic Law demonstrating that he was indeed the Lord in our midst, bringing salvation to Israel and the world. Finally, the healing signified that if man was to be truly healed, spiritually healed, he was not going to be healed by Moses and his commandments, but only by the Son of Man and his spiritual authority.

Gloria Deus! What a Savior!