Moving on from spiritual leprosy
In the Gospels, Jesus interacts with all kinds of people. We tend to surround ourselves with people like us, but Jesus did not. Luke 5:12-16 records Jesus encountering a leper. The Old Testament talked about leprosy. It was pictured as dying from the outside in as the body wasted away. Lepers were considered unclean and had to announce their presence. If they touched anyone or anything, it became unclean. In this passage, though, the leper encounters one who makes him clean.
As we come to a passage like, we face the truth that we have heard these stories many times. These miracle stories of Jesus are very familiar to us and so we tend to rush through them, thinking, “This is just another one of those miracles – Go Jesus.” We often do not pause to consider what they meant in that day for those who had witnessed them firsthand or had been among the early church and so it is not surprising that we often do not understand what they mean for us today.
Or perhaps worse than simply rushing through these miracles, we can read the Gospel stories as though they are the Christian’s version of Aesop’s Fables – children’s stories where there is a simple moral to the story and that particular moral is the point of the passage. This passage, for example, is often turned to in order to show people that they should love those who are unlovable in their lives. Jesus reached out to the leper so we ought to reach out to that person in our lives who is not like us as well; we should reach out to those who are unlovable.
I am giving away the end here at the beginning, but, for us to touch a leper is not the same as it was for Jesus to touch a leper. For Jesus to touch a leper there is much more at stake. For us, it would be one leper is touching another leper. Luke is teaching us by example the kind of teacher that Jesus was. It would have been very simple, even right, for Jesus to turn this leper away. But he doesn’t do that; rather, he is willing to reach out to this leper and to heal him.
We look at Biblical miracles as changes in the natural world, as though natural laws are suspended. The right perspective is to see them as a breaking in of how things were supposed to be from the beginning and, subsequently, how they will be in the New Creation. That is, miracles are not changing natural laws but are restoring things briefly to how they were supposed to be before sin and death.
This is the last miracle recorded by Luke before Jesus will begin to receive opposition from the religious leaders of his day. His preaching and miracle ministry will take on a polemical tone. His ministry is well underway, and he is very popular with the people by this time Luke shows the Pharisees and Sadducees beginning to publicly challenge him. Their biggest problem will be their lack of seeing their own need.
They would consider themselves above touching a leper, hiding behind God’s laws in order to withhold compassion. Luke’s picture of Jesus is one of authority, power, and compassion as he ministers to those who are most in need. Christians are called to minister to those who are most in need regardless of their outward appearance.
The church often grows as the gospel is offered to those who are without, both physically and spiritually. This has accounted for many of the spiritual awakenings throughout history as well as the current spiritual growth in poorer third world countries. God often uses times of need in our own lives to help us grow in our faith. We are called to reach out to those whom the world despises because we, in ourselves, are those that have received the greatest mercy – forgiveness from our sins.
Apart from Christ we are all poor, pitiful sinners. But let’s admit it; once we have been cleansed of our spiritual leprosy, we tend to forget what we were. We find it easier to associate with those who are like us in our present state rather than those who are like what we used to be. Christ reached out to you when you were spiritually dead so you can be those who are used of God to reach out to others around us who are spiritually dead.
Pastor Everett Henes, the pastor of the Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, can be reached at pastorhenes@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Hillsdale Daily News: Opinion
