Restoring the Ruined
Introduction: Casey House in Toronto is a modern day leper’s colony. None of the residents who live there has any hope for a cure. None of the residents who live there has any family interested in their plight. None of the residents who live there has any dreams for the future. Few of the residents who live there can think fondly on their past. None of the residents who live their will today will be alive to see the end of March. None of the residents who live there has leprosy. They are modern day lepers; they are people suffering with end-stage AIDS virus.
We came across Casey House last year on our summer mission’s trip. We didn’t go in, we didn’t even stop on the same block, but a few blocks over, we paused to pray for the people who live there. The home is set up as acute hospice care for people suffering with the AIDS virus and all who are admitted are expected to live at the most for six weeks. In many ways, they parallel the Leper communities of Jesus’ day.
Leprosy was a ruinous disease, and in more ways than simply, the physical flesh of the Leper. Among the Jews, it was especially horrific.
I. The Ruin of Leprosy
Leprosy is a disease, which is not prevalent today. Many believe the root cause lies in poor sanitation, in certain third world countries the disease which is now called Hansen’s disease is still found. In scripture, Leprosy described a number of skin ailments; the worst of them would utterly ruin a person physically.
There is no nice way to describe the effects of Leprosy. Runny, dripping sores on the body, dry flaking skin; nubs where once there had been fingers and toes. Skin discolouration, bulbous swelling, and distortion of limbs. One of the main effects of Leprosy was to numb the senses so that a leper might accidentally burn him or herself to the bone or cut their foot without knowledge. Dr. Paul Brand, a Christian doctor who worked among Lepers in the third world, discovered much of what we know today about this debilitating disease.
There is no doubt about the fact that the most visible effect of Leprosy was to steal strength, beauty and health. Leaving the sufferer as a shriveled wraith. There is no known cure for Leprosy.
Similarly AIDS attacks a persons immune system, destroying the T-Cell’s which fight infection the end result in inevitably death, not death from AIDS, but from Pneumonia, Tuberculosis, Chicken-Pox, Influenza or the Common Cold. AIDS sufferers also are thin a wraith like in appearance often, discolorations mark their skin. And there is no cure for AIDS.
The suffering of Leprosy did not come primarily from the disfiguration for most however. Many can suffer with debilitating disease if they have the support of friends and family. Leprosy drove the sufferer from their home, from their town and from their loved ones. The fear of infection was so great that no leper was allowed to enter a building where non-infected people dwelt. Lepers were not permitted to enter the gates of a walled city. Lepers were forced to dwell outside of community, finding companionship only with other Lepers. It was against Jewish law to touch or be touched by a Leper. It was a life of mandated isolation. It was a life of mandated poverty. In the Middle East where food and water are hard to come by it was a life of mandated starvation unless a family member was kind enough to leave food where you could find it. It was the intense suffering of being without family and without friends.
So also, with AIDS, it is a social disease. No matter how much we educate people about the AIDS virus, every one of us will be somewhat on guard when we know we are dealing with someone who has the dreaded disease. For each one of the victims who are dying at Casey house they have been rejected by their families. Not necessarily because of the AIDS virus, but because of the lifestyle choice that has brought AIDS upon them.
It is almost always true that AIDS is a lifestyle related disease. When forced to face the facts I realize that my life may end from cancer, heart disease, stroke or some other accident. In fact, there are many diseases, which may ultimately end my life, but I don’t spend much time worrying about whether AIDS might claim me. I imagine none of us does. So, isn’t this different from Leprosy?
In fact it isn’t. Although scripture doesn’t say anything about the cause of Leprosy, by the times of Jesus the Rabbi’s and teachers of the law had determined that Leprosy was the judgment of God upon immoral people. It was a logical conclusion in a society that lacked medical technology. Why else would a God visit such horrendous suffering upon a person if not for some terrible secret sin? And so, the numbness of disfigurement and the pain of isolation were augmented by the accusation of wrongdoing. Moreover, the Leper was left throughout their lifetime wondering whether it was something they had done.
Finally, for the Jewish Leper there was the Ruin of Religion. Throughout the Old Testament, we find criteria, which allowed a Jew to offer sacrifice and to participate in worship. Those who were unclean or defiled were prohibited from entering the temple or offering sacrifice. Most violations were temporary in nature and came with instructions on how to be restored. To touch a dead body would cause ritual impurity, after childbirth a woman was to be purified, even to violate the Sabbath could bring impurity. But each of these things was temporary condition. To contract Leprosy was to be ritually impure for life. No longer were you to be permitted to enter the temple, no longer were you permitted to offer sacrifice. And in the understanding of the Old Testament into which Jesus is born, to be prohibited from entering the temple to sacrifice was to be prohibited from coming to where God was and worshipping.
One of the greatest tragedies of the 20th Century is the response of the typical evangelical to the AIDS virus. From the pulpit, it has been proclaimed as the judgment of God on the homosexual community. In our own way whether we have said it with our mouths, or reinforced it with our actions, we have made it abundantly clear to those who suffer with this disease, ‘If you got it from anything other than a transfusion, consider yourself unclean before God.’
Application: It’s time for us to change our thinking about our world. As the community we live in becomes increasingly secular, the evangelical community seems to find itself increasingly marginalized. We seem helpless in a wave of hedonism. We don’t know how to deal with the world that is beginning to show up on our doorstep. Nevertheless, Jesus would not be ineffective, Jesus would not be marginalized. What would Jesus be doing? It has always struck me as interesting that Jesus reserves condemnation for the religious establishment and preaches good news to the heathen, the pagan and the lost. My goal this evening is not to minimize sin, but to point out that to judge the sinner without offering Christ is simply to condemn them. Let’s consider the reaction of Jesus to this man.
II. The Reaction of Jesus
We know that our Bible is the most accurate book on the face of the earth. We know that it is inspired by God. We know that it is authoritative for our lives today and we know that is absolutely infallible and yet once in a while we come upon minor textual questions. One of them comes in this passage. Some of the earliest manuscripts we have say that Jesus was ‘filled with anger’ rather than ‘filled with compassion’. The reason that this matter merits a moment of consideration is because it is fairly certain that no scribe is going to change compassion to anger, but a scribe might change anger to compassion when it comes to dealing with Jesus. However, the hermeneutical evidence gives good reason to suspect that when Mark wrote this phrase he may well have said that Jesus was filled with anger.
Why would Jesus be angry? Some have suggested that Jesus had prophetic foresight of what the Leper would do and the negative effect it would have on his future ministry. But it seems as we read scripture that although Jesus had the attributes of God that would permit him foresight he chose not to exercise them on most occasions. Perhaps the better suggestion is that Jesus was righteously angry at the state in which he found this man. Here was a man who was more dead than alive. In fact, every circumstance was more like death than life. He wandered aimlessly, without friends, family, he was avoided or driven away, he had no hope of ever being made whole again… no hope until he heard about Jesus.
The Leper breaks the rules of law in coming to Jesus, but so convinced is he that Jesus can heal him that he takes the chance of approaching the Lord. “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean,” he says. It is possible that as Jesus looked at this creation which had been so terribly oppressed that he was filled with righteous anger. But the argument over the text is moot, for his very next action is an action of compassion.
“Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man, ‘I am willing,’ he said, ‘Be clean.’” There is no fear here of infection. Just as demons were forced out in the presence of this perfect man, so, disease also was driven from this leprous man, and with that touch and those words the man was immediately clean. Had this been a gentile, he would have asked simply to be healed, but as a Jew, this leper’s desire was to be clean so that he could re-enter all of Jewish life.
Jesus gives him a stern warning to go directly to the priest and to show himself to him in order to re-enter society. He also told him not to tell anyone how this had happened.
Application: If Jesus was angry at the suffering he saw, should we not too be angry at the suffering that sin and sickness cause? If Jesus was filled with compassion when he saw this man and heard his plea, should we also be filled with compassion for those who are in need? If Jesus was willing to touch the untouchable, shouldn’t we be willing to seek them out too?
III. The Result of Jesus Action
The first result was a negative one. We can hardly blame the poor leper for being unable to contain himself. Perhaps he thought Jesus was being overly humble, or perhaps he just couldn’t keep it in, but as a result of his retelling the story to everyone he met, Jesus could not openly enter the cities to preach, he was thronged on every side, in fact even as he stayed out in the wilderness the crowds flocked to him. The man who came to bring peace would have no peace himself. For according to some ancient writers, healing leprosy was considered the equivalent to raising the dead.
We should learn from Jesus that not every good work or helpful deed will result in our benefit. Many of those we seek to help will unwittingly cause damage; worse, some like Judas may even betray us. Would Jesus have helped this man if he knew the problems it would cause later? Without a doubt, it was in the nature of who Jesus was.
The second result of Jesus work is seen in his command to go and show himself to the priest and offer sacrifices. This was to be done as a sign to them. Jesus was announcing his identity to the priests in the temple if they were prepared to see it. The Old Testament left them powerless in the face of leprosy. They could only announce clean or unclean, they had no ability to change the effects of the disease. Jesus sent the leper as a proclamation that God was doing a new thing, that indeed, the prophecies were being fulfilled and the Messiah was in their midst. By declaring the man clean, they would have to state that Jesus had worked a miracle, by refusing to declare him clean they would be contradicted by what was clear for all to see.
The final result is not stated explicitly in the texts, but well we might assume that after being declared clean by the priest, this man, once a leper condemned to wander in the wilderness alone, was welcomed again into community life and worship. Jesus had restored this man to life.
Conclusion: Why spend so much time comparing this passage to the AIDS community tonight? Surely there are other communities in need of healing. Yes, but none is so ostracized as the AIDS community by the church. That needs to change. If Jesus were here today, I imagine that he would stop by Casey House for a visit. Jesus never minimizes the effect or severity of sin, but his very presence offers redemption. His message was repent, his action was restore. Thankfully, I can tell you that as of this past year Casey House has hired a young Christian woman as one of their counselors. What better place for the good news of Jesus to be proclaimed, but to those without hope, without future and without Christ.
Let me challenge each of us to make a greater effort to discover how we can carry the message of Christ forward in word and deed into a new culture. Let us encourage our youth to consider missions work in the urban centres of Canada, and let us consider whether we might find and support missionaries who are working in these settings, for indeed this is where the message of the gospel is needed most.
