Week 22 ———  Jesus Cleanses Someone You Thought Had Leprosy
Matthew 8:1-4,  Mark 1:40-45,  Luke 5:12-15

This entry is the text of a sermon I gave this past week at the first meeting of an annual Camp Meeting we have attended for many years. (It is my favorite ten days of the year.)  It will read a little differently than my usual blog (including an invitation.)  

Jesus just finished the sermon on the Mount on this day, 1997 years ago. What does he do next?

In the sermon, he describes just who will be the initial people of his kingdom—and they are the people no one would expect. He explains God’s heart behind the Old Testament law, teaches them to pray, and tells them how to be members of God’s kingdom and how to act in God’s kingdom. 

Now, he will demonstrate what he just taught them because actions speak louder than words.   Actions teach better than words. Sunday school teachers, are you listening? Small group leaders, did you hear that?   Pastors?   You can give a well-crafted lesson or sermon, but people will learn more from watching how you live your life than they will ever learn from what you say.  Sometimes, we who preach spend too much time talking and not enough time letting people see how we live it out.  If we aren’t demonstrating what we are saying, then why would anyone listen?  Matthew reports what Jesus taught in chapters 5-7. The following two chapters will be about how Jesus lives it out — demonstrating his teaching by action.

So, let’s join the crowd following Jesus down the mountain.  His first encounter after the sermon is an important one, where Jesus will first put his words into practice.  So walk down the mountain with me, and let’s see who Jesus first meets after he preaches these messages:

Matthew 8:1-4
When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”

Okay, Jesus heals a leper. It’s a great story. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Let’s sing a song and eat some ice cream. Not so fast, my friends. I want to give you some context. I want you to see this story like Andrew, Simon, and the crowds saw it.

First, I must put my doctor’s hat on for just a minute.  Matthew tells us a man with leprosy comes to Jesus.  Well, that is not exactly what Matthew said.  You can read much about leprosy in the Old Testament — except it is not leprosy.  When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek about 250-200 BC (the Septuagint or LXX), the Hebrew word ‘Tsa’arat’ was translated as ‘lepra.’   That was a good word choice because ‘lepra’ was the Greek word Hippocrates used to describe a variety of relatively minor skin disorders (eczema, psoriasis, vitiligo, scurvy), all of which involved flaking skin or whitening of the skin. Now, fast forward to 383 AD, and Jerome, a Bible scholar, is translating the Bible into Latin. He translated the Greek word ‘lepra’ into ‘leprosy,’ the Latin word for a very different disease.  It was an honest mistake.  ‘lepra’ and ‘leprosy’ sound similar. 

But Tsa’arat or lepra has nothing to do with what we call leprosy or Hansen’s Disease today.   Hansen’s disease did not exist in the Middle East until over 1000 years after the time of Leviticus and Moses.  Tsa’arat in the Bible is described as white, flaky skin, occasionally with white hair within it.  Modern leprosy lesions are always dark, never white.  Tsa’arat in the Bible can affect buildings and clothing.  Hansen’s Disease is caused by a bacteria.  It cannot affect inanimate objects.  They are entirely different diseases.

So, Jerome’s simple mistake in 383 AD led to a tremendous misidentification. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate became the primary Bible for over 1,000 years and is still used today in the Catholic Church. This incorrect translation persists today, even in modern biblical translations done in the past ten years.  Even though we know better now, they still keep the mistranslation going.  Tradition wins over correctness again.

So, the man Jesus encounters in Matthew 8 coming down from the mountain does not have the contagious, disfiguring disease we know today as leprosy. He had tsa’arat, or lepra, a skin disease with white, flaky skin that was not contagious.  Yes, the skin lesions were not contagious.   You could not catch it from touching someone.²

Why, then, do we have all these Bible stories of people with tsa’arat having to live outside the camps if it is not contagious?  Why were they avoided as if they had the plague?  Why couldn’t they go into the Temple?  Why is it such a big deal for Jesus to touch this man in Matthew 8?

Because it is not about a contagious medical problem; it is all about ritual purity.   Now, bear with me a bit here because ritual purity is something we poorly understand. If you want to understand anything in the Bible, you have to go back to the beginning. 

God designed a world where he could dwell with us.  The Garden was made for man to dwell with God.  But man chose to sin, and the earth became a place of sin and death — no longer a place where man could dwell with God.  So, the Garden was shut down.  The rest of the Bible after Genesis 3 is the story of God’s plan to return the world to a place where he could dwell with mankind.  God chose one man, Abraham, to build a nation that would be a nation of priests to teach all the other nations about God.  They end up as enslaved people in Egypt.  God rescues them and leads them to a mountain. (I’ll bet you saw that movie.)  There, God enters into a covenant with them.  He wants to restore that Eden relationship with man.  So God tells Moses on Mount Sinai, “Build me a tabernacle that I may dwell…in it”…. No! Not that God may dwell ‘in it’… but God says, “Build me a tabernacle that I may dwell with you.” (Exodus 25:8). God wants to dwell with man.

But there must be some rules if God is going to dwell with man. To see those rules, we go back to your favorite book of the Bible, Leviticus:

Leviticus 11:44-45   For I am Yehovah your God. Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not make yourselves unclean with any defiling things.  For I am Yehovah who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.”

The key word in this passage: ‘holy.’   And in this passage, we see that the opposite of holy is ‘unclean.’  God is holy and will place himself in the middle of Israel, so they must be holy, too.  We think of holiness more in terms of morality, and that is a part of it.  But ‘holiness’ carries more of an idea of being unique, set apart, and pure.

There are two types of impurity in the Bible, and if you don’t understand this, then you will misunderstand a lot of what Jesus says because he talks about impurity a lot.  There is moral impurity and ritual impurity.

Moral impurity is the result of sin. If you never sin, you are morally pure; if you sin, you become morally impure. We understand this. Moral impurity is not contagious. The person sitting beside you can’t spread their sin to you by touching you.  Moral impurity is cured by punishment or atonement. The wages of sin is death.  

Ritual impurity is very different.  First of all, ritual impurity is not sinful.  You don’t become ritually impure by sinning, and it is not sinful to be ritually impure.  Ritual impurity is unavoidable.  Everyone who lives life will become ritually unclean.

Numbers 5:1  Yehovah spoke to Moses, saying, “Command the people of Israel that they put out of the camp everyone who is leprous or has a discharge and everyone who is unclean through contact with the dead.” 

You can become ritually impure by touching a dead body, touching bodily fluids, and tsa’arat.  All these things represent corruption or death.¹  And death is foreign to God.  He created a world without death.  Death was not to be a part of the world he made.  Death is not part of who God is.  So you don’t bring death or the forces of death into God’s presence. To enter the temple in an impure state was a sin.  Again, it is not sinful to be ritually impure unless you go in that state into the temple.   And unlike moral impurity, ritual impurity is spread by contact.  If you touch the fluids, if you touch a corpse, if you touch someone with tsa’arat, then you become ritually impure.  

  The cure for ritual impurity was simple:  washing with water and a time of waiting.  However, everyday activities in life would routinely cause people to become ritually impure again.  So they set up these pools to immerse themselves (mikveh) all around the temple, so everyone would ritually wash before entering the temple, in case they had become ritually impure.  Unless you had tsa’arat, the skin disease.  You couldn’t be clean as long as you had the skin lesions.  So, people with tsa’arat could never enter the temple.  They could never go in and sing the psalms of praise.  They couldn’t make an offering to atone for their sin.  They were banned from God’s presence.  And no one would touch them.

Now, that all sounds a little weird to us.  But you need to realize that every time you open your Bible to read, you are traveling to a foreign country with a different culture.  Now if I travel to Boston and make fun of them and call them ignorant because they don’t have sweet iced tea or grits, and they talk funny, then you call me a dumb intolerant hick from Alabama.  Just because a culture is different doesn’t mean it’s wrong.  Every culture has standards of purity and defilement.   The Hindu will not touch people of lower caste.  Certain sicknesses are taboo to touch in many societies.  Come on, it hasn’t been that long since COVID-19.  “Keep 6 feet away from people.”  “Wear masks.” “Don’t breathe their air.  “Don’t touch them.”  I half expected to see people out in public ringing a bell, “Unclean, Unclean!”   We became very good at fearing medical impurity.  (If only we feared moral impurity with such commitment.)

I have seen people afraid to touch some of our homeless people. I understand. Several times, I picked up homeless hitchhikers, and about 30 seconds later, I realized that I was going to be reminded of their journey with me every time I got in my truck for the next several months. Some odors really linger. 

You may think you have trouble grasping the concept of a holy set aside place where you must be clean to enter.   But there is a unique set-aside place in my hospital.  We call it the operating room.  And it is a place to promote life.  It is a place where the forces of death are defeated, and life is brought into the world.  But not just anyone can go walking in there. There are barriers.  You have to wear special clothes (scrubs), special head coverings, masks, and gloves, and everyone must wash away all uncleanness thoroughly before entering.  It is a unique set-aside place.  Maybe it is not so strange a concept.

When the Israelites were taken captive in Babylon for 70 years and the temple was destroyed, there became much more focus on ritual impurity over moral impurity.  After all, they couldn’t deal with any moral impurity (sin) because there was no temple at which to sacrifice.  But they could still concentrate on the ritual impurity because there was water to cleanse in Babylon.  When they returned and rebuilt the temple, then sin sacrifices could resume, but the focus on ritual impurity remained through the days of Jesus.  But the biggest deal for God was always moral impurity.  It was sin that caused death and the separation of men from God.  

So God wants to dwell among Israel in the Tabernacle.  But there were barriers— fabric walls around the tabernacle with only one opening.  You had to be ritually pure to enter.  Then, there was a holy place where only the priest could go after they washed in the bronze basin.  A barrier of thick curtain, a veil, separated the holy place from the most sacred place that contained the ‘mercy seat’ for the presence of God.  

The religious leaders liked these barriers.  They liked them so much that they created more when they built the temple.  They constructed a five-foot-high wall to keep Gentiles from coming too close to the temple, under threat of death.  (One of the signs listing the threat of death to Gentiles that entered was recently found by archeologists.)   Women could go a little further, but not where the men could go, not where the ‘real worship business,’ the sacrifices were made.  Men can go where the offerings were made, but only priests can go further, and then, as in the Tabernacle, only the high priest can enter the holiest place through the veil.   

There were barriers.  (By the way, ladies, that whole ‘court of women’ thing was not God’s idea.  God never prescribes it in the Bible. It is the creation of man. (So don’t blame God for that.)

Enter Jesus.  Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus breaking down barriers of anything that separated people from God.  Jesus goes charging down the mountain after the sermon on the mount, and the first person he runs into has a skin disease; he is unclean.  He has not been able to go to the temple for a long time, and unless his skin disease is cured, he never will again.  He is an outcast by the religious leaders. He is outcast by the people, but he is not outcast by Jesus.   What does he say to Jesus, “If you are able, you can make me clean.”  No, that is not what he says.  He says, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”  See, this man has no doubt that Jesus has the power to make him clean.  He is just not sure Jesus is willing to do it.  His past experience with holy men was that they walked a wide berth around him.  They give him the Covid 6 feet.  They don’t give him the time of day.  They ignore him.   If robbers beat him up and he was lying half-dead on the side of the road to Jericho and these holy men came by, they would just leave him there on the side of the road because they didn’t want to become ritually impure.  (That would make a good story.)

I see this in some of our neighbors without homes today—they know the church can help them; they know the church is able to help them, but they have had some past experiences with church people who ignored them and were afraid to touch them.  They are not sure if the church is willing to help them, so they stay away.  They are like the man in Matthew 8 who is wondering, ‘Does Jesus care about me? ‘Is he willing to cleanse me?’

Let me make this easy for you. Jesus is always willing to help you. I don’t care how unclean you think you are or how much sin you have committed.  Jesus is always willing.

He runs down that mountain. He can’t wait until he finds a man with tsa’arat so he can show the people the power of the Gospel.  Jesus is not afraid of this man.  And Jesus doesn’t stop there.  The next thing he does is offer to go to a Gentile Roman soldier’s house to heal his servant.  The crowd gasps.  ‘Go to a Gentile’s house?  No way, Jesus, they are so unclean!’  And then, in the next chapter of Matthew, Jesus is on his way to a dead girl’s room — What?  That is the worst form of uncleanness!   But on his way, the woman with the issue of blood touches the tassel on his garment. 

Do you see what Matthew is doing here?  He has shown Jesus face down all the causes of uncleanness known in the two chapters following the sermon on the mount.  Jesus is breaking down all the barriers that keep people from God.  He is not just talking about it; he is doing it.  

Now, don’t get from this that Jesus is throwing away the purity laws.  Jesus doesn’t think the laws from Leviticus were wrong or bad.   He wrote the laws; he gave Moses the purity laws. He tells the man who is unclean from skin disease to obey the law of Moses and show himself to the priest. This is important: Jesus doesn’t do away with the laws of impurity; he does away with impurity itself.  

When Jesus reaches out and touches the man with the skin disease, you can almost hear the crowd gasp.  Because they thought the man’s uncleanness would make Jesus unclean.  But it didn’t.  Because when Jesus touched the man, his skin disease was gone.  Jesus didn’t touch a man with tsa’arat.  He touched a man who had been cleansed of tsa’arat.  Jesus didn’t get contaminated by the woman with the issue of blood.  Because that is not who grabbed his tassel; it was a woman who had been healed, a woman who used to have a problem that Jesus took care of.  Jesus didn’t touch a corpse; he touched a girl who was dead but was now alive. Every time Jesus encounters a corpse, it comes to life.  Jesus was not afraid of ritual impurity because he took away the cause of the impurity.  

And we need not fear ritual impurity today; that same power of Jesus, the same power that took away uncleanness, the same power that raised Jesus from the grave, lives in us.  Jesus overcomes all uncleanness.  And this should not have surprised anyone. The prophets had predicted a time when all uncleanness would be dealt with: 

Ezekiel 36:25-29    I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from fall your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. (moral and ritual impurity)  And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. .. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. 

It is the same way with moral impurity.   Jesus is not scared of sin.  You may have heard before, “God can not stand sin in his presence.”  That is not Biblical.  You may have heard that God turned his back on Jesus when Jesus took on our sins on the cross.  Jesus shouted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”   Jesus wasn’t saying God forsook him.  He was quoting Psalm 22.  (Remember, they didn’t have chapter numbers in Jesus’ day.  He couldn’t say, “Hey, remember Psalm 22.”  So their method of pointing someone to a particular passage of the Bible was to quote the first line.)  Look it up.  Psalm 22 is the story of the crucifixion.  The Psalm says, “For God has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted one and he has not hidden his face from him, [he has not turned his back on him.] but had heard when he cried to him.”  The Psalm tells us Jesus was not forsaken but would be vindicated, and all the nations will come and praise the Lord because God has done this great thing.  The Psalm ends with this one Hebrew word, ‘Asah,’ which can be translated: ‘He has done this,’ or as Jesus said, “It has been done (finished).”

How can you say God cannot stand sin in his presence?  God put his Tabernacle right in the middle of the children of Israel.  Do you think they were without sin?   God looked at this sinful, lost world.  He didn’t stay away from this world of sin; he chose to enter it himself as a baby.  Jesus is not scared of sin.  He runs down the mountain, looking for the worst sinners he can find to build his kingdom.  He is walking through Jericho and finds the most wicked cheating businessman he can.  He invites himself over to Zacchaeus’ house.  The crowd grumbles, but Zacchaeus repents of cheating people and vows to repay them plus more.  And then Jesus says, “The son of man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”  Jesus came seeking out sin.  Jesus doesn’t avoid sinners because he conquers sin.  Jesus doesn’t avoid touching corpses because he conquers death.  

Do you sometimes feel distant from God?  Do you feel like some sin you have committed makes God want to be distanced from you?  What is it that separates us from God?  Sin?  God says no, I have that covered.  What keeps God out of my life is not my sin.  What keeps God out of my life is I don’t make space for him.  If we make space for God, he will fill it.  God told the Israelites, “Build me a tabernacle that I may dwell with you.”  If they don’t build a space for God, then he can’t dwell with them.  If you don’t make room for Jesus in your heart, he can’t dwell with you.  If you don’t make room for God in your life, then he cannot be a part of your life. From the beginning of time, God’s desire was to live with his children and walk with them as he did in the Garden.  

Jesus came to break down those barriers.  On the cross, he broke the last one, the biggest one.  When he died, that last barrier, that thick veil in the temple that separated all people from the place reserved for God the holy of holy place, That veil tore in two top to bottom, letting you know that the barriers are all down. 

 Being a Gentile will not keep you from God, being unclean will not keep you from God, and being a woman will not keep you further away than men.  The veil is torn.  God has left the building.  His presence will not be contained in a small room that only the high priest can enter.   Sin will not keep you from God. Death will not keep you from God. God will live with you, within you, if only you will make a place.

Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount over several days. The sermon begins with Jesus teaching his disciples, but as he teaches, the crowds gather.  People gather from all over, coming together to hear messages from God.   And here we are today, 1997 years later, gathered from all over.  We will listen to messages from God this week.  When this week is over, we will leave here.  This week comes and goes — as the sermon on the mount did almost 2000 years ago last week.

We can leave this place in 10 days, as some left the sermon on the mount.  Some left saying, “I like that line about the ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”   “And that prayer he taught was nice.  Short and sweet.  Yeah, Jesus did a good job; let’s invite him back and do this again next year.” You can leave this meeting like that, saying it was a good meeting with some good sermons.  It was hot as Hades, but the music was good.  You can leave here feeling good but not be changed.  Or you can be like that crowd after the sermon on the mount who decided they needed more Jesus; like them, you can follow Jesus down the mountain to see what he will do next.  When we leave here in 10 days, and you are traveling down from this mountaintop experience, I will pray that God puts somebody right in front of you that the world thinks is unclean.  I’m praying that God stops you in your tracks so you have an opportunity to live out your faith.

For so many years, I think we have left this place and left blessings on the table. There is so much God wants to give us, but we come and listen and go. You can leave this meeting in 10 days just exactly as you came, or you can leave with a renewed spirit, a renewed energy to live as Jesus wants you to live, a renewed knowledge of scripture, a renewed heart for people, and a renewed dedication to do life differently. Jesus would call it doing life abundantly.

Right now you can decide how you will leave in 10 days.  You can make the most out of this time with Jesus or let it pass by.  We are going to sing, and our altar is open.  Maybe you have never made space in your life for Jesus.  Perhaps today is the day you open your heart to the one who can cleanse you.  Maybe you just want to come and say to God and everyone that you want to dedicate this time to God as a time for you to grow as a disciple.  Whatever God has laid on your heart, you are welcome. 

Jesus is always willing, are you?

1.   Why these three things?  They all represent corruption or death.  Touching a corpse is self-explanatory, but bodily fluids?  These are particular bodily fluids that are a part of the formation of life (semen, menstrual flow, etc.)  Tim Mackie of the Bible Project explained it as well as I have heard, and I paraphrase:  ‘If you and another person both spit on the ground, then new humans don’t spring up there.  So saliva is not a special fluid and will not make you unclean.  But bodily fluids that are involved in the production of life are included.  Life is sacred, and there is something unclean with encountering these fluids outside the place where they are involved in creating life.’  Tsa’arat represents a corruption of normal skin and is included for that reason.  I don’t expect you to understand exactly how that works, for this concept was formed in a completely different culture, and we will likely never understand.  (And that is okay.  I also don’t know why a “thumbs up” sign is seen as a positive response in the US but interpreted differently in parts of Africa.)
2. One of the diseases Hippocrates included in his ‘lepra’ category of skin diseases that whitened skin was fungal diseases.  Some of these can occasionally spread from person to person, but never by incidental contact, only by prolonged, close contact.