It’s a picture every Sunday School child carries in living color in his or her mind – the leper walking down a dusty road forced forever to cry, “Unclean, unclean!” (13: 45). As a kid we think, “What a miserable life!” The life of the leper was an indescribably sad agony of emotional deprivation, relational isolation and physical pain. One of the reasons so much focus is placed on leprosy and other skin diseases in Leviticus is that this illness paints a canvass of the corrupting cancer of sin in our lives (cf. Isa. 1: 6). Leprosy radicalizes the life and so does sin. Leprosy contaminates the life and so does sin. Leprosy isolates the life and so does sin. Leprosy alienates the life and so does sin.
The parallels with our sin probably account, in part, for the multiple occasions on which our Lord healed lepers (Matt. 11: 5; Mk. 1: 40 – 45; Lk. 17: 11 – 19). One of the most touching scenes in the Gospels is when the pleading leper appears before Jesus and [m]oved with compassion, Jesus reached out His hand and touched him (Mk. 1: 41). How long had it been since this ostracized man had felt a human touch? Could he feel our Lord’s hand through the thick, leathery excuse for skin now covering much of his body? Whether he felt the touch physically he no doubt felt it in his heart. For him it would have been a miracle of indescribable proportions just to experience the Savior’s touch.
The good news is that when touched by the Savior we receive more than a heart warming experience. The touch of Jesus is transformative. Immediately the disease left him (Mk. 1: 42). Under Levitical Law several steps were necessary to be pronounced clean from leprosy. The priest must approach the leper (14: 3). Our priest, the Lord Jesus, traveled all the way from heaven to the Cross to meet us at the point of our need. Sacrifices were offered (14: 4 – 7). Jesus is our full and final sacrifice. The leper must be washed (14: 8 – 9). We have been washed…in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 6: 11). Back in the camp, the former leper offered a restitution offering (14: 12) to express his thankfulness to the Lord. Through Jesus we continually offer up to God a sacrifice of praise (Heb. 13: 15). The blood and the oil were applied to the ears, hands and feet of the cleansed man signifying God’s ownership of all his life. Jesus claimed all our life by His Cross (1 Cor. 6: 20).
It was a lengthy ordeal for the leper to walk through the painstaking steps of Leviticus 14 but Jesus accomplished them all for Mark’s leper immediately just as he did when we were alienated from God and others by the leprosy of lawlessness. No more do we cry from the tortured chambers of our hearts, “Unclean, unclean!”