The Outcasts Restored

Returning to the gospels, the centrepiece of the Bible, the account of Jesus, His life and His ministry. And we come to a very famous part in His ministry, the healing of a leper. And we'll read that now, from Luke chapter five, verses 12 to 16. In the ESV, the title here is Jesus cleanses a leper. Luke five, verse 12.

While He, who is Jesus, was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, 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, the leprosy left him. And He charged him to tell no one, but go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to them.

But now, even more, the report about him, who is Jesus, went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. But He would withdraw to desolate places and pray. This is the word of the Lord. In a couple of weeks' time, I am going to attend the twentieth reunion of me finishing high school. That is how old I am.

Twenty years of having graduated from high school. It means ten years ago, we had our tenth reunion. And it was a particularly fascinating event to see the reversal that happened after ten years of being out and about, you know, studying and working and so on. Where I saw all the kids who were bullied in those years of high school, having become the ones that were well adjusted, highly paid, well educated. And the ones that did the bullying, the opposite.

We've probably seen sort of Hollywood stories that show that happening, and it's a fascinating thing to notice, to see that all the nerds were the ones that were the winners. All the ones that were picked on were the champions. I really look forward to seeing ten years on where those guys are at now. Reunions are the context to seeing what happened to the outcasts. And there is no greater characteristic of being outcast in the Bible than being a leper, which is what our story is about today.

Leprosy in biblical times referred to something probably broader than what we today call leprosy, which is Hansen's disease, most commonly, which is a seriously disfiguring disease that affects the nerves in the human body. Leprosy in biblical times referred to that, but probably much more things that were visibly shown on the skin. When we read leprosy or leper in the New Testament, therefore, we can assume that it was probably referring to a number of painful conditions in the day. This leprosy, however, posed a serious threat to the health, the communal health of society in those days, because while leprosy or Hansen's disease is well treated today, can be easily treated today, diseases of that sort two thousand years ago and longer were untreatable. It meant that so-called lepers of the day were treated as outcasts to protect the rest of society.

We've tasted, we've experienced something similar to that idea with COVID recently. Right? The quarantining of sick people or potentially sick people. Now, the kernel of this treatment, the treatment of these people with these particular skin conditions, in Jesus' time, had come from way back in the Old Testament. We find a prescription of how the nation of Israel were to treat and curb the spread of this type of skin disease from Leviticus 13.

Here, Leviticus 13, verses 45 to 46, gives us an idea of what God commanded Israel to do when it came to this disease. The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of His head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, unclean, unclean. He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean, he shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.

Camp. So this person had to dress shabbily, their hair had to be unkempt, and they had to cover their upper lip, which probably meant to have a mask. Again, just like we had with COVID. And they had to warn people by saying to them, I am unclean. In other words, don't come near me, you might get sick.

Now, according to New Testament scholars, their concern about these sorts of communicable skin diseases addressed in the law, the concern about them had reached a fever pitch by the time we get to Jesus. It was almost, you can say, how the media hunts, you know, smallpox at the moment and COVID. It was that sort of hysteria in the time of Jesus. Throughout the gospel accounts of Jesus, we see the Pharisees and the religious leaders being obsessed with categorising everyone and everything in two categories: clean or unclean. Now, these extra biblical regulations, so these decisions of how to treat clean or unclean people, didn't come from the Bible, so to speak.

It came from these so-called religious leaders. They prescribed all sorts of things of how to treat these lepers. For example, in the time of Jesus, we have rabbis teaching things like this: how a leper could attend a synagogue on the Sabbath day. Historical evidence shows that the Pharisees decided that a leper could attend the synagogue very graciously, only if, however, they were the first to enter the building and the last to leave. So many of us here who turn up ten minutes after nine couldn't come to church if you were a leper.

First to enter, the last to leave. They had to sit in special compartments in the synagogue building. They couldn't leave that area, and they had to stay, interestingly, four cubits away from anyone else, which is two metres now. So, you know, COVID's treatment is biblical. To a leper, the curse of having this disease was almost unbearable.

It was a terrible thing to have this leprosy. In fact, in all the biblical history we have, before we get to Jesus, only two people in the entire Old Testament were healed of leprosy. Firstly, we hear of Miriam, who had leprosy for seven days as a punishment for speaking against Moses' leadership in Numbers 12. And then, the second account is of a man called Naaman, who was the general of the Syrian army in the time of Elisha. If you remember the story, Naaman was told by Elisha to go and wash himself seven times in the Jordan River.

And the Gentile, the Syrian Naaman, believed Elisha, bathed himself seven times in the river, and was healed of leprosy. But it means that by the time we get to Jesus, it had been eight hundred years since anyone had seen anything close to a healing of a leper. Jesus, in the chapter just before we get to Luke five, in chapter four, Luke four, Jesus says that the reason for the lack of the healing of leprosy was as a result of the hardness of God's people towards God. It was as a result of Israel's hardness of heart. Have a quick skim there, and you'll see that after some of the people doubted Jesus' miracles and His teaching, after looking to one another and saying, isn't this the son of Joseph, the carpenter?

I mean, what is going on here? This guy is doing the strangest things. Jesus replies to them and said, a prophet isn't accepted in his hometown. And in order to rebuke their unbelief and the fact that they were simply being as hard-hearted as their forefathers were to the amazing work that God was starting to do among them, Jesus says in Luke four, verse 27, there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian. At this, we are told that when the people heard it, all of the people in the synagogue were filled with wrath.

They took Jesus to the top of a cliff to throw him off it. But Jesus miraculously just walked through the crowd, and no one laid a hand on Him. Why am I telling you this? Because by the time we get to the leper in chapter five, all eyes are on Jesus. The local hysteria about leprosy, of what is clean and unclean, what is morally acceptable and what is cursed, and the long silence between God's miraculous healing of people through the prophets like Elijah and Elisha.

And then here at Jesus' piercing accusation that those who doubted Him were no better than their forefathers who didn't see God's miraculous intervention due to the hardness of their hearts, but that God, in fact, healed a Gentile instead of the Jew. All of those things are coming to a head when this leper approaches Jesus and says, please heal me. All the eyes are focused on Jesus. And the question is, what will He do now? So we see the unclean, and then we come to a bold request in verse 12.

Jesus has just left the town of Capernaum, and He stops in another unnamed town in Galilee. A man with leprosy approaches Him. And Luke, the physician, tells us a detail that the other accounts don't tell us: that he was full of leprosy. That's a diagnostic, that's a detail that only a doctor will make. He was full of leprosy. He was a man with a far advanced disease.

And again, you can just imagine the scene if you understand the outcast status of this man. You can imagine that he was probably sitting around the outskirts of town, disfigured, dressed in tattered clothing, a mouth covered by a mask, and the stench of rotting skin emanating from him. All day, he had been circling the edge of town. And when he finally sees the form of Jesus, he knew this was his chance. Perhaps he had heard of the man Jesus in his teaching, who had said incredible things about what God was about to do.

Perhaps he had heard of the whispers of miraculous healings. But he is compelled to go to Jesus. It was all or nothing. And as he approached Jesus through the crowd, you can just imagine that crowd parting like the Red Sea, two metres away. Two metres away.

Perhaps they smelt him before they saw him, but the people pull away in disgust. But he wasn't simply a great risk to them. He himself was at great risk. His brazen act of coming so close to the town and to its people probably would have meant that he would have been severely beaten. If no one came close enough to beat him with sticks or whatever, he would have been hurled at with rocks.

He was at risk for this audacious act. But if Jesus could heal him, then he's willing to bear any punishment. And as he gets to Jesus, he falls on his hands and his knees. He pushes his face into the dirt, and he makes his request. If you are willing, you can make me clean.

Think about that request. It's surprising. He is the first account according to all three gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke of a leper being healed in the ministry of Jesus. In other words, there is no precedent for him to be this confident that Jesus can heal him. So you have to ask yourself, what evidence did he really have to make this request?

You could understand the confidence: if you are willing, you can make me clean. If he had heard of a hundred lepers being healed by Jesus. But at this stage, there had been no healings, no cures for lepers in eight hundred years since the time of the great prophet Elisha. Now, this is probably where the rabbis of Jesus' time and what they said comes to the fore.

They used to say, in Jesus' time, it is easier to raise the dead than to heal a leper. Now, some scholars believe that saying came from what the king of Israel said in the time of Elisha. When the king of Syria, being very concerned about his army general Naaman, wrote to the king of Israel to say, I know that there is a great prophet in your land. Can he heal my man Naaman? And the king of Israel said this at the time, am I God to kill and make alive that this man sends word to me to cure a man of leprosy? Leprosy.

In other words, he equates the healing of leprosy to the raising of the dead. It is that difficult. And you can imagine that people in Jesus' day had tried to help lepers. It was their brothers, their sisters, their children that had leprosy. You can imagine the priests would have dearly wanted these poor people to be clean, to restore them back to society when they came in, were to be certified as being healed or clean.

They had tried. And you can just imagine the difficulty of having to say to someone, I'm sorry, but you haven't recovered. Go back to the caves. Neither the law of Moses, the priests, nor the rabbis could do anything for them. They only were ever condemned.

So it is truly remarkable, and you can only conclude it was a faith given supernaturally, that this man falls at the feet of Jesus and professes, you can make me clean, if you are willing. So was Jesus willing? If the bold request from the man with leprosy was a surprise, then Jesus' response was even more surprising. Verse 13 tells us that Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him and said, I am willing. Be clean.

Now, it's surprising that Jesus did this because on the one hand, Jesus, who was quickly gaining a following as one of the great rabbis of his time, masterful teacher, Jesus was the perfect rabbi. He dared to touch an unclean leper. In the feverish hysteria of the day, determining what was clean and unclean, and attaching moral weight, moral significance behind it, Jesus daring to potentially become unclean for ministering to this man, well, was outrageous. Unheard of.

What rabbi would do that? But on the other hand, this is even more surprising when you realise that Jesus, in the power that He had, didn't even need to touch him. There are many other occasions where Jesus healed with a word. Jesus could have said to the man, I'm willing, be clean. But Jesus chooses to touch the man.

A picture speaks a thousand words, but in this moment, a touch speaks even more. For a man who had lost the touch of his entire family, the hugs of all his friends, a man condemned to live in lonely places, shunned by the healthy, untouched by the spiritually clean, with a stench of death and disease heavy upon him, the touch of Jesus was unmistakable. The feel of His hand against his skin would have shocked him as if he had been zapped by electricity.

And Luke records simply that at that touch, the leprosy immediately left him. Can you imagine a man who before was covered with sores and lesions, a man Luke describes as full of leprosy? His skin is clear and unblemished. Cleansed is the right word. And there is a gasp, you can imagine, among the bystanders: this man is healed.

A leper in Israel has been healed. Who is this Jesus that when He touches the unclean, He doesn't become unclean Himself? The unclean becomes clean. But we aren't even finished with the surprises because, lastly, Jesus gives this man a surprising command. He tells him to go and show himself to the priest, give sacrifices at the temple, and prove to them that he is cleansed.

Now, the Greek word that Luke uses here is a strong one. It's parangello, which means to command, to direct, to give orders, and it was to not tell anyone what Jesus had done for him, but simply to go and be restored to society. Now, according to the Mosaic Law, the one that I referenced in Leviticus before, in order to be restored, and there was a path to restoration that was available to people with leprosy. In order to be restored back to society, you had to be certified by a priest that you no longer had the symptoms of the disease. And once you were declared clean, you could then go and make a sacrifice at the temple to be ceremonially reunited with God and God's people, to be restored as clean. Jesus, in His ministry, was often accused by the Pharisees and the teachers of the law as seeking to abolish God's law.

But here, He upholds it strictly. We know that Jesus never actually nullified the law. He never broke the law. He never called for people to break it. In fact, He said that not a single jot or a single tittle would be removed from the law until heaven or earth had passed away.

Not a dot or a stroke would be removed from what God had written. Throughout His life, He perfectly obeyed God's law. So why do I say it's surprising that Jesus strictly commanded the man to stay quiet and to go throughout all the processes of being restored to God's law? Because in that healing, Jesus showed Himself to be far greater than any rabbi, any teacher of the law. He showed in that moment that He is a prophet greater than Elisha.

He healed the leper when the rabbi said, it is easier to raise the dead. And Jesus touched the leper when the Pharisees were saying that the law would make someone morally unclean for touching them. But instead, Jesus doesn't become unclean Himself. By His power, He makes the leper clean. And all of that points to this conclusion.

Jesus is above the law. You could at least think that. With all that power, Jesus could be above the law, and yet He directs the man to obeying the law, and He tells the man that His healing is a proof that God has intervened. Can you imagine what a stir it must have been for that ex-leper to appear at the Temple of Jerusalem demanding a certificate of cleansing and offering sacrifices at the holy temple? Jesus' command sends two signals.

Firstly, to Jesus' high regard for God's law: that He is not going to abolish anything. He's going to fulfil it. But also a testimony to the authorities in Jerusalem of this, that the messianic kingdom had come. The kingdom of God is at hand, as He had said. And this is ultimately what Jesus was pointing us to.

Blessed is the one who is not offended by me. Well, we see Jesus right after healing this man and commanding him not to tell anyone about it. Well, that guy doesn't obey that. He obeys the cleansing, you know, this getting a certificate to be cleansed, but he goes and tells everyone the story of his cleansing. And it means that more and more people come to Jesus to be healed, Luke tells us.

But verse 16 then goes on to say that Jesus removed Himself from those people and He would go into desolate places to pray. Why? Why would Jesus not give Himself over to the people? Why would He not place Himself at their disposal? Because there was a greater purpose for Jesus than healing people.

As Noland in his commentary writes, to be a successful preacher and healer does not achieve the goal of Jesus' ministry. Jesus' goal was not centred on healing us physically. Jesus' main ministry wasn't even to give us really good words of loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek. The goal of Jesus was the journey on which He fixed His eyes even in that moment, which was the cross. Jesus, in other words, wouldn't allow Himself to be glued down in one place, serving one group of people.

A couple of chapters later, while Jesus is still in the region of Galilee, the northern parts of Judea, Jesus gives us a hint of what the healing of the leper here was really pointing to. In Luke seven, the disciples of the great John the Baptist, who was a contemporary of Jesus, his disciples come to Jesus and ask him, Lord, are you the one that we are expecting? In other words, are you the Messiah? Jesus, in his characteristic way, doesn't say yes or no. He simply says this to them.

Luke 7:22 and 23. Go and tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk and lepers are cleansed. The deaf hear. The dead are raised up.

The poor have good news preached to them. And then He said, blessed is the one who is not offended by me. What Jesus is saying in that moment? He's saying, yes, I am the one that was meant to come. He's saying that the age of the kingdom of God has arrived.

The great reversal, the great blessing, the great restoration of all the things that are dead and dying as a result of the curse of our brokenness and sin, that is being healed, that is being restored. You see the blind being healed and the lepers being cleansed, the dead being raised, they were not the final objectives. They were the symptoms pointing to a deeper reality that Jesus was ushering in the restoration of life. And the truth of this was seen in the restoration of the things that were fallen and broken. Blindness, deafness, leprosy, death, they were all shown to be wound back by Jesus to point to Him as the one and only king of this new kingdom.

And the root of all those things that are dead and dying, as we read in Romans, is this power called sin. It was to cure sin that Jesus had come, and He needed to go to the cross to accomplish that. That's why Jesus ominously added, blessed is the one who is not offended by me, to John's disciples. Why? Because the idea that Jesus could be the Messiah, that Jesus could be the saviour that would turn back the things that are dead and dying to bring in eternal life, that was outrageous and offensive, as much back then as it is today.

The irony is, however, the one who wasn't offended by the leper approaching Him, He became offensive to everyone else. But today, we hear that for the lepers who have eyes to see, for the unclean among us, those who realise that they are spiritual lepers, outcasts from God, stinking of sin and death. To those who mysteriously, but unmistakably, know Jesus is the answer to a problem I'm not even sure of myself. To those ones Jesus says, you are blessed. If you are not offended by me, to turn your back, if you will come to me, you are blessed.

For the kingdom of God belongs to you. Some of us listening this morning are painfully unaware of our uncleanness. You are so aware of your disease. I wanna tell you that today you need to know that Jesus is not just gracious enough for you to be near Him, to come into His building and to sort of just skirt along the edges. Jesus stretches out to touch you.

When you expect Him to recoil at you in disgust, when you think that there is brokenness and unholiness in you that He just cannot face, that He cannot deal with, His arms can't be more outstretched towards you. You might be tempted to think that your uncleanness is too much for Him. Today He's telling you, today He is telling you, however, that His righteousness overwhelms your imperfection. His grace always wins. So let Him heal you. Let Him heal you.

And then for others of us who have come to love and cherish Him for that forgiveness and that grace, that cleansing flow that, as the hymn says, has washed me white as snow. We need to know that Jesus loves His Father and He loves His Father's law. And that once He had healed that leper, He told him to go and obey God. And that man in his freedom and in his joy obeyed the law of God because he was cleansed. He obeyed that law with a full and happy heart.

Likewise, Christian, you no longer are a slave to sin. It is for freedom that you have been set free, Paul wrote. And so go and offer your sacrifices of praise. Go and offer yourselves as living sacrifices in view of God's mercy. Worship Him rightly.

Live with Him rightly because you are not your own anymore. You've been bought at a price. So unlike the outcasts who have become winners that I'll see in two weeks' time at my reunion, the outcasts who Jesus have made citizens of the kingdom, those Jesus has restored for all eternity, we have become winners to a far greater extent.

If you are willing, the leper said, you can make me clean. I am willing, said Jesus. Be clean. You are clean. Now, be clean.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank You for Your grace. We thank You that You have found us just as we are, without one plea, without one bargaining chip. And Lord, today we come to You in humility with faces metaphorically, symbolically in the dirt, asking Lord for You to heal us and cleanse us, to restore us back to You and back to Your people. And we thank You, Lord Jesus, that for this man You did not recoil.

And in that moment, You have shown us the deeper truth of Your acceptance of sinners. That You Yourself would later say, I have not come to save the righteous, but to call sinners to repentance, to bring healing to them. And so this morning, Lord, for some of us, we repent. We turn away from the things that we have done to ourselves that have caused us to be diseased and broken and dying. And we ask, Lord, that You will restore us and bring us back into a unity with God.

And then for those of us who have loved this gospel, who have loved this good news, that we are cleansed, that we have been restored, simply through faith, simply through coming to You, Lord. For those of us who have walked this journey for a long time, may we remember that we have been set free for freedom, that we don't need to go back to what is dead and dying. Lord, that we can live to righteousness and holiness and freedom. So restore us, God, in all ways. Give us a great confidence even mysteriously, even with the little amount that we know of You, that You are the saviour worth going to.

And help us to rest in Your salvation today. In Jesus' name. Amen.