Healing of the Leper

Setting and Overview
As Matthew 8 begins, we are given descriptions of three different healings. Each of has a particular significance that is important for us to appreciate. In the first, we see Jesus heal a leper. It is no accident that this healing is first in Matthew and in Luke (and early as well in Mark) as this healing serves as a demonstration of what Jesus has proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount: He came to fulfill the Old Testament. To understand how this is true, we must recognize the significance of leprosy with the Mosaic Law, and what Jesus healing it meant to the Jewish people in that time, and what it should still demonstrate to us today.

Exposition
Leprosy today usually refers to a specific disease, but in the Old Testament, it was used to describe a number of diseases. Leviticus 13 gives us a full description of how the various ailments should be treated. That chapter comes at the middle of a series of chapters (11-15) that continually differentiate between “clean” and “unclean,” and show a cycle of how people and object can go from clean to unclean by being polluted or defiled, and then from unclean to clean by being cleansed or purified. While this set of chapters does not deal with sinful activities, we do see from Leviticus 18 and Mark 7:14-23, that the things that polluted in Leviticus 11-15 were meant to represent sin. Even with that understanding these chapters can seem arbitrary and unnecessary, unless we see them within the larger picture of Leviticus. The theme of Leviticus can be expressed as “be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44-45, 19:2, 20:26.) God’s presence is dwelling among the people, but His holiness is dangerous to what is impure or imperfect (Exod 19:22.) If something unclean comes near to God’s holiness, it would be destroyed (Leviticus 15:31) because the closer one came to the presence of God, the stronger the representation was supposed to be of God’s perfection. Therefore, God commands the people to not only respond to His act of sanctification (Lev 20:7-8) but to also remove their uncleanness before coming near to His presence, so that the holiness of the temple and camp might be preserved with the people being destroyed.
Since some leprosy was permanent, in order to preserve that sanctity, lepers were cast out of the camp (Leviticus 13:45-46, Numbers 5:2-4), a sentence that was akin to dying. As harsh as that seems, we are being given a shadow of the Gospel in that: God is perfectly holy and we can never reach His standard, so He takes action to set us apart and calls for us to respond, allowing us to draw nearer to His presence without compromising His holiness. Of course, Leviticus only contained a shadow, and that still left lepers cast out, through no fault of their own. How can all be invited into the presence of God, without His holiness being compromised or destroying us?
We get a hint of the solution in Isaiah 6:1-7, but then we see the fulfillment in Matthew 8:2-4. The leper approaches Jesus and bows in submission, a representation of worship. He acknowledges that Jesus can heal him, but he is unsure if Jesus would choose to do so or not. Jesus responds not only by healing, but by healing by touch, which He later shows to be unnecessary (Matthew 8:5-13.) While touching a leper would have made someone else unclean, Jesus cannot be made unclean and instead makes the leper clean. Jesus then commands the leper to fulfill the offerings commanded by Moses (Leviticus 14), which serves as a picture of the lepers rebirth into the community and being brought back from the “death” of being cast out.

Examination and Application
Can we relate to the leper? The leper was a physical manifestation of the ugliness and danger of sin. His ailment cut him off from the people of God, just as our sin alienates us from God. The leper would have been desperate to remove the leprosy from his body, just as Jesus instructs us to be desperate to separate ourselves from sin (Matthew 5:29-30.) The leper could not remove his ailment though, and neither can we remove our own sin. Yet God acts to cleanse us from our unrighteousness and to bring us into fellowship with Him and His people, just as Jesus acted to cleanse the leper. Now that we who are in Christ have been declared to be clean, how much more so should be eager to separate ourselves from sin, not in order to receive acceptance as a child of Christ, but rather in desire to live up to that which we have already been declared to be.