Mark 1:40-45: Jesus Heals a Leper

There is no more pitiable predicament than to be cut off from other people, to be an outcast, someone people loathe and are afraid to come near. But that was what it meant to be a “leper” in Jesus’s day. In this story we see how Jesus responds to the deepest need of a poor leper and learn how he also responds to the deepest need of our heart.

INTRODUCTION

I used to teach school, and I enjoyed my work, but there was one part of working with children that was especially hard for me. That was the cruelty of so many children to those who they considered undesirable in some way. The child that was too fat or too skinny, or too short, or had bad skin, or was poor, or lacked social skills, or was in some way “different” was often picked on, or—almost as bad—ignored. We teachers called these children “isolates.” The plight of these isolated, friendless children was heartbreaking.

And it was often impossible to convince the “normal,” happy children to behave considerately. Once I was talking to a girl named Beverly about her unkindness to a classmate who had some handicap (I can’t now remember what). I said to Beverly, “Beverly, suppose you had her problem. How would you feel if someone treated you the way you treat her?” 

Beverly said, “But Mr. Sommerville, I don’t have that problem.”

In this story we will watch Jesus in an encounter with an “outcast” of his day.

Read: Mark 1:40-45

I. To have leprosy in Jesus’s day was a terrible fate.

A. “Leprosy” was the name given to several ugly and disfiguring skin diseases, not only to the disease we now call “leprosy,” or “Hansen’s disease.”

One of the jobs I held in time past was that of a medical librarian at one of our state hospitals.

We had a book in our library with color photos of dozens of different kinds of skin diseases.

Some of those skin diseases were truly horrible to look at. I hated that book.

B. But it was even worse in Bible times. In Bible times people thought that anyone who had such an ugly disfiguring disease meant that the sufferer had done something evil and was being punished by God. “God hates lepers,” so people thought.

The Old Testament book of Leviticus instructs the Israelites how they were to treat the lepers in their midst.

In Leviticus 13 we read that whenever anyone had some sort of abnormal eruption or growth or spot on his skin that persisted, he was to be brought to the priest for an examination.

If the priest determined that the person had leprosy, the priest would pronounce him “unclean.”

They believed that these diseases were very, very contagious. Perhaps many of them were.

Here are the instructions for the victim of what they called “leprosy” in Leviticus 13:45-46:

“The leper 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, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp.”

He must remain outside all towns or villages.

This meant that he would have to leave his family—all who loved him and whom he loved.

His only associates would be other lepers, unless somehow, sometime the disease went away.

He could not bring sacrifices to the Temple, worship at the Temple, or take part in the religious festivals of the people.

And the state of medical knowledge was such in that day that that he would most likely be isolated from normal society for the rest of his or her life.

It must have seemed a fate worse than death.

II. Let’s imagine the scene in our story.

A. Watch the poor leper come to Jesus and throw himself at Jesus’s feet.

Right now, he’s broken the law. He was supposed to stay away, but the poor man is desperate.

He cries out to Jesus: “If you will, you can make me clean.”

We aren’t told what it was that inspired this man to believe that Jesus could heal him.

I suppose he had been watching from afar as Jesus healed people with various diseases.

He decides to take a chance; what could he lose?

He rushes up to Jesus before anyone can drive him away and throws himself on his knees before Jesus and pours out his heart before the Lord: “If you will, you can make me clean!”

Notice that he doesn’t say, “…you can heal me” but “…you can make me clean.” As bad as the disease was, it was the uncleanness that was even harder to bear.

Will Jesus drive him away? He’d probably experienced enough of that.

B. Now, as the poor man kneels, holding his breath, watch Jesus.

Jesus looks at him and is moved with pity. When the man said, “If you will…” Jesus could only respond in one way, “I will; be clean.”

Jesus had a tender heart.

The word translated “compassion” or “pity” comes from the agitation of one’s inward organs, like a convulsion of in one’s belly or heart.

But compassion is more than a strong feeling. In the Bible compassion has to result in action, like the compassion of the Good Samaritan, who, seeing the half-dead man lying beside the road, stopped and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, and then set him on his donkey and brought him to the inn.

To properly show compassion, we must also do what we can about the plight of those we pity.

C. We read that Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the man.

This is an important part of the story.

Jesus could have healed with a word.

But this man needed to be touched.

The word in Greek can mean more than what we call touching. The word basically means “to take hold of,” “to fasten to,” “to adhere to.”

This is the way I picture the scene: Jesus reaches out and takes hold of the poor leper with his hands on both of the man’s shoulders. It’s almost a hug.

This was an important gesture to the poor leper, who had not been intentionally touched by another human being—except other lepers—since he had contracted the disease.

D. Then Jesus told the man to go, show himself to the priest and get the required certificate of health so that he could rejoin normal society.

So, as important as his healing, was the freedom now to go back to his family—maybe a wife and children, maybe his parents, brothers and sisters—surely his old friends.

He would no longer be disdained, untouchable.

He could again join the community in worship.

Did the leper become a follower of Jesus? We don’t know. We hope he did.

Some who were healed became believers; some didn’t. Not all who enjoy Christ’s blessings give their hearts to Jesus, but we hope this man did.

III. Here is what I see as a deeper meaning in the story.

A. People were sure that touching a leper would cause them to become infected.

But when Jesus touched the leper, the infection went the other way.

Instead of the leper’s disease going to Jesus, Jesus’s wellness—Jesus’s goodness—“infected” the leper.

Instead of the leper’s uncleanness making Jesus unclean, Jesus’s “cleanness” cleansed he leper.

B. Here is a true story that illustrates this point.

The greatest Christian leader in Japan during the last century was a man named Toyohiko Kagawa.

It was in the early years of the 20th century that Kagawa, then a teenager, came upon an evangelistic tent meeting. Curious, he went inside and was impressed with the message of the missionary conducting the meeting.

Later, the missionary—a Dr. Meyers—led young Kagawa to the Lord.

Kagawa was so earnest about his new faith that, after two years of college, he went off to spend the summer preaching outdoors in the worst slum in Kobe.

Rain or shine, the young man preached the gospel to anyone who would listen.

He contracted tuberculosis and the doctor filled out the death certificate.

But Kagawa recovered, went back to school.

Soon he was back preaching in the slum.

Again his strength gave out. He became very sick again. He went to live in a fisherman’s hut.

No one would come near him, and he was very lonesome.

But Dr. Meyers, his missionary friend, came to him.

Dr. Meyers stayed with Kagawa in the hut and slept in the same bed, which was only a heap of straw.

Kagawa asked the missionary, “Aren’t you afraid of my disease?”

Dr. Meyers answered, “Your disease is contagious, but love is more contagious.”

Kagawa recovered and continued to live his life for Jesus.

This is what happened when Jesus touched the leper.

Maybe, in some sense, this is what happens when a faith-filled believer touches a wounded, broken sinner with the love of Jesus.

CONCLUSION

In this story we see the loveliness of the Savior.

This is the Jesus who is your Friend and my Friend.

This is the Jesus who gave himself to heal us from our brokenness, to cleanse us from sin, and to prepare us for live with him forever.

Let me leave you with two lessons to take away from this story.

1. We are needy people, just like the leper. We need spiritual health, cleansing, and wholeness.

We can kneel before our Lord and make our request.

Haven’t you made the leper’s prayer often? “Lord, if you will, you can help me.”

And, even if we don’t get an answer we hope for, we can let Jesus’s goodness flow into our body. We can let his love fill our soul.

Jesus does will to help us. Just as he willed to cleanse the leper, he wills to cleanse us and make us whole.

Jesus wills that the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

He waits to touch us, to take hold of us, and make us his.

But one touch isn’t enough. We need to come back every day, make our plea, and let Jesus touch us again and again.

2. We do not have the power heal either sickness or sin with a literal touch. But if we are like Jesus, we will reach out to those in need and touch them—literally and figuratively.

That’s our mission at Village Ridge: to spread the love of Jesus to those around us.

That means to our fellow residents and to the staff members who care for us here.

You are limited in what you can do. But you can give an encouraging word; you can pray; you can express your gratitude. You can mention your faith in appropriate ways.

You can point people to Jesus.

Mark 1:29-31: An Eventful Sabbath at Peter's House

INTRODUCTION

When I was young, Sundays were always special at our house.

Breakfasts were more leisurely. We usually had something special for breakfast—maybe waffles.

We got on our best clothes, suits and ties for boys, dresses for girls.

Mother got started on a special meal. It was almost always a roast or chicken in the oven with potatoes arranged around it. The roast and potatoes cooked slowly while we were at church—a threehour stint, which always included a worship service and Sunday school.

She always put extra potatoes in the roasting pan in case we brought company home with us.

When we got home the roast would be nicely cooked and the potatoes would be brown and delicious.

Mother made gravy with the drippings from the roast.

And, as often as possible, we would have company to share our dinner.

Sometimes it was a visitor who came to church and mother had invited home with us.

We lived in a university town, and sometimes Mother would invite two or three students.

Sometimes friends from out-of-town would show up at church. They’d always get an invitation.

In the afternoon we would visit with our guests.

We would play our favorite Spike Jones records for our visitors.

If we played outdoors, we were forbidden to be noisy or get dirty because it was Sunday. We never worked in the garden or mowed the grass or any such chores on Sunday.

At suppertime we would listen to the Quiz Kids and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.

Then in evening we went back to church for the evening service.

Sundays were different and we always enjoyed the change of activities.

In the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark we read about how Jesus spent a memorable Sabbath.

Of course, the Sabbath was Saturday for Jesus, but it was like our Sunday—a special day for God.

In some ways Jesus spent this day like we did.

He went to church—they called it synagogue.

And the rest of the day he spent with his friends.

On the day we will read about, Jesus went to synagogue with the brothers Peter and Andrew and the brothers James and John.

On this day several unusual things happened. I suspect that almost every day in Jesus’s life after he began his public ministry, unusual things happened, but this day was important enough that Mark tells us about it in his gospel.

At Synagogue they didn’t have one pastor. The synagogue rulers who would arrange for the speakers. They would often invite visiting Rabbis to speak. And this day a synagogue ruler invited Jesus to give the message.

Jesus gave the morning message, and, we read, “the people were amazed.” Jesus’s teaching was like nothing they had ever heard before.

But then something unexpected happened.

A crazy man—the Bible says he had an unclean spirit—stood up and began to rave: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” he shouted. “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of Israel.”

And Jesus rebuked the spirit, and it came out convulsing him.

All the people in the meeting were amazed.

After the meeting, Peter and Andrew brought Jesus, along with their friends, James and John, home to Peter’s house for dinner.

After dinner when evening came—remember that the Sabbath began and ended at sundown—people began to gather around the door of Peter and Andrew’s house.

All the sick people in the area had assembled to be healed.

They waited until sundown after the Sabbath had ended because people weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath, and—in their minds—healing was work.

But I left out the most important thing that happened that day. It was when the little group arrived at Peter’s house for the noon meal.

Here it is in Mark 1:29-31:

“And immediately he left the synagogue, and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, wit h James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was sick with a fever, and immediately they told him of her.

And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her; and she served them” (Mark 1:29-31).

Now that’s very short story. You probably never heard it in Sunday school. But it’s interesting and instructive. There’s something here for us to think about.

I. Notice.

A. Peter had a house and a wife.

An early Christian writer, Clement of Alexandria, who lived about a hundred years later, wrote that Peter had children.

Peter’s brother Andrew lived in the same house with Peter’s wife and mother-in-law. We don’t know whether Andrew had a family or not.

One thing that was different about dinner in Peter’s house than in ours was that Jews didn’t cook on the Sabbath. In order to make it a day of rest, they prepared the food the day before, so it was ready as soon as they got home from synagogue.

B. But when they got home from church they found Peter’s mother-in-law in bed.

She hadn’t gone to synagogue. She wasn’t feeling well and so she had stayed home. But when they arrived, Peter’s mother-in-law was burning up with a fever.

In Luke’s version of the story we read that “she had been seized with a high fever.”

In those days of malaria and little medical knowledge or medicines, a high fever was very dangerous.

So they came to Jesus with the problem. We don’t have much detail, so we have to imagine the scene.

We read that Jesus came and took the sick woman by the hand.

C. We don’t know whether he said anything, but we read that he took her by the hand and lifted her up.

Have you ever noticed how many different ways Jesus used to heal people?

Sometimes he just spoke a word: ”Be healed.”

Sometimes he touched the person or the part of the person that was diseased. Remember how he put his hand on the leper. That was a very meaningful gesture, because no one was supposed to touch a leper.

Sometimes he healed at a distance. Remember the nobleman’s son and the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter.

One time he made clay and put it in a blind man’s eyes and gave him something to do: “Go to the Pool of Siloam and wash your eyes.”

One time Jesus didn’t do anything. A woman just touched him and was healed. Jesus told her, “Your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

One time he healed a blind man in two stages. The first time the man could see but things were so blurry; he said he saw people like trees walking.

So Jesus touched his eyes again and then he could see perfectly.

I think that Jesus healed people in many different ways to teach us that God works in each life in a special way suited to each person.

In this case we read that Jesus took Peter’s mother-in-law by the hand and raised her up.

I think that is an especially beautiful way restore the lady to health.

Jesus showed special tenderness in taking her hand and raising her up from her bed.

I can remember another time Jesus healed in this way.

Do you remember that when the synagogue ruler Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter was lying dead in her bed, Jesus came to her, took her by the hand and said, “Little girl, get up.” And, we read, “Immediately the girl got up and began to walk about.”

D. And, we read, Peter ‘s mother-in-law got up and served them.

First of all, that she could get up and go right to work shows us that the healing is complete.

People who have been stretched out in bed with high fevers usually take a while to recuperate.

But when Jesus healed this lady, she was completely healed and recuperated right now.

Perhaps seems odd to us that she went right to work.

There was at least one other woman in the house—Peter’s wife. And there may have been others. Couldn’t these women have done the serving and let the older lady recuperate?

To understand we have to consider the social customs of the day.

Peter’s mother-in-law—being the senior woman in the household—would have had the privilege of being in charge of the hospitality in the home.

When Jesus healed her—and she was obviously thoroughly healed—he restored her to her rightful place as the one in charge of hospitality in the home.

For her, this was an honor she wouldn’t have wanted to relinquish.

When we used to have company, sometimes a guest would approach Charlotte in the kitchen and ask if she can help.

They didn’t just barge in. They asked permission.

And generally Charlotte rejected their help. She told them that everything was under control.

So don’t feel sorry for the lady. She was where she wanted to be. Glad to be cured and back where she belonged, in charge of the kitchen.

II. So what can we learn from the story?

A. I have reminded you before that each of Jesus’s healings is an acted out parable.

Each healing has a lesson for us about salvation.

Jesus opens the eyes of the physically blind to show what he does for us who are spiritually blind.

Jesus makes the leper “clean” to show how Jesus cleanses us from the filth of our sins.

Jesus heals the crippled to show what he can do for those who are spiritually crippled.

Jesus heals the paralyzed to show how he sets us free from sin.

Jesus raises the dead to illustrate the Resurrection he has in store for all who belong to him.

B. This woman was deathly ill, weak and helpless. She was burning up with fever.

Jesus came to her—as he comes to each of us.

Jesus took her by the hand—as he takes us by the hand, in a figurative sense.

Jesus raised her up—as he raises us up when he gives us healing and wholeness and salvation.

She got up and served Jesus and his friends—as he expects us to get up and go to work serving God by serving others.

APPLICATION

Everyone in this room has been on earth a long time.

Maybe God has left us here so long because he has work for us.

We’ve served Jesus in many ways in times past—in our families, and churches, and occupations, and neighborhoods.

Some of you have guided others to God.

Some of you have done God’s work of helping those in need.

What can you do, even now?

I can’t tell you. But you’ll find something.

Some of the small things we do make a big difference.

You can invite a friend to church.

You can give someone a nice compliment.

You can listen to someone tell you their troubles.

You can be a friend to someone who is lonely. Sometimes you can do a favor or give a gift.

You can write a check for a worthy cause or for someone in distress.

You can write a letter of encouragement or appreciation.

Coming to our service here is serving Jesus, because if you come, that encourages someone else to come too.

I read a story about a servant girl who was asked at church what Christian work she did.

She said that she had not the opportunity to do much because her duties were so constant, but she said,

“When I go to bed I take the newspaper to bed with me, and read the notices of the births and I pray for all the little babies.

“And I read the notices of marriages, and I pray that those who have been married may be happy.

“And I read the announcements of death and I pray that the sorrowing may be comforted.”

Just to live your life for Jesus is a way of serving him—because your cheerfulness and gratefulness and kindness will help draw others to God.

Maybe someone will ask you what makes you the kind person you are, and you will have the opportunity to tell them.

Maybe they will just see your peace and strength and be encouraged.

It is quite possible that you will meet someone in Heaven who is there because you encouraged her—or him.

I like to quote this saying from Mother Teresa: “We can’t do any great thing for God, but we can do something little with great love.”