The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Jesus Cleanses the Leper:  Mt.8:1 – 4

^8:3 Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.’ And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

Jesus probably knew that the man hadn’t been touched in years.  I wonder what that felt like for the man, being touched by Jesus.  I wonder how long Jesus rested his hand there on his shoulder.  Can you imagine not being touched for years, and then feeling the human touch of Jesus?  But there’s something more.  Jesus wasn’t supposed to touch him.  In Jewish culture and law, if you touch something unclean, you become unclean.  Also, a sick person could potentially infect the healthy person.  But when Jesus touches the leper, he doesn’t become unclean.  He isn’t worried about getting the disease, either.  Things go the other way around.  His cleanness infects the man’s uncleanness.  His health infects his sickness.  It goes the other direction! 

Jesus is drawn to the places in us that are the most unclean, the most dead.  Like a moth to a flame, he wants to go there.  We will often want to hide it from him and from others.  But that is the place in your life he most wants to be.  He wants to touch you there.  Most of us are aware of what that place is.  Present that to him, because he is always present to us. 

Maybe in place of deep, personal, fundamental change, you feel like you’re trying to work off your karma – so when ‘bad things’ happen to you, you feel like you’re being punished for some evil you did earlier.  Or maybe you try to restrain your own selfishness through raw strength of will – but that leads to self-congratulation when you succeed and self-loathing when you fail.  Who can really change you? 

Perhaps this is why, in Matthew, the story of the leper’s cleansing happens right after the Sermon on the Mount (5:1 – 7:28).  After declaring his stirring and quite rigorous teaching for the human heart, Jesus shows that he is not just telling us what to do!  He can heal the sin and impurity that lives in our hearts, too.

We need the touch of Jesus.  Why can Jesus cleanse humanity by his spiritual touch?  Because by stepping into human flesh, he was touching the evil that lived in humanity.  All his life, he was the cleansing his own humanity of its self-centeredness.  Jesus wrestled down all the hostility, greed, lust, and self-centeredness that are in us because they were in him too, when he came in human form.  But he was wrestling down his own humanity until he killed the evil in it by dying on the cross.  Like Frodo taking the Ring all the way into Mordor, Jesus took his own humanity all the way to its death.  The closer Jesus got, the more the struggle intensified.  But where Frodo failed, Jesus succeeded.  He pushed his fallen humanity to its bitter end, perfected it in the love of God, and then was resurrected with a new, fresh humanity that was cleansed of evil.  The resurrected Jesus now cleanses us.  He heals us.  He doesn’t drive us away.  We can come to him, and say, ‘Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.’

‘I am willing; be cleansed.’