Jesus Put His Hand on Him

This passage raises a question, raised elsewhere in the gospels, about the so-called messianic secret: that Jesus spent the first stretch of his earthly ministry on a kind of stealth mission, in a kind of game of cloak and dagger. He was a holy subversive, doing heaven’s work incognito and on the sly. He didn’t want anyone to know who he was. He didn’t want word out about what he was doing. He warned people to keep his work and his identity secret.

There’s much scholarly discussion around why this was so, almost all of it interesting. But I’m going to ignore the matter completely.

Because there’s something else going on in this story that interests me more. It is shocking, though most of us miss it. It is a head-turning scandal, Jesus’ real act of subversion. He commits nothing short of insurrection. He tosses a Molotov cocktail through the window of religion, then and now.

Ready for it? Jesus put his hand on him.

The book of Leviticus is rarely read in the church. It’s a shame. Because it’s a major source of revelation about the nature and discipline of holiness in the Old Testament. Then, as now, God is deeply committed to holiness. But Leviticus lays out, in detail, what that looked like before Jesus came and fulfilled the Law, cancelled it, and sent the Holy Spirit to produce holiness from the inside out.

Before that, holiness was always kept by the skin of your teeth. It was a constant, painstaking slog. Almost anything---a bleeding woman touching you, the wrong food brushing your plate, a leper getting too close—could spoil your carefully guarded piety.

Indeed, the great concern of Leviticus is one thing: avoiding any unclean thing. And there are so many unclean things—food, clothing, people, animals, furniture. The world’s a cauldron of uncleanness, one drop of which can taint whatever hard-won holiness you’ve laboured to attain. In Leviticus, whenever clean and unclean touch, all becomes unclean.

Lepers were unclean. You must go to extraordinary lengths to avoid them—and they must aid you in that avoidance by crying out “Unclean! Unclean!” should ever you wander near. And you must go to extraordinary lengths if ever you breach that. It’s rule on rule to avoid the damage or repair the damage.

But the leper in this story, by some deep instinct, ignores the rules. And here’s the scandal, the act of subversion: so does Jesus. Jesus put his hand on him. He pronounces him well. And then he sends him to jump through all the religious hoops to establish his healing beyond a shadow of doubt.

Do you see what this means? Jesus Christ overturns the book of Leviticus. In him, whenever clean and unclean touch, all becomes clean. Makes you wonder why we don’t put our hands on more lepers.

Respond in Prayer

Dear God, May I be so filled with your power and presence, Lord Jesus, that whoever I touch, no matter how unclean, is cleansed by your holiness through and through, and made well. I ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.

Mark Buchanan

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®).