Go into any hospital nowadays and you are confronted at almost every doorway with hand gel and warning signs about infection prevention. We recognise the need to prevent the spread of disease – we know that contamination can easily spread. In Jesus’ time, it was a similar concern which kept anyone with leprosy away from other people. 

Unfortunately, the term leprosy covered a variety of skin ailments, many of which we now know not to be contagious. Isolated from other people, even from the Temple, people with leprosy were ceremonially unclean. A religious teacher like Jesus might be expected to keep his distance from anyone with leprosy, but when this man calls out for help, moved with compassion (v 41), Jesus stops and reaches out to him.

When Jesus touches him, the unexpected happens. Instead of Jesus being made unclean, the man with leprosy is made clean and is healed, a reality which can be verified by the priest (Leviticus 14:2–32). Because the man does not obey Jesus’ request not to tell anyone, word spreads that Jesus has touched a person with leprosy (v 45). This same Jesus who identified with this man in order to make him ‘clean’ identifies with our sinfulness to make us righteous (2 Corinthians 5:21).

‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, / Who like thee his praise should sing?’¹

This starts a new section of the Gospel, with mounting criticism of Jesus. The incident underscores the point made in the last section, that Jesus was alert to the danger. After the leprosy sufferer told everybody about how Jesus had healed him, he could no longer enter a town. Much has been written about the ‘messianic secret’, and theologians have discussed why Jesus so often instructed people not to tell others about their healing. This story doesn’t need a complicated explanation. Jesus needed to be vigilant. 

There is an interesting textual problem in verse 41. The NIV reads ‘Jesus was indignant’, where nearly all the other translations say something like ‘moved with compassion’. The difference lies in the Greek manuscripts. Most say ‘moved with compassion’. One has ‘indignant’ – or, to use a closer translation, ‘angry’. Why would the translators of the NIV/TNIV not follow the majority? Because there is a principle in textual criticism of preferring the more difficult text. Somewhere in the copying of the manuscripts one word was changed to the other. It is easy to see why scribes would change ‘angry’ to ‘moved by compassion’ but very difficult to see how it could have happened the other way round.

So why was Jesus angry? Not at the man with leprosy, whom he healed. Probably at the skin disease and how people ostracised the man. Notice that Jesus reached out his hand and touched him. We think of the danger of contracting the disease. First-century Jews would have had further scruples. The book of Leviticus devotes most of a chapter to describing diseases and declares anyone who touched a leprosy sufferer as ceremonially unclean.² Can you imagine how the man felt? Not just when someone touched him, but when Jesus touched him with divine love.

‘Thy touch hath still its ancient power.’³ Look up the whole of this beautiful hymn, ‘At even, ere the sun was set’. 

¹ Henry F Lyte, 1793 – 1847, ‘Praise, my soul, the king of heaven’  ² Lev 13  ³ Henry Twells, 1823 – 1900