The Leper

Good morning.

Today's reading is from Mark 1, verses 40 to 45.

Mark 1:40–45

And it says, And a leper came to him, and imploring him and kneeling, said to him, If you will, you can make me clean.

Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, I will be clean.

And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.

And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, and said to him, See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded for a proof to them.

But he went out and began to talk freely about it and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

I'm not sure if there's any folks in the Overflow room, but if you are, uh you'll hear this in about a minute, probably, with the lag, and uh we're glad that you're here as well.

Uh if you're on our live stream, thanks for uh logging in this morning.

Um so some announcements uh that I made last week, but want to reiterate this week.

We've made some changes.

Uh as you noticed, you didn't have to get tickets to church this morning.

Yeah, that's right.

You uh did didn't have to register, church wasn't sold out.

We uh uh made an assessment as an elder board a week ago Saturday.

And what we were discussing is, you know, that as a church of our size, um, and with the priorities that our church has tried to place on in-person gathering, and with the current restrictions that we have, by opening an overflow room or potentially moving to a second service, seeing in how the overflow room goes, uh, we're able to accommodate our church meeting in person with the current restrictions that we have.

You know, I look out, you're all wearing masks.

In fact, I'm gonna take your picture.

Because I realized I didn't have a picture, and this is gonna be something I want to remember.

Um, ready?

Everybody smile.

Just kidding, it doesn't matter what you do.

All right, ready?

Great job.

Wow, that looks really good.

I'll tag you.

Uh we are uh okay, so what we're doing is if here's the commitment that we want to make as elders.

Uh if you want to attend church in person on a Sunday morning, we want to make that possible.

Uh we think that this is such a high value and that it's even essential to what it means to uh participate in a body, is to come together and worship like this.

Uh so opening the overflow room is part of that, and we're also uh moving back to a time which you may or may not remember before March 8th of last year.

Well, this year.

2020 has been like six years, so or three months, whatever.

Uh and we are uh discontinuing our live stream.

So uh the to the folks in this room, that may not be a shock, to the folks watching online, uh, that may be uh difficult and a shame to hear, we're open to conversation about this.

Please uh don't just log off and then not like not log back on and us lose contact.

Reach out, email, complain, engage.

Uh we want to talk and talk through our reasoning behind this.

But just as a reminder, uh, our church didn't have a live stream intentionally before COVID.

But when COVID happened, we moved to live stream exclusively, and then it moved through a season of in-person and live stream.

But now we want to open up our in-person uh so that we can accommodate within the current restrictions uh and move back to the shape of church that we think is important to adhere to.

Now, here's one of the main things that we want to uh kind of uh speak against in a sense, or or kind of train our hearts to understand in this reasoning.

Uh in a in a live stream or a uh uh a podcast or something of that nature, a lot of times what can be communicated is that the most important part of church is uh what whatever sort of clever advice I can give to you from up here.

But there's so much more to our gathering together than that.

Uh we gather together to worship and sing so that we hear each other's voices and are encouraged, just as Moses gathered his pe gathered the people together at the foot of Mount Sinai.

Uh, and in their assembly, they learned how to worship the Lord.

And in the same way, we're doing that in that same pattern at church on Sunday mornings, where we gather together to learn how to worship the Lord corporately, and so that our lives take on the flavor of a people who worship the Lord.

So that's the intention behind this.

We know that a uh, especially in this season, there's a difficulty to this, and there's a politicization to this, which we're we don't want to engage with, quite frankly.

But there's no way not to.

Uh and we uh uh want to be clear that our intention behind this is not to push away, uh, but it's to draw in.

And it's to draw in in uh difficult circumstances, but which we think that the difficulty of our gathering together we're able to mitigate in the way that we do it here.

It's part of the reason I wanted to take a picture, is because I think that when right now anyone on the live stream, they just see me.

Uh, but I think when you see in the room it it you can tell that people are adhering.

Uh people are being kind and generous with their uh approach to this.

And so we want to hold that as a church.

Two more announcements.

Uh this Thursday, men's whiskey night.

It's a bit more lighthearted.

Um next Thursday, the 12th.

Yep.

Uh next a week from today on Sunday is a baby dedication.

Don't mix those up.

Uh and uh so we'll be doing a baby dedication.

Uh that'll be in the service.

And uh then next Thursday, a week from Thursday, November 12th, is uh men's whiskey night at John's house.

That's John right there.

Um so uh really look forward to that and gathering together uh as the men in our church.

I think that'll be really fun.

All right.

Now let's preach.

Let's pray first.

Holy Father, we thank you for your church.

We thank you that you are the chief shepherd, that you are the one who leads us and guides us and directs us.

And uh Lord, you restore our souls.

You're with us through the valley of the shadow of death.

You join us in the difficult places, anoint our heads with oil, you prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies.

Lord, we can say things like, Surely, goodness will follow us all the days of our lives.

We will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Lord, as we gather together today, you are worthy of our worship and praise.

I pray that our hearts will be stoked in that direction, kindled in that direction to worship you and lead lives uh that just smell of worship to you.

Father, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Last week we saw that uh Jesus has this incredible presence with the hurt that approaches him in people's lives, but he also has this incredible focus where he's able to leave the nonstop flow of problems in order to pursue the higher calling that his father is calling him to.

Most of us are able to do one of those.

We're able to stay focused on the higher calling at the expense of what may be meeting us in the day today, or we're able to stay present in the day today, but then get lost with what our father is calling us towards.

That's because many of us relate to our problems not as though we're serving them, but really out of more of an addiction to them, where we use our problems to serve us and give us a sense of identity.

But Jesus, because he's ultimately in everything and even in all of his service to us, serving the Father, he's able to be both present with us in our difficulties and focused on his highest good and our highest good.

That's a glorious thing, a glorious pattern that we see in Jesus' life.

And so, because of that, he's able to leave the flow of people looking to be healed in Capernaum and tell Peter, okay, it's time to leave Capernaum, and we're gonna go to all the other towns, and we're going to do what I came here to do, which is to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God.

That's Jesus' focus.

That's the focus of his ministry.

But while they're traveling today, we see that they are encountered by a leper who approaches Jesus and is healed, and then there's some sort of interesting and difficult to understand consequences of that healing.

So, what we're gonna see today is Jesus once again focuses on a problem that faces him very presently, uh, that actually comes and meets him sort of in the wilderness.

Uh, and uh what we're going to see in this is the audacity of the healing.

It's an audacious healing.

We don't use that word other than when somebody does, other than when like somebody approaches me in my office and does something uncouth, and I say, the audacity.

But outside of that context, I don't use the word that often, uh, but audacious means they just cast aside whatever social or legal norms were present.

They say, I'm just gonna do it anyway.

That's audacious.

And then we're gonna look at the secrecy, the command to secrecy that Jesus gives to the leper, which is really strange.

And then after that, we're going to look at the exchange that they make, that the leper and Jesus make.

So, first, let's look at the audacity of the healing.

This is Mark 1.40.

And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling, said to him, If you will, you can make me clean.

Okay, so central to this story, as I've said, is the audacity of the leper, and we may miss it if we just read that little snippet, but we need a bit of context to understand that uh lepers were social outcasts, and they were meant to stay outside of the towns and outside of any gathering of people.

Uh the lepers were not able to approach anyone, uh, and uh they were not able to speak openly to people.

They, in fact, had to remain isolated and shout wherever they went that they were unclean in order to keep people away.

Now, the reason this leper is particularly audacious is because he throws off that social convention of who he's supposed to be before Jesus, but he's also throwing off the Torah, the Bible.

Okay, this is a command from Scripture.

And the leper is saying, forget that.

I've got a chance to be healed, I've got a chance to be cleaned, I'm gonna take it.

This is an audacious approach that the leper makes.

And we can see that it's compelled by the long suffering of his condition.

This audacity is compelled by a familiarity with his sort of absolute need.

He can't be helped.

Never did he imagine that his situation could be changed by anyone.

But with Jesus, he sees there's someone who could change his situation.

Now, let's get to know a bit more about leprosy.

Um, leprosy was not necessarily a particular disease.

Uh, it's more of a category of skin diseases.

And some of them were very contagious, very deadly.

Some of them weren't very contagious or very deadly, but they would still be diagnosed under the same category of leprosy.

And the priests were the ones that were responsible for making the diagnosis of leprosy.

So priests had a lot of jobs in those days.

Priests uh uh they would do things like this where they would expound the scripture.

If you were to meet a priest, I'd you'd think you met a butcher uh because they were always preparing sacrifices, uh, and it looked like a butcher would look.

Um and likewise they were dermatologists.

And so they would you would show up and they would you would show them your skin disorder, and they would say, Okay, uh looks okay, come back in a week, uh, literally.

And uh we'll see if it's grown or if it's spread at all.

And it and you'd come back in a week, and the priest would say, Okay, it looks like it's spread, and then they would make the diagnosis.

But a diagnosis is an understatement for what we're for when we're talking about leprosy.

This is a sentencing.

And uh here we can read what the command was in Leviticus 13, 45 to 46.

It says, the leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes, and let the hair of his head hang loose.

He shall cover his upper lip and cry out.

Now that's not like he needs to grow a mustache, it's to wear a mask.

You guys familiar?

And cry out, unclean, unclean.

He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease.

He is unclean.

He shall live alone.

His dwelling shall be outside the camp.

The sentencing.

Leprosy.

You go to the priests and imagine the heartache when you walk in.

All right, we're in for week two.

Oh man, I hope he doesn't think it's spread.

Your family might have walked in with you, and you walk out alone.

Uh you lose your name, you lose your role, you lose your position in society, you lose your face, you lose the words that you can communicate to people, you lose hugs, you lose touch, you're isolated, you're outside of the camp.

And the primary fact of your life, you shout if anyone gets within 50 paces of you.

Unclean.

Unclean.

This is now the central fact of your identity.

Leprosy was a sentencing.

So do you see the audacity?

50 paces away.

That's not in this text, but it's in the Mishnah, an interpretation.

He runs up to Jesus.

He doesn't shout unclean, unclean.

He says, if you will Jesus, you can make me clean.

Do you see it's not even a request that this leper makes?

It's an accusation.

And isn't that the way that we think about God?

The way that we think about God is rarely, I don't think God could sort this one out.

And I don't think he will.

If you will, you could make me clean.

He places responsibility on Jesus for his cleanliness.

You see how audacious he is being.

So familiar with the depth of his need.

Well, Jesus is not like uh the priest who called him unclean.

He's much more audacious than that.

Jesus, in fact, seems to share this very same characteristic of audacity that the leper has.

And it says in Mark 1, 41 to 42, moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, I will be clean.

And immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean.

The text, you know, if you were to film this and you were to read this as the script, you would have to say, okay, all Mark draws so much attention to Jesus' hand.

We're zoomed right in on Jesus' hand.

It does all the action.

He stretches out his hand and Jesus does the touching.

This was a long way to reach in that culture, in that moment.

He's reaching through the commands of the law, he's reaching through the social conventions, he's reaching from his holiness to the leper's unholiness, and he touches the leper.

Now you can't touch a leper.

If you touch a leper, you become unclean.

Jesus touches the leper, and Jesus doesn't become unclean, but instead the leper becomes clean.

What is this contagious holiness that Jesus has?

What is this super spreading cleanliness that is contained in the Christ?

This translation, the ESV, says, moved with pity.

He stretched out his hand.

The oldest manuscripts that we have don't say pity, they say anger.

Moved with anger, Christ stretches out his hand and touches the leper.

Now, I've I think that we have a sort of a strange sense of the anger of God, but what we can see is that God hates uncleanness.

He hates his creation being out of order for what he commanded it to be.

And so Jesus heals this leper through his wrath.

Jesus experiences this wrath against the uncleanness, against the leprosy, and motivated by this wrath and this even sense of judgment, he heals the leper.

Can you imagine what his eyes looked like?

If you were that leper, what you saw?

This is such a strange moment.

If you will, you can make me clean in anger.

I will be clean.

And you find yourself clean.

The leper got the answer to the deepest question.

He asked God, I know you can, but will you?

And the answer that he got was, I will.

He knows that now.

Jesus will.

I I just feel like this experience for the leper had to be so strange.

Because we you would think pity seems like the right thing to do, which, by the way, as the manuscripts get older that we have, Jesus' words always get softer.

You know, anger always becomes pity, but then you look at an older manuscript and it's like, anger, that's weird.

I get why they changed it to pity.

Uh but it the the anger you can kind of hear in the tone at Mark 1, 43 to 44, as he commands him to secrecy.

Says, and Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, and said to him, See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priests, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded for a proof to them.

Okay, so we saw uh that.

Jesus reaches through the law.

He says, I'm not allowed to touch.

You know, nobody's no touching.

All right, one arrested moment, fan.

And he reaches through the law and he touches man and makes him clean by reaching through the law in a way that only Jesus can.

But then he pulls him back in his cleanliness under the righteousness that's commanded by the law.

And he pulls him back and he says, okay, now what are the commands that you're meant to do in order to be deemed clean?

You've got to go back to the priest.

You've got to make your offering in the temple, just like Moses commanded.

See, the law, before Jesus touched you, the law worked to condemn you.

But now Jesus, doing what the law could not do, weak as the law was through the flesh, achieves the righteousness of the law for the leper and brings him back in so that he stands under the law, no longer condemned by it, but pronounced clean by it.

Do you see the shape of what's happening?

Jesus is this new type of priest.

The other priest is required to declare someone clean.

Jesus makes you clean.

And so he commands him to move joyfully under a law that no longer condemns him, but in which he can find life.

That this law that once condemned us, now we talk about it like it's our joy.

Because in it we experience the righteousness of God.

That's justification and sanctification.

That's we're made clean by faith alone, by an act of Christ alone.

But then Jesus draws us under the guidance of the law, which no longer works to condemn us because we're freed from its condemnation.

Instead, we grow in our ability to adhere to the law.

And what is that ability?

What is the height of the law?

How is that expressed in our hearts?

That we might love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and we might love our neighbor as ourself.

Something that we would have railed against now becomes our hope and our joy.

But this doesn't explain the secret.

Why can't he tell anyone?

Jesus, just like a couple verses earlier, was like, hey, my whole purpose in being here is to go from town to town and explain the gospel of the kingdom is coming.

Now he makes this clear presentation of the gospel of the kingdom and this sign of the healing that he is bringing.

And he says, okay, now don't tell anyone about it.

This one's going to be between you and me, okay?

Instead, just go back through the normal patterns of cleanliness that have already been established.

Why this oath to secrecy?

Well, it's a pattern already in the Gospel of Mark that Jesus is swearing people and things to secrecy.

The demon that he first casts out in the synagogue on the Sabbath day is saying, You, the Holy One of God, I know who you are, you've come to destroy us.

And Jesus says, Be silent.

And he basically does the same thing.

He silences the demon that's proclaiming who Jesus is.

The next day, uh, or later that day, actually, uh, when Jesus is healing and casting out demons in uh Simon and Andrew's home, it says that he was commanding the demons to be silent and to not proclaim who he was.

And then here with the leper, once again, Jesus heals the leper and then commands the leper to secrecy.

Why is that happening?

Well, I think there's three reasons that Jesus is commanding people to secrecy at this point in his ministry.

The first reason is uh guarding against a misunderstanding of who the Messiah was.

So the Messiah was a prophesied character and a looked forward to character in Jewish scriptures and in the culture.

Uh, but this messiah that was anticipated was thought to be bringing a political salvation.

Now, this culture back then, Jewish culture back then, they were so backwards and absurd that they used to actually think that their salvation rested in politics.

Can you imagine?

It just seems crazy to me.

I can't imagine a culture ever being duped into something like that.

And so their expectation of a savior was we're gonna have someone finally show up and they're going to overthrow the Roman government, and we will then be set free because we couldn't imagine a higher freedom than that.

And uh, this Messiah that's coming will be our military leader.

So that's misunderstanding number one.

For Jesus to be proclaimed as the Messiah would plug into a misshapen understanding of that word into the minds of whoever heard it.

And so they wouldn't be able to receive Jesus in the new way that he was presenting himself.

Number two, the shape of Jesus' ministry is most deeply informed by the passages describing the servant.

The servant in the prophecies of Isaiah.

The servant is a hidden figure.

He's a sharp arrow that's hidden in the palm of God's hand.

He's a sharp arrow that's stored away in the quiver.

And he hits his target perfectly as he's sent by God, but he's sent in a way of suffering and in the way of obscurity.

And so, in this pattern of Jesus' ministry, in the secrecy and the obscurity through which he looks to move, he is fulfilling this prophecy of the servant who came to save, the Messiah who was the servant.

And finally, this one's most particular to just the shape of Mark, the shape of the gospel of Mark.

That's that Jesus is proclaimed as the Son of God in truth on two occasions.

I want to give away the ending, but here we go.

The first occasion we've already seen was when God himself says, This is my son, with whom I am well pleased at Jesus' baptism.

The last occasion is right when Jesus dies.

And one of the Roman centurions who helped to crucify Jesus looks at the way that Jesus died and says, Surely this is the Son of God.

What Mark is saying throughout his whole gospel is Jesus cannot be understood outside of his death.

That if you try and remove Jesus from the death that he came to die, you can't understand him.

And so for these three reasons, Jesus' ministry is shaped by this secrecy.

But the secret strategy doesn't work with the leper.

The leper, in fact, is completely unfaithful to the command to be secret.

Here's what happened, Mark 1.45.

But he went out, the leper, and began to talk freely about it.

You can hardly blame him, right?

Because think of he could walk up and talk to people now.

What a great thing to finally be able to do.

Talk freely.

Think of what that think of the weight that the word freely there is carrying.

You could see his face.

He could stand close to you.

He didn't have to shout that he was unclean.

He could just use his name.

Talk to you, maybe it was even just to his family.

You wouldn't believe what happened.

I'm clean.

But he went out and began to talk freely about it and to spread the news so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.

Okay, so the leper disobeys.

And instead of obeying the commands of Jesus, he goes out and he spreads the news like wildfire.

This was a difficult part to understand for me.

Why the disobedience of the leper?

Why doesn't he just do maybe for like a week or so, you know, just like, hey, I've got plans, I gotta go to the temple and uh talk to the priest and sacrifice a couple doves, and then I'll be able to tell you about it.

But for now, I'm just not gonna say anything.

Why does he disobey?

Here's why, I think.

I think he disobeys because he didn't understand the cost of his healing.

He didn't understand what was really given to him.

What he received was a sort of version of like a cheap grace, which is Jesus was able to just wave a magic wand and in a completely costless way was able to make the man clean.

But the man wasn't actually there to see what Jesus really did.

What happened to Jesus when the man spread the news?

Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places.

Jesus reached out and touched the leper, and they traded places.

Now the leper can come in.

But what was the cost of the healing?

Jesus is put out.

Jesus is now alone, isolated, in desolate places.

You see, what the leper didn't really get is what the willingness of Jesus to heal him actually was.

What it actually cost for the leper to be healed.

He said, if you will, you can make me clean.

What he thought was, look, if you have a change of mind, then just wave your magic wand and you'll make me clean and it'll all go away.

The question that Jesus was answering, when he says, if you will, you can make me clean, Jesus says, To make you clean, I'll become like you.

I will.

Be clean.

That's the exchange that Jesus was making.

You see, when we start to see the cost of the grace of our redemption, our hearts become changed.

And we see, wow, this was this was not just a waving of a magic wand.

This was an unthinkable gift that was given to me.

In this story, Jesus becomes the leper.

All right, so let's try and make this land a bit.

By a show of hands, how many of you have felt isolated, even in your own group of friends?

Because of okay, well, I didn't even get to finish it.

I was going to say because of our current political context, or because of like some, yeah, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

How many of you have thought that you're you're holding a position at your work that nobody understands but you?

And you don't feel like you could even explain it in a way that it could be seen.

Yeah.

Oh, how many of you have felt isolated even in your own marriage, where you felt deeply unknown?

I just want to cause fights for the drive home.

Look, uh, we know what it's like to be a leper.

Okay?

We we know what it's like to be unclean.

And when we're asking Jesus, will you come into this situation?

Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.

Do you hear what he's saying when he says he will?

He's saying, I'll I don't know any sin.

But I'll become sin so that you might become the righteousness of God.

I'm not cast out.

I'll become cast out so that you might be brought in.

I'm on the inside now.

I'll move to the outside so that you can experience real community.

This is the gospel.

This is the good news of the kingdom of God.

We can't understand Jesus the Messiah until we see him on the cross.

And we see that just as it was the sin of the leper that cast Jesus out, so it is our sin that holds him there.

Why does it hold him there?

Because he says, I will.

This is the heart of Jesus.

He will.

We know we can, but he will.

What is the highest revelation of God?

He will.

He'll come and take on our pain to bring us in.

He'll come and take on the effects and the results of our sin to bring us in.

This is who our God is.

Oh, he is worthy of our praise.

Lonely, alienated, unclean.

Jesus says, I'll become those things so that you might be brought in.

Any questions?

Let's pray.

Father, thank you that you said you will.

Lord, I pray that you would expose those areas in our lives where we feel isolated and unknown by you, and where we are unclean.

It was not a fake cleanliness, Lord, for the leper.

It was real one uncleanness.

Lord, it we have real uncleanness in our hearts too.

Lord, will you reach through, touch us, make us clean?

Lord, we praise you that you will, that you have.

Lord, let us look to you and have our faith strengthened by this joyous news that you will.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.