Scripture Reference: Mark 1:14-45
Bringing In the Outcast
Please read Mark 1:40-45 for the background to this section.
I have never personally known anyone with leprosy. However, I have heard and read of many who have devoted the best years of their lives to working in remote corners of the world, (especially India, for some reason), on ways to reverse the worst ravages of the disease and helping their patients be able to return to a somewhat normal life. I have studied a bit about leprosy, how it works by destroying nerves, killing feeling and sensation. I have read the stories about how leprosy patients are outcast and rejected by their families and in their villages and towns. I have read from those treating the disease, “Of all the gifts we can give a leprosy patient, the one he values most is the gift of being handled and touched. We don’t shrink from him. We love him with our skin, by touch.” I have learned all this in my studies, but I have never met anyone with leprosy.
However, not long ago I read a story of an incident in Tibet that involved leprosy. According to the author of the article:
There was a beggar on the street, and to those seeing him it was painfully obvious why he was there. The man had leprosy, and begging was how he survived. He was an elderly man, but because of the disease, it was very hard to be sure. His face was so stricken and wasted that I couldn’t really guess his age. There wasn’t a great deal anyone could do for him. I didn’t know a soul in the city and I couldn’t speak his language. I did speak to him; I did pray for him; and I did put money in his bowl. But I knew there was something very simple I needed to do. I grasped what little remained of his two hands in mine and looked him full in the face as I talked to him and tried to imagine the depth of his suffering. That was it, not much, really. But at least I had given him what I can almost guarantee no one else ever did, a caring touch for the outcast.
Jesus came to this earth to bring in the outcast. We find Him doing what He has just said He must do, touring the area of Galilee, “preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.” In one of these places a man with leprosy begs Him, “If you will, you can make me clean.” Leprosy in the Bible does not mean exactly what it does today. It’s probable that “leprosy,” Hansen’s disease as it’s also known, spread into the land of Israel from the east a few centuries before the time of Christ. But in those times they did not have the benefit of precise medical terminology, and the expression “leprosy” covered a number of different conditions, including other conditions with visible effects on the skin. Unlike the leprosy we know, some of these conditions would be highly contagious. The whole range of infectious skin diseases were covered in the Jewish law by very detailed regulations (Leviticus 13-14), and so the Jewish people were very much aware of skin diseases. Leprosy created two problems. The first is the obvious one; it was a disease that disfigured you, damaged your body and made people afraid of you, the same kind of fear that today accompanies AIDS, and even lately COVID-19. The second problem is that leprosy also made you ritually unclean, excluded from God’s people. You could not go to worship; you could not share in the sacrifices; you were effectively cut off from everyone and everything. If you did recover, only the priests could declare that you were “clean” once more. There were detailed rules for that as well, including sacrifices that had to be offered.
To Be Continued
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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