Scripture Reference: Mark 1:14-45
Bringing In the Outcast – Continued
Please read Mark 1:40-45 for the background to this section.
The man Jesus healed of leprosy sounds like it all ended for everyone happily, a wonderful story; the ravages of disease are undone; the pain of separation is reversed. Yet there is a tragic twist to this incident, and it is vital that we understand it. This man with leprosy, like so many others, had missed the point. He comes to the Healer; he is healed; he is thrilled with it; he is overjoyed. But, even so, he has missed the point. How do we know? The word for “sternly charged” is very strong. In essence Jesus is saying, “You are absolutely not to go spreading this around!” Why? Because the man has seen only the healer, not the King. He is to tell only the priests; they, as the religious professionals, should at least be able to recognize the evidence of their eyes. If, as they believe, it’s as hard to heal from leprosy as to raise someone from the dead, surely they will see that God must be in this. If they don’t, what Jesus probably means is that it will be evidence against them that they have refused to recognize the true messenger of God. But the man does the exact opposite of what Jesus has insisted on, he goes and tells everybody he can find. It’s hardly likely that he tells them God’s promised Kingdom has arrived and that he has met the King. If nothing else, the fact that he directly disobeys Jesus’ clear instructions proves that he has not recognized Him as the King. The outcome is that he succeeds in derailing Jesus’ whole strategy. He no longer enters the towns; instead, now the people come out to Him.
Jesus did not come to give people normal life; he came to give people abundant life, eternal life! This is what the healings point to. For a start, Jesus’ actions show that the ceremonial rules about “clean and unclean” and “touching and not touching” are finished with and no longer necessary. He is not concerned about obeying those rules any more. But, more than that, as Jesus touches the man, He takes on his uncleanness so that the man can be made clean and the barrier which excludes the outcast is broken down. In a sense Jesus becomes the outcast, so that the outcast can be brought home. It is evident in the fact that Jesus no longer goes into the towns, but the people come to Him, an outcast from the cities. Jesus has come into the world to do just that on a grand scale. Leprosy was a terrible curse; it ruined normal life and brought pain and ugliness into human life. Jesus healed people from it, such was His compassion, but, wonderful as that was, it points ahead to the healing of the far greater curse of sin, which, even more than leprosy, ruins normal life, destroys relationships and brings pain and ugliness into human life, but not just in the natural, in the eternal even more so. Jesus came to provide cleanness from sin, the disease, the curse that affects us all because we have all broken God’s law. Under the curse, we are all outcasts, cut off from God by the barrier of sin. Therefore, as Galatians 3:13 puts it, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us . . .” When Jesus the King went to the cross, He became the curse for us, dying under the weight of it and bringing in the outcasts. Life can begin anew, not just a normal life regained, like the one this man knew when he was healed, but far more; eternal life. This is what the Kingdom of God is all about. The one thing that can keep you an outcast from God is exactly the same disease that we all start with, our sin. If you have been to the cross and seen Jesus become a curse for you, then there is nothing at all that can ever separate you from His love. He says to all who acknowledge Him, “I will; be clean.”
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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