(Josiah Hall)
Matthew 8:1–4 When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. 2And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” 3And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. 4And Jesus said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”
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After describing the astonished reaction to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (7:28–29), Matthew then narrates Jesus healing a man with lepra. The inclusion of this miracle here should surprise us.
Just prior to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew stated that Jesus had gone throughout Galilee both preaching and healing, and that it was the combination of Jesus’ preaching and healing ministries that had led the crowds to follow him (4:23–25). The cleansing of the man with lepra, however, is the first miracle that Matthew narrates—why?* This miracle confirms two key points that Matthew stressed in the Sermon on the Mount: Jesus came to fulfill, not abolish the Law, and Jesus has unique authority. Before we can fully understand what’s happening in this miracle, we first need a brief reminder about what lepra was and why it was a problem.
Even though the ESV describes the man as having leprosy, I’ve referred to him as having lepra. When we hear the word “leprosy”, we often think of Hansen’s disease, a bacterial infection which can affect the nerves and cause the loss of a sense of touch or pain. In ancient times, however, the phrase lepra did not refer to Hansen’s disease but to a wide variety of skin diseases, including psoriasis and eczema. These conditions are not normally life-threatening, but the Old Testament laws describe lepra as something that defiles a person, making them unclean. We need to remember at this point that ritual purity in the Old Testament was not always an issue of sin, but was a way in which God taught his people about his holiness. Often the things that made one ritually impure had to do with death, including a corpse, or lepra. When Moses’ sister Miriam is afflicted with lepra, Moses prays to God: “Do not let her be as in death” (Numbers 12:12). To summarize, for Jews in Jesus’ time who followed the Old Testament Law, lepra was a condition that symbolized death and therefore could defile someone and make them ritually impure.
Lepra caused an especially potent impurity that could spread to another person through touch or even by being in the same room. As a result, those with lepra had to live apart from others and could not touch holy objects or holy food, lest they contaminate others. Although likening ritual purity to diseases can help us understand how it can spread and infect others, we need to remember that the danger of lepra was not that it was a virulent infection but that it caused ritual impurity that had to be cleansed before one could participate in corporate worship. For the people in Jesus’ time, while ritual impurity was not viewed as sinful, it was still something that could be dangerous if you did not purify yourself before approaching God’s holy presence.
This background helps us understand what Jesus is and is not doing when he cleanses the man with lepra. First of all, Jesus is not abolishing the Old Testament purity regulations or saying that ritual impurity does not exist or matter. Instead, once he cleanses the man, he specifically instructs him to go to the “priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them” (8:4). The priests could not heal lepra; rather, according to Leviticus, their job was to diagnose it and to facilitate the rituals to purify someone who had been cleansed from it. Jesus sends the man to the priest to both fulfill the Law and so that the man’s cleanness will testify to them that someone has healed him.
The only people in the Old Testament to have ever healed lepra were Moses (when he prayed to God to cleanse his sister Miriam in Numbers 12) and Elisha, who heals the Syrian Naaman (2 Kings 5). Jesus shows that he is a greater prophet than either Moses or Elisha when he merely touches the man and heals him, with no other steps or intervention necessary.
Jesus’ healing action illustrates his ability to remove the source of defilement, something that the Law could not do. Jesus’ actions here do not contradict or invalidate the guidance in Leviticus about lepra (again, remember that he sends the man to the priest in accordance with the Law). From Jesus’ point of view, the Levitical Law was the good gift of God to enable the people to dwell in the presence of a holy God. But the Levitical Law could only purify someone once they had already been cleansed from the lepra; that is, the Law could not remove the source of the impurity.
This miracle does more than simply testify to Jesus’ power over skin diseases. It clarifies that one of the ways in which Jesus fulfills the Law is by doing what the Law cannot. The first miracle Matthew chooses to narrate thus tells us something essential about Jesus: He can and wants (see 8:3 — “I will”) to remove not just the defiling effects of sin and death from the world, but the very things that cause impurity (both moral and ritual impurity), namely sin and death themselves.**
* The miracle Mark narrates, in contrast, is the exorcism of a demon from a man in the synagogue in Capernaum (Mark 1:21–28). This difference between Mark and Matthew is a good reminder that each Gospel is selective with what they include. Mark opens with an exorcism because his Gospel highlights the conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan (see Mark 3:22–27). As I describe above, Matthew draws attention to this cleansing miracle in accord with his narrative purposes.
** Much of what I wrote here has been influenced by Matthew Theissen’s book Jesus and the Forces of Death and by Paul Sloan’s book Jesus and the Law of Moses.