“A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”  Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!”  Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”  But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.”  —Mark 1: 40-45

Last week our pastor Brent drew attention to the excitement and constant activity we see in Mark’s Gospel, especially here at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. There is an urgency in the story. Mark uses the word immediately some 40 times.

In today’s reading we’re not even out of the first chapter of Mark yet and Jesus has been baptized, he’s been tempted by Satan in the wilderness, he’s exorcised a demoniac, and he’s healed Peter’s mother-in-law.

Which is to say that Jesus is a busy guy, and he’s also a big deal, since crowds of people flock to be with him. If you think about it, it is remarkable that in a time before mass communication, word could go out, and great crowds could gather. And the many people who sought out Jesus recognized his authority, recognized his ability to meet them in their need, to heal them, feed them and fix them.

And so it is, in today’s story about the cleansing of a man with leprosy. And I quite intentionally describe this man as “a man who has leprosy” rather than a leper, which is what the scripture calls him. Today, we try to be careful not to let someone’s disability define them. I have a disability and it doesn’t define me.

But the truth is, before he meets Jesus, the man is a leper, his disease does define him in several significant ways. First of all, he has a loathsome contagious skin disease. He’s hard to look at, much less to touch.

Secondly, the law of Moses in Leviticus chapters 13 and 14 condemns him to social isolation, since leprosy makes him ritually unclean, a category we don’t understand in our time. Anyone who touches him becomes ritually unclean. He has to live outside the town gates. He is required by the Law to shout “unclean, unclean” as he moves about other people. But though the Law can segregate him to protect others, it cannot make him clean.

And, finally, adding insult to injury, the ancient world in which he lived blamed the diseased for their affliction, as a result of some sin they had committed. In short, the leper was a walking dead man. The rabbis said that it was easier to raise the dead than to cleanse a leper. So, it is not inaccurate to say that he was defined by his affliction. He was a leper. He was quite literally, untouchable.

He approaches Jesus and beseeches him to cleanse him. Notice that he forgoes the legally required shout of “unclean, unclean.” The emotional urgency of the leper’s approach shows his desperation at his plight. He kneels down at Jesus’s feet. “If you will, you can make me clean.” He believes in Jesus’s authority to cleanse him.

One of the important themes in Mark’s Gospel is what is called “the messianic secret,” in other words, his identity as the expected Jewish Messiah is hidden. Jesus asks those he cleanses, heals and cures, to keep it a secret. In time his true identity will only be revealed by his resurrection and known only by the cross. But in the meantime, some do recognize his true identity or at least his authority. Most, however, including his own disciples, do not. The demons recognize him, and so do many who suffer with afflictions.

That is the case with this man afflicted with leprosy. He drops to his knees and says to Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”

“Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.” (Notice the “immediately!”)

Was it pity for the man, or was it anger that the world has so much brokenness, is so at odds with the intentions of the Creator? One of the manuscript variants says “anger” rather than pity. Either way, it was an act of compassion. Compassion means to share suffering, and Jesus himself was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53)

Jesus sternly warns the man to say nothing and to report to the priest as required by the Law. Notice that Jesus upholds the Law here. Recall how he said, “I have come not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.” (Mt 5:17)

But the man, no longer a leper, could not contain himself, and went about witnessing to his transformation. And the word about his healing got around and the crowds swelled so that Jesus could no longer go into town openly.

It is a wonderful story, just five verses, but there’s a lot packed into it.

What are some of the takeaways for us?

1. God meets us in our need. My friend Tony Robinson tells a story about James Forbes, formerly Pastor of Riverside Church in New York. Forbes taught preaching at Union Theological Seminary, and Tony had him as a teacher. Forbes, came out of the Pentecostal tradition of the Black Church. Tony asked him why the Black Church’s worship had so much more vitality that the White Churches. James Forbes said, “Folks in the White Church think God needs them, whereas folks in the Black Church know they need God.” God meets us in our need.
2. The healing touch of Jesus manifests the power of God. The Doctrine of the Incarnation won’t be developed for centuries, but here we see the power of God demonstrated by Jesus’s human touch in the cleansing of the leper.
3. Jesus breaks down all kinds of barriers that separate people. According to the Law, Jesus should have become unclean by touching the leper. Instead, the leper becomes clean by being touched by Jesus. Jesus breaks through the boundaries that separate the “clean” from the “unclean.” What the Law could not do, Jesus did quite easily, with a touch. In Romans 8: 3 Paul writes, “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.”
4. Jesus came especially for those in the margins of society. A book that has been very influential to my understanding of Jesus is Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the Disinherited.” Brent gave it to me several summers ago. Howard Thurman was born in the segregated South of the Jim Crow era. His grandmother was a slave. She couldn’t read and he read her the Bible out loud. His book was published in 1949, the year I was born. He became the Dean of the Chapel at Boston University. He traveled to India to meet Gandhi and to study non-violent resistance to injustice. One of his students at Boston University was a young Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here is a quote from Thurman’s book: “The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish thinker and teacher appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. ‘In him was life; and the life was the light of men.’ Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.”

Thurman understood that the disinherited lived on the margins of society. He recognized that racial segregation was a great evil, whereby both the victim and the victimizer were deprived of a relationship that could set them both free from their respective bondage.

One of the things we are doing when we gather here for worship is to be a community of compassion, to share each other’s lives, to, in Paul’s words to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. And we do it in the name and Spirit of Jesus, both the earthly Jesus who cleansed the man with leprosy, and the Risen Christ who lives among us still, and is the head of the Church, which is his body.

As a community of compassion, we pray with and for each other. It is why we have a meal train for our members and a community pop-up pantry for our neighbors.

A friend of mine suggests that too many in our time view the world as a battlefield, a war between good and evil, and it is tempting to see the world that way. He suggests a better model is to see the world as a hospital, where everyone in need of healing can come. All of us, whether we are medically ill or not, have places in our lives that need fixing, broken relationships, family estrangements, addictions, compulsions, alienations.

So, what barriers need to be overcome, what breaches repaired, between Red States and Blue States, between the races, the sexes, rich and poor, the disinherited and privileged?

Perhaps we need to get in touch with our inner leper, the places where we are on the margins, or where we have cast others into the margins.

The Good News, and we always come here to hear good news, is that our God meets us in our need, and his son Jesus, who breaks down all barriers, heals us with a touch. Amen.

(I preached this sermon at The First Congregational Church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on January 21, 2024. To see a YouTube video of the service go to: