'And there came a leper to Him, beseeching Him, and kneeling down to
Him, and saying unto Him, If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean. 41.
And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth His hand, and touched him,
and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean. 42. And as soon as He had
spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was
cleansed.'--Mark i. 40-42.
Christ's miracles are called wonders--that is, deeds which, by their
exceptional character, arrest attention and excite surprise. Further,
they are called 'mighty works'--that is, exhibitions of superhuman
power. They are still further called 'signs'--that is, tokens of His
divine mission. But they are signs in another sense, being, as it
were, parables as well as miracles, and representing on the lower
plane of material things the effects of His working on men's spirits.
Thus, His feeding of the hungry speaks of His higher operation as the
Bread of Life. His giving sight to the blind foreshadows His
illumination of darkened minds. His healing of the diseased speaks of
His restoration of sick souls. His stilling of the tempest tells of
Him as the Peace-bringer for troubled hearts; and His raising of the
dead proclaims Him as the Life-giver, who quickens with the true life
all who believe on Him. This parabolic aspect of the miracles is
obvious in the case before us. Leprosy received exceptional treatment
under the Mosaic law, and the peculiar restrictions to which the
sufferer was subjected, as well as the ritual of his cleansing, in the
rare cases where the disease wore itself out, are best explained by
being considered as symbolical rather than as sanitary. It was taken
as an emblem of sin. Its hideous symptoms, its rotting sores, its
slow, stealthy, steady progress, its defiance of all known means of
cure, made its victim only too faithful a walking image of that worse
disease. Remembering this deeper aspect of leprosy, let us study this
miracle before us, and try to gather its lessons.