Mark's record of this incident puts the miracle in very small compass,
and dilates rather upon the attitude and mind of Jesus Christ
preparatory to it. As if, apart altogether from the supernatural
element and the lessons that are to be drawn from it, it was worth our
while to ponder, for the gladdening of our hearts and the
strengthening of our hopes, that lovely picture of sheer simple
compassion and tender-heartedness. 'Jesus, _moved with compassion_'--a
clause which occurs only in Mark's account--'put forth His hand and
touched him, and said, I will; be thou clean.' Note, then, three
things--the compassion, the touch, the word.
As to the first, is it not a precious boon for us, in the midst of our
many wearinesses and sorrows and sicknesses, to have that picture of
Jesus Christ bending over the leper, and sending, as it were, a gush
of pitying love from His heart to flood away all his miseries? It is a
true revelation of the heart of Jesus Christ. Simple pity is its very
core. That pity is eternal, and subsists as He sits in the calm of the
heavens, even as it was manifest whilst He sat teaching in the humble
house in Galilee. For 'we have not a High Priest which cannot be
touched with a feeling of our infirmities.' The pitying Christ is near
us all. Nor let us forget that it is this swift shoot of pity which
underlies all that follows--the touch, the word, and the cure. Christ
does not wait to be moved by the prayers that come from these leprous
lips, but He is moved by the leprous lips themselves. The sight of the
man affects His pitying heart, which sets in motion all the wheels of
His healing powers. So we may learn that the impulse to which His
redeeming activity owes its origin wells up from His own heart. Show
Him sorrow, and He answers it by a pity of such a sort that it is
restless till it helps and assuages. We may rise higher. The pity of
Jesus Christ is the summit of His revelation of the Father, and,
looking upon that gentle heart, into whose depths we can see as
through a little window by these words of my text, we must stand with
hushed reverence as beholding not only the compassion of the Man, but
therein manifested the pity of the God who, 'Like as a father pitieth
his children, pitieth them that fear Him,' and pities yet more the
more miserable men who fear and love Him not. The Christian's God is
no impassive Being, indifferent to mankind, but 'One who in all our
afflictions is afflicted, and, in His love and in His pity,' redeems
and bears and carries.
Note, still further, the Lord's touch. With swift obedience to the
impulse of His pity, Christ thrusts forth His hand and touches the
leper. There was much in that touch, but whatever more we may see in
it, we should not be blind to the loving humanity of the act. Remember
that the man kneeling there had felt no touch of a hand for years;
that the very kisses of his own children and his wife's embrace of
love were denied him. And now Jesus puts out His hand, and, without
thinking of Mosaic restrictions and ceremonial prohibitions, yields to
the impulse of His pity, and gives assurance of His sympathy and His
brotherhood, as He lays His pure fingers upon the rotting ulcers. All
men that help their fellows must be contented thus to identify
themselves with them and to take them by the hand, if they would seek
to deliver them from their evils.
Remember, too, that according to the Mosaic law it was forbidden to
any but the priest to touch a leper. Therefore, in this act, beautiful
as it is in its uncalculated humanity, there may have been something
intended of a deeper kind. Our Lord thereby does one of two
things--either He asserts His authority as overriding that of Moses
and all his regulations, or He asserts His sacerdotal character.
Either way there is a great claim in the act.
Further, we may take that touch of Christ's as being a parable of His
whole work. It was a piece of wonderful sympathy and condescension
that He should put out His hand to touch the leper; but it was the
result of a far greater and more wonderful piece of sympathy and
condescension that He had a hand to touch him with. For the 'sweet
human hands and lips and eyes' which He wore in this world were
assumed by Him in order that He might make Himself one with all
sufferers and bear the burden of all their sins. So His touch of the
leper symbolises His identifying of Himself with mankind, the foulest
and the most degraded; and in this connection there is a profound
meaning in one of the ordinarily trivial legends of the Rabbis, who,
founding upon a word of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, tell us
that when Messias comes He will be found sitting amongst the lepers at
the gate of the city. So He was numbered amongst the transgressors in
His life, and 'with the wicked in His death.' He touches, and,
touching, contracts no impurity, cleansing as the sunlight and the
fire do, by burning up the impurity, and not by receiving it into
Himself.
Note the Lord's word, 'I will; be thou clean.' It is shaped,
convolution for convolution, so to speak, to match the man's prayer.
He ever moulds His response according to the feebleness and
imperfection of the petitioner's faith. But, at the same time, what a
ring of autocratic authority and conscious sovereignty there is in the
brief, calm, imperative word, 'I will; be thou clean!' He accepts the
leper's ascription of power; He claims to work the miracle by His own
will, and therein He is either guilty of what comes very near arrogant
blasphemy, or He is rightly claiming for Himself a divine prerogative.
If His word can tell as a force on material things, what is the
conclusion? He who 'spake and it was done' is Almighty and Divine.