JESUS TOUCHES THE LIVING DEAD


Matthew 8

July 07, 2019

From Saul To David

I wanted to have both the last and the first readings, because the
backdrop to this exhortation, this very simple exhortation, is the
difference, really, between David and Saul, the attitudes that they both
had, and I’m thinking here of Saul’s double mindedness as opposed to
David single-mindedness, and if we keep that in the back of our minds as
we go on, I hope that will set the scene as it were, for the comments,
but the the comments will all be taken for Matthew.

As I say, it’s a very simple exhortation today, and I’m going to focus
just on one parable, one _healing_ parable, the healing of the leper,
and try and appreciate, as we gloss, as the Bible so often does, it
glosses over just so much depth that’s so wonderful to search out. And I
hope that we can gain something by doing that. A bit gory at times, but
I hope that that is _real_, that brings the _reality_ of what this man
was going through and the reality that we’re going through. So I’ll try
and keep that to a minimum, but _enough_ so that we get an appreciation
for his suffering.

Leprosy in Today’s World

And it’s not just him that suffers, three out of every one hundred
thousand, two hundred thousand every year suffer from leprosy. In this
country there ought to be based on those numbers, two thousand people,
but there are probably only hundreds each year who get diagnosed, and
those parts of the world where there is no medical help, it’s as bad as
perhaps we see it in this story. So we’ll just look at this man’s
background then, at what he was going through, the description of what
he was suffering, and we can do that first by looking at some of the
regulations in Leviticus thirteen and what what was done to somebody,
what they had to go through if they were discovered to have a rash or
swelling on their body or a bright spot.

Leprosy Then, Under The Law of Moses

  “The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, ‘When a man has on the
  skin of his body, a swelling or rash or bright spot and it becomes an
  infection of leprosy than he should be brought to Aaron the priest or
  one of his sons.”

In other words, anyone who gets leprosy, take them straight to the
priest. The priest will examine them. And if the hair has turned white,
then the infection, perhaps it’s deeper, and there might be more than a
superficial problem because the roots of the hair are being affected

  “and the priest shall look at him and pronounce him unclean.”

Now, if someone did that to us today, it wouldn’t make much difference
would it, nobody would know ,it’s an anonymous society, but in those
days it was very different.

  But if the bright spot is white and doesn’t appear to be deeper and
  the hair on it hasn’t turned white, the priest shall isolate him
  outside the camp for seven days and see what happens. The priest will
  look him after that time and if in his eyes the infection has not
  changed”

in his determination, and it hasn’t spread, during which time that man
or woman would have to worry about what was going on. “The priest shall
isolate him for seven more days”

so two weeks in total

  “and the priest will then look at him again and if the infection had
  faded, he would be pronounced clean. It’s just a rash or something
  Eczema or something. But if the rash spreads further, then he will
  appear again and he priest will print out some unclean. It’s leprosy.”

It’s like the C word, isn’t it? Today, it’s Cancer.

Sometimes it’s already extremely clear what he’s got, he meets the
priest, and it’s all over him, and so therefore, if the infection is
from his head to his feet, the priest will look and behold, it’s
_obvious_ it’s Leprosy and he’s _covered_ with it and he will pronounce
him ‘unclean.’ But there were two types therefore, there was this white
leprosy, which was get better after three years, and he was pronounced
clean, even if it was sort of all over him. There was another type that
was just obviously terrible, and that was a serious type, those were the
tests that were given. And again, there’s nothing to tell us what these
people went through. If that man were to, or a woman would have a red
forehead or rash there than he had to tear his clothes. The hair of his
head would be uncovered. He would cover his mouth and cry before himself
__unclean, unclean__! And if he loved others, he would shout it loudly.
Leprosy is breathed-in, and as leprosy is breathed-in from one victim to
another, and that’s how it’s spread, so they would have to breathe out
these curses against themselves. It’s also bred by touching the unclean
thing, so there would be a suspicion on that person that they haven’t
been following, (perhaps correct, the suspicion might be true )that they
hadn’t been following the law of Moses.

A Terrifyingly Awful Disease

It’s to note that in the Middle Ages, when leprosy was rife, and there
were thousands of leprosy hospitals, six alone in Chichester, that it
was probably due to the squirrel fur trade, an unclean animal under the
Law of Moses, (and they found that out by DNA testing or DNA analysis of
the Leprosy bacterium from the Max Planck Institute.) So it’s just an
aside that the Law of Moses could well protect you from the transmission
of leprosy, so then he spent the rest of his life going around with his
face covered, there was no long-term hope for that person. It was a
pronouncement, essentially, of the death, of slow death, it’s a very
slow growing bacteria.

And it’s awful, just the most dreadful thing you can imagine. In the
Bible days, no physician could treat it, it was uncontrolled therefore,
and just took its course, apart from all the physical symptoms, which
were just dreadful, all the patchiness and the bulbousness, and we’ll go
into some of those details, it attacks the nervous system, and you and
you begin to lose sensation in every limb, every part of you. So you
become _deadened_ to the world. You can’t feel your limbs, and so you
knock them, you scratch yourself and you cut yourself without realising
it, or you have a sort an OCD itch perhaps, and instead of realising
that it’s hurting you, you just carry on and draw blood and and it
doesn’t heal in the normal way. Instead, the infection travels around in
your blood, reaching every part of you. You bash your feet on stones.

People who have leprosy today report that their fingers are eaten by
rats in the night, they don’t know, that’s how terrible this is. Your
bones are deformed, they become claws. Your feet… you can’t walk. Your
bones are absorbed into your hands until their stumps. Your nose is
absorbed, if you’re lucky enough for that not to happen, your teeth will
fall out. Your face is completely exploded until you have flaps of skin
and it looks like you’ve been under gravity or something, it looks just
as if you’re drawn out. It’s the most… and I do, because of the message
of this healing parable, I do ask you to look online some pictures and
just get a feeling for what this man looked like, perhaps, as he met
Jesus on what people had to go through and therefore what it means to us
to see, to actually visibly be able to see these people which we don’t
see today, it’s an object lesson for us, as we will find out so the
leprosy further attacks the bone marrow…. There’s just nothing that this
disease leaves untouched, and it’s a slow, oozing death, as I say,
atrophying fingers, it attacks the eyes, it brings blindness, you know,
in the worst possible way, the eyes look like they’re just falling out.
Sterility occurs. The one thing it isn’t, though it’s very painful,
because your limbs are dead. It’s just ugly, it gets into your organs,
and eventually you lose everything.

This is the reality for that man. That was his outlook. His voice may
have been changed. You could certainly smell him coming. There was
nothing about him which was not _distasteful, repugnant, repellent_. He
was shunned, that man, as he walked towards Jesus, the crowds would have
parted like the waters in the Red Sea. But the one thing that may not
have been affected was his mind.

The Walking Dead

But as the historian Josephus writes, these lepers were considered dead
people. They were, quite literally, the walking dead.

So this was no doubt, this was a terrifying, awful disease. But it’s not
just that it was ugly beyond imagination, and all of this, it made you
ceremonially unclean, it destroyed your relationships with others and
your relationship with God. You could no longer worship together, you
could no longer visit your family or be part of the community. This is
the most graphic, and that’s why I suggest you look at what what these
people suffer, illustration of what sin is. I would like to suggest that
_sin_ is this ugly, this incurable, this uncontrolled in us, unless we
change, contaminating and alienating and all of those things that we’ve
just heard, it leaves you with stigma, if others can recognise the sin
in you, and it’s certainly how we must appear to God, naturally
speaking, we’re ceremonially unclean, we’re just a walking illustration
of the fall, and unless we do something about it, those characteristics
remain in us.

A Surprising Jesus

So it’s totally surprising. Is it not? And shocking, that Jesus, in
presenting himself as a clean sinless son of God, begins with such a
man? You don’t go near a lepper ond a lepper doesn’t go near you. It was
utterly beyond the realms of any social norm, Old Testament Law, it was
just not done. You could hear these people coming, remember? So there
was no chance you could accidentally bump into one. This is an
outstanding thing that Jesus did and what makes it more outstanding is
the attitude of the leper. This leper approached and bowed low before
him, saying,

  “Lord, if you’re willing, you can make me clean”

His Attitude - Confidence.

The first thing that makes this leper so interesting is that he came
with confidence absolutely and utterly against the Law of Moses. The Law
of Moses to him __meant__ something, didn’t it? It wasn’t (just) a set
of ceremonial laws to obey. Here was the son of God and I can go to him
with confidence.

  “and behold, there came a leper”,

it says, a lepper approached, he didn’t touch Jesus from behind,
silently, he comes right up, and the crowd parts and he’s there. This
man was so desperate. Do we feel that desperate? Did we feel that
desperate before we were baptised? You know, we recognise in that man
something of ourselves, don’t we? The fact that he was an outcast did
not stop him. He came in full view of everybody out of a very deep need,
to speak to Jesus.

His Attitude - Humility.

The second characteristic as he came with humility, he bowed low before
Jesus. He fell on his knees, as we hear in another gospel. He came
worshipping him, didn’t he? When he said ‘Lord’, it wasn’t just a title
to him, he knew he was in the presence of God’s representative. He fell
prostrate, and Jesus standing there in front of him. That been many
healings, of course, but one wonders how he heard of this, this Jesus,
from where he was outside the camp, in a leper colony probably.
Nonetheless, he comes before Jesus and prostrate himself in humble
worship. It’s clear to see that whatever his body may have been going
through, his mind was still pure in that sense, he could recognise
Jesus.

His Attitude - Faith.

The third thing that we read is that he, or that I feel is important, is
he comes with great faith. He was full of leprosy as well wasn’t he but
also full of faith. Luke, the physician says, ‘Full of leprosy’, you
could do it, he thinks, therefore, the only question is, ‘do you want
to,’ he had nothing to lose? And I like to think that the reason why he
came in faith is that just a few moments before, a few days earlier or
perhaps weeks, Jesus was giving a talk in the synagogue, everybody’s
eyes were fastened on him and he made the point that ‘there were many
lepers in Israel, but only Naaman the Syrian was healed’, and that crowd
turned on him, from hearing gracious words, ‘isn’t this the son of
Joseph, where are all these gracious words?’, the crowd rounded on him
and took him to the edge of the cliff and wanted to kill him, that would
have been big news, but he passed through them, we hear, so the big news
of Jesus, and attached to the fact that he was making an example of a
leper that was _not_ in Israelite, I like to think, would have given
this man courage, _outside the camp_, not allowed to take part in any of
the ceremonies but Naaman was healed. Maybe I could be too?

‘If You Will’

If you will. How many times have we prayed that brothers and sisters, we
know he can, but will he? A very difficult thing to say. And here we
have the answer, don’t we? Some people like to say that Jesus may have
been indignant at the question. I’m not sure, it says he was moved with
compassion. We _believe_ God is able even, if we have a disease that
won’t leave us. We __know__ he’s able, but maybe there’s a reason. Maybe
there was a reason this man had such terrible leprosy. And of course, we
know there was, so that from the rest of time, God’s purpose on Earth
here we know that God’s name is great, just like the paralytic there’s a
reason why people suffer and there’s a reason why we suffer. We know he
can, but will he? So he had confidence, had a deep need, he came with
_reverence_ and _humility_, with _faith_,

  “and Jesus, put forth his hand and touched him”

Given everything we’ve just heard about the disease of leprosy, that’s
unbelievable. He put forward his hand and touched him. You don’t touch
people with leprosy you’re never __permitted__ to. But you know, that
was probably what that man needed of all things, a _relationship_,
personal contact, and Jesus simply says, be clean. As I say. It’s one of
the great things about the Bible, that it just glosses over so much
detail. ‘It is my will, be clean’, and his miracle was __immediate__.

Jesus Touches the Unclean Thing

When we touch the unclean thing, we become unclean. When Jesus touches
the unclean thing, they become clean.

That’s power and its power we can’t imagine his claws becoming beautiful
hands, his eyes clarifying, his hair growing back, his eyelashes, his
scaly skin disappearing, his voice restored. Everything that we’ve ever
experienced in life would fade into insignificance in the presence of
that miracle. Everything we know about technology, the fact that sixteen
million lepers are cured as it were today by drugs is as nothing because
they still have all those terrible symptoms. This man was made whole.

  “See thou tell no man, don’t say a word to anyone but go and show
  yourself to the priest and offer a sacrifice that Moses commanded”

And people mention this and they say, well maybe Jesus didn’t want the
attention. He didn’t want to get the crowd’s going, and so he asked this
man to keep its secret, but Jesus needed to fulfil all righteousness,
the man needed to obey the law of Moses. Jesus was thinking of him I
think. that man needed to rejoin society but had ostracised him. And to
do that, he had to go to the priests without them realising that it was
Jesus. This Jesus they had just tried to kill, without them realising it
was Jesus who had healed him. And they needed to inspect him, perhaps
for a week or two and then pronounce _clean_ and they would have been
then complicit in this miracle. They would have looked back and they
would have…, he would have had a certificate, he would have been able to
prove that he was clean and that _they_ had said so, and then when he
said that Jesus had done it, it would have made all the difference.
We’re reminded of the Syro-Phoenician woman who Jesus was silent
towards, she stood outside until she was bursting with faith and came in
and prostrated herself and begged him. We would imagine that this man if
he had been able to go away in silence and just carry out Jesus command,
would have had a similar conversion experience from being someone who
had come confidently but not quite making the last few metres, to
somebody he was bursting with energy for the rest of his life. Rather
like pool had to go through that ‘death’ period of persecuting the
church. You know, we we heard earlier some sad news, and we know that
what we saw him weakness, we reap in power.

So as we say, this leper who once stood a far off, unclean, cursed,
cursed by his _own_ mouth is now made near, and he can approach with
confidence that graceful man. The healing miracle therefore, was not of
his healing, but was of Christ’s sacrifice. Christ sacrifice is what
makes all of this possible, because in metaphor, this man represented
scene and we take part in that ugliness that’s lying just below the
surface of our skin. And it’s only through Jesus’ sacrifice, a man who
was prepared to walk towards his _own_ terrible death that we have any
chance at all. I’m reminded of.. I’ll tell you a story, when I was in a
lecture at Brighton, one of my friends was sitting at the back with me
and I drew a cartoon of me being crushed by a one tonne weight of sin
and my friend wrote back to me. “Well, what you going to do about it?”
And hyou know, I was quite shocked by that. I thought, Well, I don’t
know if I can do anything about it. I’ll try. But it’s not really _my_
job. It’s Christ job. He’s now no longer meeting with us. The second
request I have for you is that you pray for him tonight as well.

Jesus Makes Everything Meaningful

The sacrifice of Jesus, therefore, is what makes all of this meaningful.
It’s what makes our suffering meaningful. It’s what makes those who have
passed away meaningful. What gives us hope for the future. It’s what
made this man’s faith meaningful, it’s what made all of the lives of the
past meaningful. Even at this late stage, those Jewish leaders that we
feel may have tried to kill this man for having been healed, like they
did Lazarus, even at that late stage, were even able to accept Jesus.
And we are, too. Just think for a moment therefore, about the sin that’s
in you that’s _still_ in you, that you haven’t transformed but is still
holding you back.

  “‘Even now’”, declares the Lord “‘return to me with all your heart,
  with fasting and weeping and mourning.’”

Renew your hearts,

  rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord, for he is
  gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and
  he relents from sending calamity.’”

There are three reactions to Jesus’ presence aren’t there. There’s
Peters mother-in-law, who was immediately about humble, obedient
service. There is the disobedience of the happy ebullience of the healed
leper, and then there’s the hostility and rejection that we sometimes
see in those who’ve fallen away from the truth, and those, sadly, those
Pharisees that could see him in the flesh and still not understand who
he was. And we’re probably a mix of all three of them aren’t we. If it
weren’t for Christ sacrifice this would be a sad state of affairs, we
would of all men be sad. But isn’t it enough? Just think of the
blessings that we have. Isn’t it enough then that Jesus has done all of
this for us?

All That God Has Done For Us

I mean, we have life given to us without our will, and then were given
agency over our life, then we’re given knowledge so that we can
understand our position, the very stars themselves, lead us towards God.
Yahweh’s literally written in stone specific knowledge of him, how to
love him, and Jesus, the tree of life from which we may freely eat has
come and sacrificed himself for us. God has caused angels and righteous
men and women to call out to us through the scriptures, through the
ages. They called out like Joseph had a man calling out in front of him,
This Yahshua is clean. This man that’s coming. He’s clean, _clean_,
__clean__, even a voice from the sky proclaims him.. someone who pleased
God. We know who to follow, we know to come to. we know whose door to
knock at. We already know the answer ahead of time to every question, no
matter how personal, no matter how tragic, no matter our suffering.

The feet of Jesus are nearby heard again. This is why we at this moment,
have such gratitude for Jesus long-suffering patience. Is it a small
thing that we can come so confidently? We can come with so much faith,
so much belief that not only _will_ he but that he _wants_ to? We have
an amazing hope don’t we. And what we’re about to do now is is itself a
beautiful thing, such a simple, understated thing.

You know, when you think of your sin, I think a lot of people, well, in
the world perhaps, they think of a book or scroll that’s open, and there
will be two columns, and on the left and on the right, and on the left
will be all the things you did wrong, and on the right. But instead, I
think that book will be a story of your life, a story of your
progression from before you knew anything and God foreknew us and was
knitting us together, to when we recognise that state of sin in us, when
we were baptised and yes, sometimes disobedient and yes, sometimes
rejection and yes, sometimes humble service, but also a growing
recognition, like the disciples of the character and identity of this
man we’ve chosen to follow and a growing trust and coming-togetherness
of ourselves with Jesus.

This is why we sacrifice so much time, money and energy. It’s why we cut
off the parts of us that we want to let go of. It’s why we deaden
ourselves to sin. We allow the Spirit to take over and we don’t mind the
passing, of that which was us, as we allow ourselves, our earthly man,
to shrivel away and drop off.

This lord, that we follow, the Lord that we fall at the feet of, is
willing to receive us as we are, repulsive and unclean in many ways. But
he is someone that as he touches our hearts, cleans our consciences and
transforms us, someone willing to stand up for us. _This_ is why we
remember him as often as we think of him, and at least once each week.

We won’t know how many people in this world have been made alive and
healed by him until the kingdom, the marriage supper of the Lamb, when
two will become one flesh, as we share this bread and wine together
let’s not just think of it as sustaining our memory, but also of looking
ahead to what he’s made possible

  “for God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in him and through
  him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on Earth or
  things in Heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the
  cross.”

So let’s restore our spiritual focus and strength of purpose as we
realise that Jesus _is willing_ and he’s willing to touch our hearts, he
wants to become one flesh with us, because when that happens, when he
becomes one flesh with us, you and me, the body of his Bride will be
united with his body, and we will be in relationship with God Almighty
in _clean_, _whole_, _permanent_, _oneness_.

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_M Farey_