First Pass at This Weekend's Bible Lesson: Mark 1:40-45

[Okay, folks, most of the blog's regular readers will know the drill by now, I suppose. But by way of explanation, each week I publish several "passes" at the Bible passage that will serve as the foundation on which our congregation's weekend worship will be built. In these posts, I present reflections and things I'm learning as I prayerfully consider the passages at hand. So, this is the first pass for this week's lesson, Mark 1:40-45.]

The Passage
40A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” 41Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” 42Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. 43After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, 44saying 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.” 45But 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.

A Few Initial Thoughts
v. 40: This is the first overt expression of faith in Christ that we find in Mark's Gospel. At most, faith is implied in Mark 1:30 and of course, in the silent witness of the Capernaum crowds who came to seek healing (Mark 1:32-33). Although it should be said that in both cases, there is reason to wonder whether what's being expressed is faith. At this point in the Gospel, the crowds are not responding to Jesus as a matter of trust in Him as the Messiah Who will suffer and die for them and call them to die to self in order to rise to new life with God. Not even Jesus' first four disciples--Andrew, Simon, James, and John--appear to have an understanding of Jesus that would qualify for the Biblical term of faith (pistis in the Greek of the New Testament, a word that means trust. Rather, the incipient faith we see here demonstrated is rooted in the belief that Jesus is a miracle worker who will give them what they want.

But the leper's belief in Jesus is different from what we've heretofore encountered in Mark's account. There's a note of "Your will be done" in his words. "If you choose," he tells Jesus. This is submission. In that word, if, the leper also recognizes that Jesus is sovereign, that Jesus doesn't have to heal unless He chooses to do so, and that it's possible that a sovereign God may allow suffering to happen in the lives of believers. Tough stuff, but very mature. (God grant me such maturity of faith!) This is the sort of real and unflinching faith I often observe in people who have suffered.

Leprosy was regarded as more than merely a biological ailment. The leper was "unclean," unfit for participation in social or religious life. This is why the Old Testament book of Leviticus had clear guidelines on how one who had suffered from leprosy could have the restoration of their cleanness, and their restoration to religious and community life, certified. The certification was done not by a physician, but by a priest at the Temple in Jerusalem.

It's a measure of Jesus' perceived compassion that the leper feels that he can approach Jesus. In those days, people were so paranoid about being near a person with leprosy, for fear of physical and spiritual contamination, that they would throw stones at lepers to keep them at bay. We no doubt see a contemporary version of this in the attitudes of some toward those infected with the AIDS virus.

v. 41: The most jarring words in this verse are: "Jesus...touched him..." This was a scandalous no-no.

Jesus did choose to heal the leper, underscoring what I mentioned earlier, that healing is always at the discretion of a sovereign God.

v. 42: "Immediately" again. Mark's frequent use of this term emphasizes several things: (1) the immediacy of God's presence in Christ; (2) the capacity and desire of Jesus to work with urgency in our lives; (3) the rapidity with which Jesus moved from meteoric superstar to rejected Messiah.

v. 44: Once again here, we see an example of what's known as Mark's "messianic secret." Until Jesus has gone through cross and resurrection, the crowds are inclined to see Him as nothing more than a kewpie doll, a miracle-maker bound to do their bidding and provide them with pleasure. But Jesus has not come into our lives to give us lives of ease. He has come to be the road to our everlasting transformation.

This is what will happen in the lives of those who turn from sin (repent) and trust in Jesus and the good news about Him (Mark 1:15). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran martyr killed by the Nazis in the waning days of World War Two, pointed out, new life and forgiveness are gifts we cannot earn for all with faith in Jesus Christ.

These things come to us as grace, the Bible's word for the charity God grants to undeserving people like you and me. They're gifts and they are free. ("For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast," Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8-9).

But, as Bonhoeffer goes on to point out, if we accept these gifts, doing so will cost us our lives, the lives we're accustomed to living. We cannot take up Christ without laying down our self-absorption and self-protection. There is a difference, Bonhoeffer shows, between "cheap grace"--anything goes-ism without personal transformation--and "costly grace," embracing Christ's gifts by laying down our whole lives in surrender.

Until we understand the difference between cheap and costly grace, to speak about Jesus as the Messiah is meaningless babble.

And so, Jesus doesn't want the healed leper to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah yet.

But there's a second reason that Jesus tells the leper not to tell anybody about how he had been cleansed. He wants the man to go through the certification process alluded to earlier and which is detailed in Leviticus 18 and 19. Remember: Jesus didn't come to abolish God's laws, but to be their pure and complete fulfiller. He expected the cleansed leper to abide by those laws.

v. 45: But the cleansed leper couldn't keep his mouth shut. Jesus' fame spread even more.

I hope to write more about the passage later in the week.