Jesus Cleanses a Leper
Mark 1:42 “And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was cleansed.”
immediately the leprosy... What could cleanse a man of such disease in a moment aside from God’s power? If God can and will do this for a stranger, will He not do this for a child?
This was not a gradual healing, but a sudden complete healing.
But the charm of this delightful incident is the manner in which our Lord grants the impassioned prayer. We might have expected a shudder, a natural recoil from the loathsome spectacle, and then a wonder-working word. But misery which He could relieve did not repel Jesus; it attracted Him. His impulse was to approach. He not only answered I will, -- and deep is the will to remove all anguish in the wonderful heart of Jesus, -- but He stretched forth an unshrinking hand, and touched that death in life. It is a parable of all His course, this laying of a clean hand on the sin of the world to cleanse it. At His touch, how was the morbid frame thrilled with delightful pulses of suddenly renovated health. And how was the despairing, joyless heart, incredulous of any real will to help him, soothed and healed by the pure delight of being loved.
This is the true lesson of the narrative. St. Mark treats the miraculous cure much more lightly than the tender compassion and the swift movement to relieve suffering. And he is right. The warm and generous nature revealed by this fine narrative is what, as we have seen, most impresses the doubter, and ought most to comfort the Church. For He is the same yesterday and today. And perhaps, if the divinity of love impressed men as much as that of power, there would be less denial of the true Godhead of our Lord.
Both this symbolic touch (cf. Mark 7:33; 8:22) and Jesus’ authoritative pronouncement - I am willing (pres. tense), be clean (aorist pass., decisive act received) - constituted the cure. It was immediate euthys; cf. Mark 1:10, complete, visible to all who saw him.
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