Transcript

In 2013, the Louisville Cardinals were playing the Duke Blue Devils in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Kevin Ware, who played for the Louisville Cardinals, jumped to block a shot, but when he came down, he suffered a horrific break of his leg.

When Louisville forward Luke Hancock saw Kevin Ware lying near the sideline with a shattered right leg and the bone protruding out, he initially recoiled like his teammates. Some Cardinals began vomiting, others were crying and were inconsolable.

But then Hancock thought back to the previous summer, when he suffered a gruesome shoulder injury in a pickup game. He remembered how others were aghast.

He remembered how former Louisville guard Andre McGee was the only one to rush to his side, to rush him to the hospital. He remembered how much that had meant.

So as Ware lay there, scared and alone and stunned, Hancock got up and ran over to him. He held Ware’s hand and told him they would get through this together. He told Ware he would say a prayer for him.

Ware didn’t respond at first, because he was in shock. Hancock took a deep breath, closed his eyes, clenched Ware’s hand and started the prayer.

“Lord, watch over us and let Kevin be OK during this tough time,” he began. “The Lord does everything for a reason, and He will get you through this.”

Hancock said he did all he could to keep from breaking down, to keep tears from falling onto his fallen teammate. He found out later that Ware also was trying not to cry, trying to stay strong for him.

Hancock gently patted Ware’s chest several times, the two of them together in front of 34,657 fans in Lucas Oil Stadium and millions of horrified TV viewers.

“I wouldn’t want to be alone in that situation, and I don’t think he wanted to be alone,” Hancock said. “I just thought if I could talk to him and tell him he’ll be all right, it might help.” It helped more than Hancock realized, more than he could imagine.

Ware said that before Hancock arrived, he was scared. After Hancock touched him and calmed him, he knew he would be fine. “Seeing Luke there,” Ware said, “really just touched my heart. His presence allowed me to refocus and regain my strength.”

What Luke Hancock did was compassion and love. Believers are called to imitate the love of Christ. Like Luke, we are called to be a people of love in action, to reach out and to be there and help others in need, and to react quickly when the need is urgent.

We see a portrait of grace with a leper that the Lord healed in His earthly ministry. And we see the love of Christ in action.

Mark 1:40: “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.”

The Lord was ministering in Galilee at this time, preaching in synagogues and healing and casting out demons. As He was doing so, a leper came to Him.

That’s something to take note of, that the leper came to the Lord. This was a violation of the law of Moses concerning lepers. This was a bold move by the leper.

The law commanded that he was to shout, “Unclean!” to keep people away and warn anyone that he was near. But instead, he was so determined and hopeful that he ran right up to Christ.

In Luke’s account of this miracle, he described the man as being “full of leprosy” (Luke 5:12), or he was covered with it. This was an extremely serious, acute case of leprosy.

This being so, he truly was a dead man walking, he was experiencing a living death. The word “leprosy” is translated from the Greek word, lepros, which means “scaly.” In the Old Testament the Hebrews term for “leprosy” means “to rot” and that’s exactly what was happening. A person with leprosy was someone who was literally rotting away.

Scaly spots develops on the skin. Leprosy results in open sores, ulcers, puss-filled lumps all over the body, which emit a horrific stench.

The face and various parts of the body swell, and they look malformed. Leprosy results in missing fingers, missing toes, damaged limbs.

The hair turned white. Eyebrows and eyelashes drop out. It can destroy the eyes and cause blindness. It causes the teeth to fall out. It penetrates all the bodily organs and affects the larynx so that one winds up with a weak and raspy voice.

Leprosy attacks the nerves and the skin. It compromises the body’s ability to feel pain. With the accompanying loss of feeling in the body, the victim often unknowingly destroys his own tissue because he has no feeling. No warning system alerts them to pain.

They don’t know when things are too hot or too cold, or if they’ve hurt themselves. The disease is still with us today. There’s stories of those who work in leper colonies, of lepers who reach into fires for things, who walk barefoot on glass, who go blind by pouring hot water on their faces and they can’t feel it. They turn ankles, tearing tendon and muscle, but they just adjust and walk crooked.

Lepers can live up to thirty years with the disease with the victims usually dying from low resistance, other diseases, or infections.

It can be easily transmitted by inhalation, bodily contact or contact with clothing.

In biblical times, the effect of this communicable disease was so severe and the potential for wiping out the population was so great that God laid down strict instructions and commandments about it for Israel.

Those with leprosy were required under the law to tear their garments so people would recognize that they were a leper. Over their upper lip, they had to wear a cloth to not spread the contamination. They were commanded to shout “Unclean, Unclean” whenever they came into contact with other people without leprosy.

In Leviticus, leprosy is the most serious of all forms of uncleanness. Some forms of uncleanness, such as the result of touching an unclean animal, were cleansed simply by waiting until evening and washing.

Other forms of uncleanness required a longer waiting period, such as 40 days, and the offering of a sacrifice, but they would eventually reenter life and society and the worship in Israel.

But leprosy was much different. If it was discovered that you had leprosy, the label “leper” was a social death sentence. You were then removed from all social contact and the only people you could ever associate with were other lepers.

Leprosy required the person to live outside the camp, to be utterly cut off from the congregation of Israel, to be outcasts, to live in exile from the mainstream of society and life and day-to-day activities in Israel.

Leviticus 13:45,46 says: “And the leper in whom the plague is…shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone, without the camp shall his habitation be.”

This man experienced a sad existence due not only to the physical ravages of the disease but also because of the exclusion from society and family required by the Law. And so he lived in utter isolation and loneliness. Without love. Without hope.

Without the simple joys and dignities of life, of being smiled at, being greeted on the street, buying fresh fruit in the market, talking politics by the public fountain, worshipping in the synagogue, celebrating holidays with family.

And most painful of all was that he was separated from the blessings, love, and acceptance of home, away from his spouse and children, deprived of the time and daily life spent with them. Leprosy brought anguish at all levels: physical, emotional, spiritual.

If this man would have scribbled out words on a sign to hold up, it would have said: Unclean! Unwanted! Rejected! Unloved! Isolated!

This leper hears that Christ is near and in Galilee. And he had heard as verse 34 says, that “He healed many that were sick of divers diseases.” The hope of his healing sent him looking and searching for the Lord.

Once he finds Him, according to Mark 1:40 this man came to Christ “beseeching Him.” In the original Greek, this is in the present tense, which means that he begged, and implored the Lord over and over again.

It took courage to come to Christ in public. If anyone was near, we can be sure, they would have gasped in horror, wretched and recoiled when they saw him, covered their mouths and noses, and scattered.

His coming took courage, and he came to Christ with humility. Verse 40 says that when he came to the Lord, he humbly fell to his knees and was “kneeling down to Him” as he begged the Lord. Luke adds, “who seeing Jesus fell on his face, and besought Him.”

He came to Christ, fell on his knees, and in the fervency of his begging and the anguish of his heart, he fell forward on his face.

As he begged, he asked for Christ to heal him, to cleanse him of his dreadful disease. He professed that he believed Christ was the answer to his problem.

With a raspy voice, he implored the Lord, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” And he said this over and over again.

A man and his fiancé went to get their wedding certificate. While filling out the form, the young man read aloud a few questions.

When he got to the last one, he read aloud: “Are you entering this marriage at your own will?” and he looked over at his fiancé. She said, “Put down ‘Yes.’”

The leper here appeals to the Lord’s will. Without presumption, he says, “if you are WILLING,” and without doubting His ability, he says, “you CAN make me clean,” and the leper humbly begged Christ to heal him.

The leper believed Christ was able. He expected nothing. He didn’t bargain with the Lord, saying something like “if you do this for me, I’ll follow you.” He merely presented his great need to Him and left it with whatever was Christ’s will.

Only twice does the Old Testament record that God cleansed a leper: Miriam and Naaman. Yet this leper was convinced by faith that Christ could cleanse him. He just was not sure if it was His will to heal him.

This is a great example for how we are to bring our requests to the Lord in prayer. We do so having great confidence and faith in the Lord and in His power and ability to answer our request.

At the same time, we pray with a humble submission to the sovereignty of God and His will and His wisdom in answering our request, in Him knowing what is best for us.

Essentially the leper was telling Christ, “Lord, if you are willing, you can do anything. This is what I want but I don’t know if it’s your will.”

The leper came to Christ, humbled Himself before Him, made his request, and repeated it out of the anguish of his heart, and He left it in the hands of the Son of God.

He made no demands. And he had no basis for his request, other than to appeal to Christ’s power and mercy.

Mark 1:41-42: “And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth His hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean. And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was cleansed.”

Christ saw this man’s deep need and He felt his anguish. While everyone else was repulsed by the leper, Christ was “moved with compassion” for the man.

This means that compassion gripped Him deeply. He felt the agony of his exclusion, isolation, pain and suffering.

It was common for Christ to be filled with compassion in His earthly ministry. Mark 6:34 says, “And Jesus, when He came out, saw much people, and was moved with COMPASSION toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and He began to teach them many things.”

In Matthew 14:14 it says, “And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with COMPASSION toward them, and He healed their sick.”

It’s been said that, “Sympathy says, ‘I feel bad that you’re hungry.’ Empathy says, ‘I know something about how you feel; I was hungry once myself.’ But compassion says, ‘Let’s go get something to eat.’”

Sympathy and empathy don’t require us to do anything; but compassion requires us to act. It will cause us to touch, lift, and help those in need as Christ did for the leper.

Out of the Lord’s compassion, He acted. Out of His compassion, Christ was not only willing to heal the man, He did the unthinkable. He reached out and touched the man that society had regarded as untouchable.

In other instances, Christ spoke a word and the miracle happened. He healed by a spoken word from a distance of twenty miles with the nobleman’s son.

But in this situation, He chose to touch the leper. Why? The Lord DIDN’T HAVE TO touch people to heal them. All Christ had to do was speak.

But there was something this man needed that others didn’t. This man NEEDED MORE than just healing.

In his suffering and heartache, He NEEDED a touch of compassion. He knew that this man needed this just as much as he needed to be cleansed of his leprosy.

And this was not a tentative touch, or a pat on the arm that the Lord gave him. The Greek words used of the Lord putting forth His hand and touching him literally means that He reached out and fastened or adhered His hand to the leper.

He grabbed his shoulder and held on tight, and gripped him. This guy hadn’t been touched in years. This was the first loving touch this leper had felt in a long time. Can you imagine what that meant to him?

One author wrote this, “To touch a leper was unthinkable. Banishing lepers from society, people would not get within a stone’s throw of them.

“In fact, they would throw stones at them if they did come close! With their open sores and dirty bandages, lepers were the last persons anyone would want to touch. Yet the first thing Christ did for this man was touch him.

“Even before Christ spoke to him, He reached out His hand and touched him. Can you imagine what that scene must have looked like? Think how this man must have longed for someone to touch him, not throw stones at him to drive him away.

“Christ could have healed him first and then touched him. But recognizing his deepest need, Jesus stretched out His hand even before He spoke words of healing.”

Moved by compassion for this man’s physical sufferings as well as his emotional anguish, Christ touched the untouchable, loved the unlovely, and cured the incurable.

Both the touch and His authoritative pronouncement: “I am willing, be clean,” constituted the cure. And it was immediate, complete, and visible to all who saw him. A touch. A simple statement. A miracle. And this man’s life was changed forever.

Christ granted the leper’s request, not slowly or in stages over a number of days, but right then and there, the leprosy left him. His leprosy was gone instantly. The leprosy wasn’t just halted or arrested. It was completely gone.

Christ’s healings resulted in total wholeness. The leper was instantly cured and cleansed and made whole. His voice, his face, his skin, his eyesight, his hands and feet all returned to normal instantly.

As we are conformed to Christ’s image and we think and act with His mind and His heart, we are called to love the unlovable and touch the lives of the untouchable around us in life.

Mark 1:43-45: “And He straitly charged him, and forthwith sent him away; And saith unto him, See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.

“But he went out, and began to publish it much, and to blaze abroad the matter, insomuch that Jesus could no more openly enter into the city, but was without in desert places: and they came to Him from every quarter.”

Christ wanted the man to maintain focus on what was important at this moment. The Lord gave him a charge to not tell his cure to anyone.

I believe the Lord was giving him a temporary prohibition here till he had traveled to Jerusalem and had been pronounced clean by the priests.

This man, who is in the north in Israel in Galilee, is told by the Lord to “go thy way,” or to make the journey to Jerusalem, which would take a few days, and to show himself and his cleansing at the Temple to the priest and follow what the Law dictated.

Christ commanded the healed leper to observe the law and its regulations concerning cleansed lepers. He needed to first show himself to the priest as the Law required. Healed leprosy required one to go to the priests, the health inspectors for this disease.

And until the priest declared him clean and until the required offerings had been made, the man remained ceremonially unclean.

Christ lived under the law, and kept the law perfectly, and commanded others to keep it and do what it required.

When you’re in the Gospels, you’re under law. This is Law ground in your Bibles. The Gospels is instruction written to Israel under the law. Today, we, the Body of Christ, are not under law, but under grace. We find our grace instruction from Christ in Paul’s letters.

While the Gospels were written to Israel under law, we should never neglect them, as today we find many principles in them to live by, we learn about Savior, and we see His love and mercy that we, the Body of Christ, should seek to imitate under grace.

Being under the law, Christ wanted this man to offer for his cleansing “those things which Moses commanded.” He wanted the former leper to uphold and fulfill the law, and follow its mandate in order to reenter society as a whole, cleansed man.

In the phrase “as a testimony to them,” Christ was urging the man to allow his healing and his restoration to do the talking, and to have it validated by the priests.

This would send a message directly to the priests and religious leaders in Jerusalem that something special was happening, and Someone special was in their midst. The cleansing of the leper was an undeniable messianic sign (Matt. 11:5).

The priests and scribes knew that the Messiah would heal lepers according to prophecy.

Christ’s words as “a testimony unto them,” speaks of how if the priests declared the leper clean, but rejected the One who cleansed him, their unbelief would be incriminating evidence and testimony against them. So it was important for the leper to follow through in light of him being a testimony of Christ’s Messiahship to the Jewish leaders.

But instead of obeying Christ’s command to silence and to go first to Jerusalem, in his exuberance the man went out and talked freely and openly, making known far and wide the story of his cure. Christ told this man to say nothing, and he told everybody!

The enthusiastic witness of the healed leper resulted in Christ not being able to enter a town openly without encountering large crowds seeking His healing and help. He then withdrew from the crowds because Christ did not measure success by numbers. But even when He withdrew to remote places, the people kept coming from all directions.

This story is a portrait of grace in salvation. Leprosy in the Bible is symbolic of sin.

Like leprosy, sin is terminal. Like leprosy, sin makes us unclean in God’s sight. Like leprosy, sin spreads and defiles. A leprous person had to be isolated outside the camp, and lost sinners one day will be isolated in the lake of fire, outside of heaven.

People with leprosy were looked on “as one dead” Numbers 12:12 teaches. And those who have not trusted Christ as Savior, are “dead” in their sins, Ephesians 2:1 says.

What we learn from the account is that in our sins, you are the leper, and I am the leper.

The leper is a picture of each of us outside of Christ. The pain, anguish, heartbreak, and suffering of one with leprosy is a picture of sin and the consequences it brings to our lives.

Anyone who has never trusted the Savior, is spiritually in even worse condition than this leprous man was physically.

And we are “covered with leprosy,” filled with the leprosy of sin and we need to be cleansed and made whole. Christ is our only hope.

And like this man, we must come to Christ humbly by faith, and as it were, to throw ourselves upon the mercy of Christ, the One who is able and willing to cleanse us from all our sins.

In this account it’s revealed that what Christ could do in the physical realm He can also do in the spiritual realm. He can cleanse leprosy, and He can cleanse sin! As He was moved with compassion by this man in his leprosy who came to Him in faith, He is moved with compassion toward us in our sins when we come to Him in faith.

And when He cleanses, He cleanses us completely from our sins and makes us whole.

And when Christ healed this man, he was healed instantly! And so the miracle of salvation is not a process, it happens in a moment of time. When we place our faith in Christ that He died for me, for my sins and rose again, we are saved instantly.

Our misery and condition in our sins is worse than we think, and the compassion, mercy and love of Christ is deeper than we can imagine. Christ loved the unlovely leper. And Christ loves the unlovely sinner.

After being cleansed by Christ, the leper would need a large sign as well to recount all that Christ had done for Him. And it’s the same things that are true of us in salvation, as when we are saved by Christ and cleansed from our sins, we are: Cleansed! Loved! Accepted! Included! Alive!

The leper had been hopeless, now he had hope. He had been homeless, now he could go home. He had been rejected, now he would be received. He had been experiencing a living death, now he was alive.

And for us, we had been hopeless, now we have hope. We had been homeless, now we have a home. We were alienated from God, now we are received and accepted in Christ.

We were spiritually dead, now we live. We were afflicted with the leprosy of the soul, the condemnation of sin, now all our sins are washed away, we are cleansed, and we are made new in Christ. Praise God!