The human touch
In 1987 Princess Diana was photographed holding hands with an AIDS patient. This stunned the world. It was shocking. How could someone do this? In 1987, people were scared of AIDS, some believing that it could be transmitted by casual contact. And here, not just anyone, but Princess Diana, possibly the next Queen, was holding the hand of a man with AIDS.
She said, “HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows they need it.”
The world was changed that day. Attitudes to the disease changed. Awareness was raised. But I suspect the biggest change happened in that man. For the first time in a while, he might have felt accepted, loved, special. In a culture of fear, suspicion, even hate, of people like him, with AIDS, for someone to reach out to him in compassion like this must have been life-changing. Especially when that someone was Princess Diana.
In the Indian Hindu caste system, there’s a group of people known as Untouchables, they’re at the bottom of the social ladder, and they have little or no chance of climbing higher. They have generally only ever been given the jobs that are considered beneath everyone else – in the days before sanitation, it was their job to clean up people’s mess… Mother Teresa of Calcutta saw the untouchables as human beings, when many saw them as less than animals. As she worked among the slums, the poorest of India’s poor, she touched the untouchables, serving them as she would anyone else.
U can’t touch this
In Jesus’ day, lepers were the untouchables. But it stems from the Old Testament, from the Levitical laws. In Leviticus chapters 13 and 14, there are detailed regulations, describing varieties and symptoms of leprosy, and there’s the protocol for how to deal with it. Of course, the word leprosy in the Bible doesn’t equate to what we know as leprosy – Hansen’s disease – but it was an umbrella term for various skin conditions, like psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema… These were considered ‘defiling’ skin diseases, which made people unclean to take part in worship. But the fear was that they might be contagious, and disqualify others from worship too. Let’s remember, this was in the days before doctors and medicine as we know it.
So the risk had to be managed. They couldn’t have it spreading through the camp. The symptomatic individual would be assessed by the priest. If it is thought to be a defiling skin disease, they’re excluded or isolated for seven days, and then reassessed. It seems to me, reading Leviticus, that the hope was for the individual to be reintegrated, and that’s the direction that the legislation heads in. That wouldn’t always be possible, but I believe that the aim was not primarily to cast people out of the community, the camp, but to protect the camp, the purity and safety of the community – hopefully with as little exclusion as possible.
Out of touch
Yet, it seems that by the time of Jesus, in an age where certain groups were obsessive about ritual purity, that exclusion became the norm for people with such skin conditions. And it seems that they were put out of the way, and forgotten about.
They were very much untouchable. They were unable to lead normal lives in Jewish society. They were unemployed and unemployable. They were excluded from normal family life and on the margins of communities. If you’ve seen the film Ben Hur, you’ll get a picture of leper colonies, sort of ‘ghettoes’ outside of towns or villages. The story of the ten lepers in Luke 17 paints a similar picture: how else would Jesus be confronted by ten lepers at once as he enters a village?
The lepers were put out of sight and out of touch.
Clean
And then Jesus comes along. There’s a story in Luke chapter 5, the first leper cleansing reported in the gospels. It’s found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. But they each draw out slightly different points, so we’re mainly concentrating on Luke’s version.
The first thing I want to think about is that the leper says to Jesus, “If you are willing, you can make me clean…”
I think this is really telling. First of all, he believes that Jesus can make him clean. Maybe he’s heard about what Jesus has been doing throughout Galilee, all the miraculous healings… But as a leper, he’s probably out of the loop, and might not know any of that stuff. Maybe he just sees that there’s something about Jesus. Or maybe he thinks that Jesus is a rabbi, and perhaps a rabbi’s word is enough. After all, the guy doesn’t ask to be healed. He asks to be made clean. And I wonder if there’s a difference? In Leviticus, the priest didn’t heal, he wasn’t expected to. He was only expected to declare the leper clean or otherwise. In actual fact, the Greek term used here in Luke, is the same one that the Greek translators of the Old Testament used in Leviticus. And so perhaps this leper is asking Jesus to say he’s ok. To tell him, it’s fine, you’re not excluded anymore. Come back…
Touched by the hand of God
Perhaps we’ll never know about that. But what is really interesting is that Jesus goes far beyond what this leper might have expected. It makes me think of Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3, about the God who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine…
Jesus gives him physical healing, and much, much more, as we’ll see. So if the leper had only been looking for ritual purity, to be declared clean and able to come back to society, he gets more than that. He’s healed. In many ways.
What is also really interesting is that the leper says, “If you are willing…”
Why does he say this? It suggests to me that he assumes Jesus might not be willing to help him. And I think this assumption is probably based on his experience, that no one else has been willing. People just wouldn’t stop. He’s an untouchable.
But Jesus stops. At this point, I’m going to mention a little detail from Mark’s version of this story: it says there that Jesus was moved with pity, or even anger. I’ve often wondered about this anger thing. Is Jesus angry at being pestered? I don’t think so. I wonder if he’s angry at the assumption that he might not be willing. I wonder if He’s saying, “Of course I’m willing, why would you even ask?” Maybe his anger is at a world in which someone has to ask this, a world in which someone is untouchable…
To return to Luke’s account, the most amazing part of the story is that Jesus stretches out his hand and touches the man, and says, “I am willing. Be clean.” And immediately the leprosy is gone.
This is amazing because in Luke’s gospel, this is the third detailed report of a healing or cleansing miracle. And yet, in the previous two, Jesus didn’t touch the people who were healed. He simply said the word, and they were made well. Because His word is enough. He’s the God who created the Universe by His word. He only needs to say it and it happens. Jesus didn’t need to touch the leper to heal him of his leprosy. That happens when Jesus gives the word. But the real transformation probably happened when Jesus touched him. This is an untouchable. And Jesus touches him. This might be the first human touch the man has had for a long time. For the first time in a long time, he is human.
In a sense, it probably didn’t matter whether Jesus healed the man of his leprosy or not. What mattered most is that he touched him. And in doing that, he not only said to the man, you’re human, you’re part of society – he also said it to everyone else. Because for Jesus, there are no untouchables. While the man still had leprosy, Jesus touched him.
Jesus sees that the leper can change his spots. Jesus sees that this man is a person, and should be included. In Jesus’ day that meant he needed to be healed. But sometimes, it’s everyone else that needs to be healed – changed, challenged, to see past the spots. Leprosy is only skin deep. And whatever people’s leprosy might be, Jesus will touch them. Whatever it is that society thinks makes people untouchable, for Jesus, there are no untouchables.
There’s a word that is used a lot today: stigma. The word actually comes from Latin, it means a brand, like the one used on cattle, to mark them. When someone is stigmatised, they are branded, given a mark. That’s the key point here: they are given a mark. It’s put on them by others. Cows don’t brand themselves. And people are stigmatised by society, by others.
Maybe we can think of some untouchables. Who do we think we can’t go near? Who do we think is at the bottom of the barrel? Who are the most excluded from society? Maybe we need to follow Jesus, and touch them. In touching, embracing those that no one else will, we can share the love and message of Jesus.
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