Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.
Mt. 8:2
In the passage above, from the Gospel of Matthew we see record of an encounter between a leper and Jesus. The leper sees in his disease a deeper truth – that in some way it is tied to the history of sin in man of which he also has a history. That may be a controversial statement because everyone knows that leprosy is not caused by moral impurity. Hansen’s disease (leprosy) is caused by an infectious bacteria that is spread via droplets from the nose and the mouth.
Disease is a type of mystery because it touches upon the mystery of suffering and ultimately the mystery of evil. The leper saw that in some way his disease was related to the history of the sin of man begat in the Garden of Eden and given with death as a consequence of that sin. Yet, the relationship between disease and sin remains mysterious. The leper may have, wrongly, viewed his disease as a mere moral condition. But, he also, rightly, has experienced sin within himself and in his community. What man is a stranger to this?
He desired a liberation from his disease, a healing, yes, but he also was asking for something deeper: to be clean, i.e. to be forgiven by God in a way that washes and sets free. While an incomplete picture it alludes to the forgiveness of sins, a central theme of the Gospel and something only God has the power to do. Who doesn’t, deep down, desire to be forgiven of all their sin in a way that sets free from their burden, free from their weight, free from their attraction?
It was Jesus will that the leper be clean. Jesus had the power to do this, not merely to heal a man from a bacteria caused infection, but instead to wash him of sin and its consequences through the power of forgiveness, of grace. Mere physical healing doesn’t touch the soul, it doesn’t set free. At best it prolongs life, a good thing, but this is to view man as mere material in need of material solutions. Until material solutions no longer work. What happens when we neglect the soul and our desire to experience cleansing grace at the depths of our being?
Why do we have this desire to be clean?
I am reminded that people who are in recovery from drug addiction speak of their length of abstinence from drugs as clean time. Unlike the leper who had a physical disease spread by social contact, but like the leper in possessing a soul addiction is often not arrested by mere physical means. In theory, it probably could be.
But the substance of the drug has become a poor solution in many cases for a problem that is spiritual, a problem that requires cleansing, a touch of God that mends what is broken, that makes whole what is shattered, that removes what is obscuring, precisely through the relational medium of the touch, the intimacy, the movement of God toward man.