It’s never pleasant to be ostracised. To have your family, your friends, your village turn their back on you. Decide they don’t want to know you.
I’ve heard stories of it happening in villages like this. Someone breaks some unwritten rule about how to belong to the community. Everyone doesn’t ignore them. But people who used to stop and chat no longer do. And you feel the cold shoulder.
We’re aware of parts of the world where it’s a much bigger problem. In parts of India the caste system is a relic of the past. But not everywhere. A 2001 census by the Indian government showed that 16 percent of the Indian population belong to the so-called untouchables.
That’s bad enough. But what if it wasn’t any group of people? What if it was the Christian church? The very people God has chosen to bless and to be with. And worse still, what if God himself ratified the church’s ostracism? A cold shoulder from God himself.
There’d be nothing worse.
That’s the horror that leprosy sufferers faced in ancient Israel. We’ve just heard how they had to live apart from the community, with torn clothes, shouting out their uncleanness to anyone who came near.
What hope was there for such people? The answer is: A great deal. And in finding out what they could hope for, we’ll learn a lot about ourselves as well. There’s hope for us here, especially for anyone who’s ever felt slightly cut off from other people or from God.
I’ve got two things to say to us this morning. Here’s the first.
We’re disfigured, so we can’t live with God
We’re disfigured, so we can’t live with God. We’re disfigured, so we can’t live with God.
We have to start with these so-called lepers in Leviticus chapter 13. We’ll move to us in a moment.
I say “so-called lepers” because Leviticus 13 actually describes many different skin diseases. It’s going to be hard to find one word to label them all. There’s a long history of English translations labelling them all “leprosy”. That’s not actually very helpful, because none of these symptoms sound like the modern illness we know as leprosy, which wasn’t even known in this part of the world at that time.
For each of these diseases, we’re given some symptoms. If you think you’re ill, you need to go to one of the priests. It was their job to distinguish between clean and unclean, so they’re the ones to decide. We’re then told exactly what the priests are to look for. They’ll either tell you that you’re clean, which is a sigh of relief all round, or they’ll pronounce you unclean, which must have been the most horrific thing to hear.
It was all about the symptoms. The priests weren’t doctors. They weren’t trying to diagnose whether it was infectious. They weren’t working out whether you’d recover or not. Many of these diseases were not infectious or life threatening. And plenty that were are not here. No, it’s all about the symptoms. Do you have symptoms that would make you unclean before God.
As you read through the chapter, with each skin disease in turn, there are some patterns. If the problem was just skin-deep, that was OK. If you’d only had the problem for a few days, that was OK.
And here’s the important one. Look at verses 12 and 13: If the leprous disease breaks out in the skin, so that the leprous disease covers all the skin of the diseased person from head to foot, so far as the priest can see, then the priest shall look, and if the leprous disease has covered all his body, he shall pronounce him clean of the disease. If the disease affected all of your skin, you were OK.
What was a problem was something disfiguring, that you’d had for some time, that was deeper than the skin, and that only affected part of you.
A while back, I got a puncture and had to put the spare wheel on the car. The car looked odd. Last week I noticed another car around Kemsing that looked odd in the same way. Three alloy wheels. And one steel wheel designed to get you home. There’s nothing wrong with steel wheels. Alloys aren’t the only way to run a car. Not so long ago, they were an expensive novelty, although they’re more standard now. What was odd was having one wheel different from the others. If all 4 wheels had been old-style steel ones, nothing would have looked odd.
Leviticus is concerned with purity. God is pure. God is holy. He cannot have his people being impure. Mixed. Divided. Torn. And so the people had to make fabrics out of one kind of cloth. They had to plant their fields with one type of crop. They weren’t to eat animals that had been torn by wild beasts. And they couldn’t have skin that was inconsistent, had no pigment in some places, had deep sores at some points, and so on.
The whole thing was a visual aid for them. God wanted to teach them about the need to be consistently his. To be pure and undivided in their devotion to him.
It’s a visual aid of what’s going on in our hearts.
You couldn’t draw a line back from these skin diseases to specific sins that the person had committed. Sometimes God did use these diseases to discipline his people. In Numbers 12, Miriam is stricken with leprosy. In 2 Kings 5, it’s Gehazi. In both those cases, it was a result of sin. But generally it wasn’t the case. The fact that one person had been pronounced unclean did not mean they were a worse sinner than anyone else.
But these diseases were the result of our sin in general. When someone’s diseases was cured, they had to offer sacrifices for their sin as well as for other things. We were made in God’s image. These disfiguring diseases were not the way we were meant to be.
Which is where these laws touch our lives. As the Old Testament develops, it becomes clear that God is most concerned with the purity of our hearts. Turn over, if you would, to Psalm 24. It’s on page 293. To enter God’s presence you’ve got to be clean. Verse 3: Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart.
What matters is our hearts. Only some of the people would contract a disease that showed on the outside. But all of the people had a disease in their hearts, the real them. And so do all of us.
None of us are the people we were made to be.
The problem isn’t our skin. It goes deeper than that – it’s in our hearts. In one sense, it would be better to be consistently bad. But we’re inconsistent. Most of us are actually pretty good people. But we all have a heart disease that keeps surfacing. We’re inconsistent. We’re torn. We’re divided. We’re not whole.
The person who’s basically kind finds themselves making a cutting remark about someone else. The person who’s basically trustworthy finds themselves passing on something that was said to them in confidence. The person who’s loyal to their friends can think of times when they’ve acted as if they didn’t know one of their more embarrassing friends. Like the skin on these people, we’re not all bad. But the bad keeps peeping through.
Who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart. The trouble is, hand on heart, we know that excludes all of us.
People look at Leviticus 13 and feel sorry for those who are sent out of the camp. In one sense that’s a right way to feel. It’s never a good thing today to shun someone and to shut them out. It was a real tragedy. But the startling thing about this chapter is not that some of the people had a skin condition that meant they couldn’t live among God’s people. The startling thing is that this didn’t affect all of them. It’s a wonder that so many of them got to stay in the camp at all. This chapter doesn’t show how harsh God is. It actually shows how kind and merciful he is.
That’s the first thing we see in this chapter. We’re disfigured, so we can’t live with God. And that’s all of us.
Jesus was disfigured, so we can live with God
There’s a second truth I want to show us, and it’s this: Jesus was disfigured, so we can live with God. Jesus was disfigured, so we can live with God.
If there’s mercy in this chapter, there’s no cure. The only hope for the unclean person was to wait. If their disease cleared up, there was a procedure for them to be readmitted to the camp.
Jesus transformed everything. There are several instances in the Gospels of Jesus coming into contact with lepers. We’re going to look at one of them – Mark chapter 1, verse 40. It’s on page 543.
And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.
In Leviticus chapter 15, we’ll learn the reason why lepers had to be excluded. Their uncleanness could be transmitted by touch. God’s presence was so pure, that if someone unclean touched something, it became unclean as well – unfit for the presence of God. So if the unclean person sat on a chair, the chair became unclean. Then the next person to sit on the chair became unclean as well. Remember this is nothing to do with infection. Nothing at all. It’s about ritual cleanness. Who can live near the presence of God?
The isolation was all about stopping the uncleanness from spreading. Nobody must touch them.
So what Jesus does with this man is most extraordinary. Most kind. He touched him. We don’t know how long that man had had his illness, but he’d probably had no human contact for years. It wasn’t just that he’d never had a hug. Nobody had touched him at all. Not even brushed past him. People kept their distance. Until Jesus reached out his hand, and touched him.
That’s not what’s extraordinary here. What’s really amazing is what happens when Jesus touched him. According to Leviticus, Jesus would have contracted the man’s leprosy. Jesus would have become unclean. Wonderfully the reverse happens. The man contracts Jesus’ cleanness. Mark says: Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.
Jesus always respected the Old Testament law. He sent the man off to perform the prescribed sacrifices. But they were just confirming the man was clean. What cleansed him was not his sacrifices. But Jesus’ touch.
Suddenly, here’s the cure. With the arrival of Jesus, the unclean can now be made clean. Now there’s a cure. Not just for the sickness, but for the uncleanness. One touch from him, and we can be made clean.
That’s why the laws of Leviticus 13 have changed for us. They still apply to us. They tell us of our need for clean hearts that are not divided. But we no longer need to exclude people with certain skin diseases. Those illnesses are no longer what make a person clean or unclean. Since the arrival of Jesus, what matters is whether someone has been touched by Jesus. If you know him, he’s made your unclean heart clean again. If you don’t know him, that’s not been done, and you’re unclean before God however much your skin looks like something off a Clinique advert.
It does make you wonder why though. What’s so special about Jesus? Why can he suddenly reverse this? Why does he touch lepers, and instead of him becoming unclean, they become clean?
As ever, it’s all to do with the cross. Isaiah chapter 53 foretold the crucifixion of Jesus. Chapter 52, verse 14, says this: His appearance was marred, beyond any human likeness. At his crucifixion, Jesus was disfigured like no human being before or since. He didn’t just have a skin condition. He was no longer recognisable as human. He was so badly beaten and abused that this was true.
That would make Jesus the most unclean person to have ever lived. But why? He’d done no wrong. The answer comes in Isaiah chapter 53, verse 5: He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. On the cross, Jesus was made unclean because of the things we do wrong, because of our impure and unclean hearts. It’s because of this that we are healed and made whole.
A little while back, I watched a murder mystery. It revolved around two sisters. Only a year apart in age, and looking very alike. One was bankrupt. Huge debts. The other had just sold her software company for millions. She was minted. The rich one had died in a car accident. Suddenly, the bankrupt sister saw her chance. She stole her sister’s identity. She claimed that she was the rich one. The one in debt was in that car. Suddenly she was rich. Her sister’s riches had become hers. All because her sister had taken her debts as her own.
The beauty of it was that her rich sister was dead. So she’d taken her sister’s debts to the grave. Those debts were gone for good. What could possibly go wrong?
Well that was illegal. But there’s nothing illegal about the exchange Jesus did with us. We’re unclean. Unfit for God’s presence. He was immaculate. He took our uncleanness on himself. He took it to the grave. It was gone for good. And in exchange, his immaculate standing before God becomes ours.
This is why the leper was made clean with one touch from Jesus.
And did you notice what happened to Jesus immediately after he’d touched the leper. He was no longer able to enter a town. He had to live in desolate places. He was becoming far too popular. But it’s striking that Mark records this immediately after Jesus cured a leper. Jesus had to live a leper’s life. It’s as if he had exchanged places with the man. The man with leprosy was not just cured, but cleansed. And Jesus had to live in the desert, outside the population centres.
Leviticus 13 closes with a gaping gap. No cure. No hope. No way out.
But the Bible does not end without closing that gap. Jesus was disfigured, so we can live with God.
Conclusion
We read Leviticus 13 and we feel sorry for those who were afflicted. We’re glad we don’t live in that age.
And yet, in one sense, we do live in that age. We don’t have a skin condition. We have a heart condition. We’re disfigured, so we can’t live with God.
And yet, in another sense, wonderfully we don’t live in that age. Jesus has come. Jesus has died. Jesus was disfigured. He invites us to trust him, so that he was disfigured for us. Which means we can live with God.