To my knowledge the Bible records only three stories of lepers being cleansed by the power of God. There is the story of Naaman, the Syrian. The story you just read from Mark is paralleled in Matthew and Luke and there is another recording in Luke of Jesus healing 10 lepers and only one coming back to thank and praise Jesus for his work of healing.
The single leper that is cured as recorded in Matthew, Mark and Luke is an interesting one because it is the only instance where the leper was actually touched to be healed. Jesus may very well have healed other lepers by touching them, but any of those instances aren’t recorded. Naaman washes in the Jordan River, the 10 lepers are simply asked to show themselves to the priest and are cleansed while walking there. But this leper from today’s lesson comes right up to Jesus breaking all sorts of cultural faux-pa. Lepers were supposed to do as the 10 lepers did in Luke’s Gospel and stand at a distance, call out to anybody nearby as they passed through letting everybody within an earshot know that there were lepers coming through, Unclean! Unclean! Yet this guy, walks right up to the Lord and Savior of the Universe in confidence and perhaps arrogance, and seemingly with a bit of disrespect, saying to Jesus “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”
And what does Jesus do? He says, “I am willing, be clean.” While reaching out and TOUCHING THIS GUY!
Jesus risks his health, his ministry, his life by touching this man. Yes he is the Son of God, yes he is curing the leprosy in his touch, but in touching this man, Jesus could have been condemned as unclean himself. He could have been outcast from society forced to shout Unclean whenever he walked anywhere. Imagine that, the only truly clean person in the entirety of the universe shouting unclean as He walked anywhere.
What Jesus does for us is even greater than that risk. He risks Himself on us to the ultimate degree by taking on our sin, even though He never once sinned Himself and He went to the cross to die, to be punished for sins and crimes He did not commit. Jesus allows the Father to pour out His just wrath upon Himself instead of on the entire universe. He says, I did those things, I committed those sins, when He did no such thing. It reminds me of a clip from the most recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight.
A bit of background for those who haven’t seen the movie…
Harvey Dent is Gotham’s district attorney. He is injured in a trap that the Joker had set. Dent’s injury earned him the villainous name of Two-Face because one side of his face is undamaged and the other is quite gruesome. After losing the only person he cares about, Dent turns from all that he has done to clean up the city and becomes a villain himself, killing people by flipping a coin, heads they live, tails they die. He brings his tyranny to commissioner Gordon and his family, blaming him for having a part in his current condition. Batman stops Dent. And that brings us to this clip, the aftermath.
2:20:25 – 2:24:25
Commissioner Gordon is distraught that Dent turned away from who he was. Everything that Dent had fought for would be undone when people realized he was just as corrupt as the criminals he put away. All of the criminals he had put in jail would go free and all of the progress they’d made would come to nothing. The city would be anarchy once again, the Joker, mastermind behind it all, would win.
Batman steps in and realizes what he must do. He must take the blame for Dent’s crimes, even though he had done nothing wrong, he had to make Dent appear like the one without blemish. He had to risk being made unclean to make the undeserving Harvey Dent perfectly clean.
For Batman, this realization comes to fruition after a previous conversation with his Butler Alfred who when the Joker demanded that Batman turn himself in, says that the point of Batman is that “he can be the outcast, he can make the choice that no one else can make, the right choice.”
Though Batman didn’t hear it, Alfred also remarks shortly after this, when Batman doesn’t turn himself in that “Even if everyone hates him for it, that’s the sacrifice he’s making, he’s not being a hero, he’s being something more.”
You see, a typical hero would have captured Dent and turned him in and exposed him for what he was, at least according to that limited definition of hero. A hero would be expected to take glory and fame, not take the role of the outcast and the villain even though he is no such thing.
In a similar way, the point of Christ was to take on the sin of the whole world. To take on sin’s punishment of death and to destroy sin and death by rising to life again. He makes the choice that truly no one else can make.
In this, Jesus is not a hero. He’s much more than a hero. A hero turns in the bad guys and helps out the good guys and accepts the praise for his heroic acts. Let’s face it. On earth, there are no actually good guys. As I’ll say once more, from Romans 3 “All have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God.” None of us deserve to be saved and protected by God. But we are still justified freely by God’s grace in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Batman and Jesus is that Batman takes the punishment of being hunted, of being hated for the crimes, but he doesn’t truly take the ultimate punishment of life in prison or perhaps the death penalty. Jesus takes our punishment for sin, which is death, which he absolutely did not deserve. And he conquers that punishment in His resurrection from the dead.
Batman takes the part of the punishment for Dent, the hatred, the role of being the outcast because he can endure it.
Christ takes on death not because he can endure it, but rather because he can overcome it. He could be killed and death had no power over him because he didn’t do anything wrong, because he is one with the Father.
In my opinion, the best symbolism in the clip you just watched is when Batman takes Harvey Dent’s face and turns it from the mangled, disgusting, corrupted side to the unblemished, beautiful, perfect side. This is what Christ does for us. We are all two-faces. We are all filled with sin and it corrupts our image, but in Christ, God turns that side of us away and gives us another side, the side that we were created to be, the Saint side, the face of Christ himself and because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, Our Heavenly Father does not look at the sinful side, He looks at the forgiven side given to us by Christ through the cross and empty tomb, Amen.
2 comments:
I think the tough thing is that the gruesome side of us seems to continue to exist, even though God promises to only see the good. It's tough to see yourself or others as forgiven when it seems to be just overlooking the bad.
I get that God hasn't simply overlooked the bad, he has sent Jesus to do away with it, to finish it, to take the consequences of all of the bad we can conjure up. It is tough though, that we, myself included, keep screwing around, not living up to the legacy God has given us.
@annaboh
You're very correct. The problem you raise is perhaps the biggest problem a Christian has to deal with. How in the world can we understand that we are forgiven, keep sinning, and still realize we are forgiven? How can we look at our own lives or the people's around us and see the face of Christ and not the face of sin? It is tough. Since we struggle so much to do it, we (or at least I) struggle to understand how or why God would look at us in such a way. I don't know how God does it, but I know He does no matter how much I struggle to.
What makes the promise of heaven so sweet to me is that I will no longer screw up on a daily basis like I am now. I won't have to deal with all the guilt and shame that still weighs me down and neither will anyone else.
Blessings Anna. I hope your heart and mind can find some peace with this.
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