Jesus Took On Our Sins
The first specific healing Matthew records is of a man with leprosy. It’s a brief but shocking encounter, and it’s loaded with deep meaning for us.
First, let’s think about this man. Read verse 2. Most of us aren’t very familiar with leprosy. It’s a disease people get in tropical climates. In the 19th century in the U.S., people who got leprosy were put on trains, sent to California, then boarded boats to be taken to a leper colony in Hawaii—far away from everyone else. Over 100 years, about 8,000 people were sent there. Leprosy was considered a contagious, incurable disease. It starts out small, with a tiny white spot on the skin, but develops progressively until the extremities of fingers and toes rot off. It gradually disfigures a person, emits a bad odor and leads to numbness, isolation, depression, disorientation, and finally death. In Jesus’ time, leprosy made people “unclean,” meaning they were not allowed to join in worship. This disease of leprosy is a powerful metaphor for the characteristics of sin. Like leprosy, sin also starts out tiny but gets progressively worse. It disfigures, numbs, isolates, and kills. And just like leprosy, sin is incurable. Sin gives us all kinds of spiritual diseases. Some are obvious, such as lust, or depression, or anxiety. But other kinds of spiritual diseases in us we may not even be aware of. We can be sick with pride and not even know it. We can be sick with vanity and not even know it. We can be sick with selfishness and not even know it. We can be sick with fear or greed or cruelty. The power of sin can be growing in us, ruining our humanity and our conscience, making us like a spiritual monster, yet we can be pretending like everything is just fine.
This man had leprosy, yet Matthew wants us to learn from him. Read verse 2 again. The man wasn’t living in denial. He faced the fact that he was so sick and that his disease was incurable. They say that in helping people with physical diseases, the first challenge is to help them realize how sick they are, how serious their illness is, so that they really want help. Likewise, to be healed spiritually, we first have to acknowledge that we have a serious spiritual problem and really need God’s help. Those who are slaves of their own honor can’t admit it. But if we refuse to recognize our spiritual problem, or laugh it off as not serious, we won’t be coming to Jesus for his healing.
But there’s another side to this, too. Once we recognize our problem and how serious it is, it’s actually easy to fall into despair. The more we think about our problem, the more we can lose hope and give up on ourselves. We can think we’ve gone too far and can never turn back. The idea that there’s no hope for me is like a pair of spiritual shackles always dragging us down. This man with leprosy knew his reality. But he wasn’t sulking in a corner in despair. He came to Jesus. His coming to Jesus as a leper was truly a marvelous act of faith.
