Judea to Galilee, Section 34

Section 34
JESUS HEALS A LEPER AND CREATES MUCH EXCITEMENT
MATT 8:2-4
MARK 1:40-45
LUKE 5:12-16

A leper approaches Jesus and asks him to heal him-  "If thou wilt."  Jesus replies "I will; be clean" and tells him to report to the priest (per regulation) and not tell anyone about it.  The man goes out and "talks freely about it."

Timing and details seem to differ among the gospels.  Matthew has this after the Sermon on the Mount, a bit later chronologically.  Mark has it in Chapter 1--as if he needed to fit one more episode in!  Mark's touches and wording is more specific--the man is kneeling, Jesus was "moved with pity" and "strictly charged" the man not to spread news of the healing.

If thou wilt (ean thelēis). The leper knew that Jesus had the power to heal him. His doubt was about his willingness. “Men more easily believe in miraculous power than in miraculous love” (Bruce).

If only out of gratitude and perhaps a bit of healthy fear (what if Jesus allowed the leprosy to return?)  you'd think the man would honor Christ's request to keep quiet about the healing.  Was the man overcome with emotion?  Was he reckless?  Was he self-centered, only focused on his recover?

Jesus Heals a Leper at Capernaum, James Tissot

Andrew MacLaren's comments on how Christ's first response is authentic compassion:

Whatever diviner and sacreder aspect there may be in these incidents, the first thing, and in some senses the most precious thing, in them is that they are the natural expression of a truly human tenderness and compassion.

Now we are so accustomed, and as I believe quite rightly, to look at all Christ’s life down to its minutest events as intended to be a revelation of God, that we are sometimes apt to think about it as if His motive and purpose in everything was didactic. So an unreality creeps over our conceptions of Christ’s life, and we need to be reminded that He was not always acting and speaking in order to convey instruction, but that words and deeds were drawn from Him by the play of simple human feelings. He pitied not only in order to teach us the heart of God, but because His own man’s heart was touched with a feeling of men’s infirmities. We are too apt to think of Him as posing before men with the intent of giving the great revelation of the Love of God. It is the love of Christ Himself, spontaneous, instinctive, without the thought of anything but the suffering that it sees, which gushes out and leads Him to put forth His hand to the outcast beggars, the blind, the deaf, the lepers. That is the first great lesson we have to learn from this and other stories-the swift human sympathy and heart of grace and tenderness which Jesus Christ had for all human suffering, and has to-day as truly as ever.

Christ's methods and desire for healing reveal the character of God and a respect for the natural order of healing:

"In healing, Christ made effort. One must be blind to read the New Testament, and fancy Christ’s cures cost Him nothing because He was Divine. It was because He was Divine that they cost Him so much. If you would seek beings incapable of suffering, you must not go up toward the angels and the great white throne, for there you will find “the Lamb as it had been slain,” but down among the oysters. Do you ask, How did Christ bear men’s diseases? Thus: He sighed, He prayed, He lifted them in His arms, He put His hands upon them, He drew them to His bosom, He groaned, He felt His strength go from Him, to heal their bodies. If He had done less, He would not have made manifest the longsuttering God; and His saving men’s bodies, His bearing their infirmities and healing their diseases, would have been no illustration of the agony with which He wrestled in Gethsemane for the salvation of their souls."

In many instances Jesus employed known remedies in physical healing. He manipulated the palsied tongue and the stopped ears—“put His fingers in the ears,” “touched the tongue.” He covered the blind eyes with moist clay, a well-known Egyptian remedy for ophthalmia. He inquired minutely the symptoms of the demoniac boy. He bent over those He healed, He touched them, as careful physicians do. Thus He encouraged, not the breach, but the observance of God’s order. He put honour, by His example, upon the use of scientific remedies. At times He healed by a word, without approaching the sick one. But He seems to have dispensed with remedies only when to employ them was impossible, or when they would have been obviously useless, or when there was a special reason for neglecting them. His example said to those apostles to whom miraculous powers were given, “Use the best means; pray God to bless their use; and when you can do nothing more, pray.” And that is what every wise and instructed Christian tries to do. -BI, William B. Wright

In all Christ’s healings there was conspicuously revealed the authority of absolute power. When He spoke, devils obeyed, the dead heard, the despairing hoped, the lost knew that they were found. (William B. Wright.)

On the various methods by which Jesus chooses to heal:

 So the divine worker varies infinitely and at pleasure, yet not arbitrarily but for profound, even if not always discoverable, reasons, the methods of His miracle-working power, in order that we may learn by these varieties of ways that He is tied to no way; and that His hand, strong and almighty, uses methods and tosses aside methods according to His pleasure, the methods being vitalised when they are used by His will, and being nothing at all in themselves. The very variety of His methods, then, teaches us that the true cause in every case is His own bare will.-Andrew MacLaren