Recently, I've spent a lot of time in the gospels. I find that the more I read the Bible, the more questions I have.

I came across Matthew 8 and Jesus’ encounter with the leper. After the year we’ve had collectively as a society, they year my family and I have had, I saw this passage through new eyes.

"When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” Matthew 8:1-4.

Jesus touching the leper is incredible. Touching the leper makes Jesus unclean, in the eyes of the law. Jesus, as a rabbi, couldn’t enter the synagogue if he was unclean. 

There are so many repercussions for this simple act of reaching out and touching him.

Not to mention the reactions the Pharisees would undoubtedly have. It’s only four chapters later when the plots to kill Jesus begin. (See Matthew 12)

But these realizations aren't what stood out to me. It's what happens next for the leper is what caught me off guard, and this part isn’t even in the scriptures.

You see, this leper was an outcast and outsider. This perceived skin disease dictated his social standing or lack thereof.

Until recently, everything I knew about lepers came from the book of Leviticus, chapter 13 specifically. It lays out all the rules, laws, treatments, etc. Verse 45-46 give us a summary:

“Anyone with such a defiling disease must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ As long as they have the disease they remain unclean. They must live alone; they must live outside the camp."

Back in Matthew, this leper comes, bows low and asks to be made clean.

He should have covered his mustache and called out "Unclean Unclean!"

This prompted me to start reading about lepers. I wanted to learn more, and after talking to a friend, I stumbled across the book The Gift of Pain, written by Dr. Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey.

Dr. Brand shares numerous and really fascinating stories of his life and his journey with patients and their pain locally and abroad. He shares about his work with leprosy patients and what he discovered.
First, leprosy is a nerve disease, not a skin disease. These damaged nerves stop working and lepers literally stop feeling pain.

Many times their injuries are a result of not getting the signal in the brain from the nerve that the body is injured.

Imagine falling and spraining your ankle, you know it hurts, you need ice and rest. Someone with leprosy doesn’t know the ankle has been sprained. Rather than rest, they keep putting the same weight and pressure on it. The sprain doesn’t heal and permanent damage results.

Or if you fall and hit your head, it hurts, instinctively you reach back, feel the bump, and see your bleeding, and you treat the wound. A leper wouldn’t sense the pain, know to reach back, notice the blood and the wound. The wound goes untreated, gets infected and leaves potentially long term damage.

Dr. Brand shares a really shocking and graphic story. 

He was working at a rehabilitation facility, in and around the 1950’s in India. They were treating leprosy patients and growing weary because the young men they worked with came to the facility, would be healed, and then go home and almost immediately reinjure themselves.

However, here's what they noticed was happening to the men during their stay at the facility: 

"Almost always, the afflicted person noticed the missing digit in the morning. Something ominous was taking place during the night. A patient solved the mystery by sitting up all night in an observation post from which he watched a scene straight out of a horror movie. In the middle of the night a rat climbed onto the bed of a fellow patient, sniffed around tentatively, nuzzled a finger, and meeting no resistance, began to gnaw on it. The lookout yelled, waking the whole room and scaring away the rat. At last, we had the answer: the boy's fingers and toes had not dropped off, they were being eaten! (Brand, The Gift of Pain, pages 127-128)

They quickly worked to trap the rats, and found that cats were an effective solution. After that, all leprosy patients would have a new feline companion when they left the rehabilitation facility. 

Because lepers could feel no pain, they were losing their fingers while they slept.

Lepers are consistently dealing with missing body parts, for reasons like this, or due to injury that require amputation, flesh that dies. It’s debilitating.

Let’s jump back to the leper in Matthew 8. When Jesus touched him, “his leprosy was cleansed.” That doesn’t mean that the just his skin was restored.

Jesus literally gave the leper the gift of pain.

Healing him meant that he could feel, that his nerves were restored. I like to envision his body restored, missing fingers reappeared, bald patches of skin now had hair.

For most of us, we don’t experience this type of injury. For most of us our nerves work properly. But we do experience pain. Other forms of physical pain, often times, emotional pain.

And so many times in our lives when we encounter pain we pray for it to go away. We take medicine to make it end quicker. We do whatever it takes. Just like the leper… he approached Jesus and asked to be healed, it's a quick fix. 

Did he know that when he asked this that he would be asking to feeling pain? Every cut, every sprain, every burn?

It makes me wonder… how many times in my life have I asked God for a quick fix? Take this from me? Heal this, help me feel better, etc.

How many times has God moved in my life, without me realizing it because it wasn’t what I asked for and expected?

And even deeper, how many times has God allowed me to experience pain, either emotional or physical pain, because, in His all-knowing and perfect love, He knew this pain was actually a gift.

I don’t have any answers for this. It’s something I’m working through. I’m trying to wrap my head around this. But I am starting to see in a deeper way how God loves and cares for us, even when it’s not the way I hoped or prayed for.