no way in which Jesus could shut the door. Once Rose Macaulay, the novelist, said that all she demanded from this life was ‘a room of her own’. That is precisely what Jesus never had. A great doctor has said that the duty of medicine is ‘sometimes to heal, often to afford relief, and always to bring consolation’. That duty was always upon Jesus. It has been said that a doctor’s duty is ‘to help people to live and to die’ – and they are always living and dying. It is human nature to try to put up the barriers and to have time and peace to oneself; that is what Jesus never did. Conscious as he was of his own weariness and exhaustion, he was still more conscious of the insistent cry of human need. So when they came for him he rose from his knees to meet the challenge of his task. Prayer will never do our work for us; what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.
Jesus set out on a preaching tour of the synagogues of Galilee. In Mark this tour is dismissed in one verse, but it must have taken weeks and even months to do it. As he went he preached and he healed. There were three pairs of things which Jesus never separated.
(1) He never separated words and actions. He never thought that a work was done when that work was stated; he never believed that his duty was completed when he had exhorted people to God and to goodness. Always the statement and the exhortation were put into action. The American Baptist, Harry Emerson Fosdick, tells of a student who bought the best possible books and the best possible equipment and got a special study chair with a special bookrest to make study easy, and then sat down in the chair – and went to sleep. The person who deals in words with no actions to follow is very like that.
(2) He never separated soul and body. There have been types of Christianity which spoke as if the body did not matter. But human beings are both soul and body. And the task of Christianity is to redeem the whole person and not just a part. It is indeed blessedly true that it is possible to be starving, living in a hovel and in distress and pain, and yet have sweet times with God; but that is no reason at all to let people live in such a state. Missionaries do not only take the Bible; they take education and medicine; they take the school and the hospital. It is quite wrong to talk about the social gospel as if it were an extra, or an option, or even a separate part of the Christian message. The Christian message is one, and it preaches and works for the good of the body as well as the good of the soul.
(3) Jesus never separated earth and heaven. There are those who are so concerned with heaven that they forget all about earth and so become impractical visionaries. There are those who are so concerned with earth that they forget about heaven and limit good to material good. The dream of Jesus was a time when God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10), and earth and heaven be one.
THE LEPER IS CLEANSED
Mark 1:40–5
A leper came to him, asking him to help him and kneeling before him. ‘If you are willing to do so,’ he said, ‘you are able to cleanse me.’ Jesus was moved with pity to the depths of his being.
He stretched out his hand and touched him. ‘I am willing,’ Jesus said, ‘be cleansed.’ Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed. Immediately Jesus sent him away with a stern injunction. ‘See to it’, he said to him, ‘that you tell no man anything about this; but go and show yourself to the priest, and bring the offering for cleansing which Moses laid down, so that you may prove to them that you really are healed.’ He went away and began to proclaim the story at length and to spread it all over. The result was that it was not possible for Jesus to come openly into any town, but he had to stay outside in the lonely places; and they kept coming to him from all over.
IN the New Testament there is no disease regarded with more terror and pity than leprosy. When Jesus sent out the Twelve he commanded them, ‘Heal the sick, cleanse lepers’ (Matthew 10:8). The fate of the leper was truly hard. E. W. G. Masterman in his article on leprosy in the Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, from which we have drawn much of the information that follows, says, ‘No other disease reduces a human being for so many years to so hideous a wreck.’ Let us look first at the facts.
There are three kinds of leprosy.
(1) There is nodular or tubercular leprosy. It begins with an unaccountable lethargy and pains in the joints. Then there appear on the body, especially on the back, symmetrical discoloured patches. On them little nodules form, at first pink, then turning brown. The skin is thickened. The nodules gather specially in the folds of the cheek, the nose, the lips and the forehead. The whole appearance of the face is changed until the afflicted person loses all human appearance and looks, as the ancients said, like a lion or a satyr. The nodules grow larger and larger; they ulcerate and from them comes a foul discharge. The eyebrows fall out; the eyes become staring; the voice becomes hoarse and the breath wheezes because of the ulceration of the vocal chords. The hands and the feet also ulcerate. Slowly the sufferer becomes a mass of ulcerated growths. The average course of the disease is nine years, and it ends in mental decay, coma and ultimately death. Those suffering from this type of leprosy become utterly repulsive both to themselves and to others.
(2) There is anaesthetic leprosy. The initial stages are the same; but the nerve trunks also are affected. The infected area loses all sensation. This may happen without those who suffer from the disease knowing that it has happened; and they may not realize that it has happened until they suffer some burning or scalding and find that there is no feeling whatsoever where pain ought to be. As the disease develops, the injury to the nerves causes discoloured patches and blisters. The muscles waste away; the tendons contract until the hands become like claws. There is always disfigurement of the fingernails. There ensues chronic ulceration of the feet and of the hands and then the progressive loss of fingers and of toes, until in the end a whole hand or a whole foot may drop off. The duration of the disease is anything from twenty to thirty years. It is a kind of terrible progressive death of the body.
(3) The third kind of leprosy is a type – the commonest of all – where nodular and anaesthetic leprosy are mixed.
That is leprosy proper, and there is no doubt that there were many lepers like that in Palestine in the time of Jesus. From the description in Leviticus 13 it is quite clear that in New Testament times the term leprosy was also used to cover other skin diseases. It seems to have been used to include psoriasis, a disease which covers the body with white scales, and which would give rise to the phrase ‘a leper as white as snow’. It seems also to have included ring-worm, which is still very common in the middle east. The Hebrew word used in Leviticus for leprosy is tsaraath. Now Leviticus 13:47 speaks of a tsaraath of garments, and a tsaraath of houses is dealt with in Leviticus 14:33. Such a blemish on a garment would be some kind of mould or fungus; and on a house it would be some kind of dry rot in the wood or destructive lichen on the stone. The word tsaraath, leprosy in Jewish thought, seems to have covered any kind of creeping skin disease. Very naturally, with medical knowledge in an extremely primitive state, diagnosis did not distinguish between the different kinds of skin disease and included both the deadly and incurable and the non-fatal and comparatively harmless under the one inclusive title.
Any such skin disease rendered the sufferers unclean. They were banished from the fellowship of others; they must dwell alone outside the camp; they must go with rent clothes, bared heads and a covering upon their upper lips, and as they went they must give warning of their polluted presence with the cry, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ We see the same thing in the middle ages, which merely applied the Mosaic law. The priest, wearing his stole and carrying a crucifix, led lepers into the church, and read the burial service over them. Lepers were people who were already dead, though still alive. They had to wear black garments that all might recognize and live in a leper- or lazar-house. They must not come into a church service, but while the service went on they might peer through the leper ‘squint’ cut in the walls. Lepers had not only to bear the physical pain of their disease, they had to bear the mental anguish and the heartbreak of being completely banished from human society and totally shunned.
If ever a leper was cured – and real leprosy was incurable, so it is some of the other skin diseases which must be referred to – he had to