“The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.” – Leviticus 13:45-46
For all the flack Leviticus gets for being indigestible, Leviticus 13 is surprisingly practical. Most of the chapter is composed of directives for the priest who, functioning as an ancient Jewish doctor, must examine suspected cases of leprosy. It’s less medicinal (although that’s part of the story) and more ritual; the priest must certify each person as clean or unclean. The chapter reads like a flowchart of diagnosis. Is there a symptom of skin disease? If so, is the hair turning white? If so, is the problem area more than skin deep? For just about every combination of symptom and duration, there’s a ruleset.
But in every case, if the priest pronounces you as leprous, your life drastically changes. Gone are your fine threads; rags are your covering. Your hair must be left unkempt. As long as the disease remains, the prognosis remains: unclean.
“Unclean” carried more weight than we give it today. It was fairly easy to become unclean. Death (animal carcasses or a dead relative) would do it, as would bodily fluids. But leprosy was unique in that the unclean were left with an indefinite prognosis. If you touched death, you could be back in business within a matter of days. Leprosy meant that you were out until the disease left; there was no guarantee that would ever happen.
And perhaps the two worst instructions: the leper must live alone, isolated from the community; and the leper must warn anyone coming close of their condition. Not leprous, but unclean.
The concept of inside vs. outside runs through the Bible; it’s hard not to see it. When Adam and Eve fall, their consequence is to eternally remain outside the garden, no longer inside. Noah went inside the ark and found salvation. The tabernacle, the dwelling place of God, was built on levels of increasing inside-ness. And the children of Israel, the nation that they were, became a similar model. Inside the world, yet set apart from it. Uniquely privileged to enter inside sacred divine spaces while Gentiles were forced outside.
And now, with a word from the priest (who was by all accounts just following divine orders), you could be excluded indefinitely from being one of those on the inside. You could come close but at some point, a line was drawn. You were outside and everyone else was inside. I don’t know how precisely this played out between the leprous and those with temporary uncleanness. The temporarily unclean could wash and remain outside the camp for a few hours or a week (depending on the specific cause of uncleanness) and come back in. But given the emphasis on living alone, it seems to me that the leprous were in even more isolation. They weren’t just unclean; they were unclean.
Another unique aspect of uncleanness lost on the modern reader is the principles of transference involved. God, speaking through Haggai, clarifies what’s at play:
“Thus says the Lord of hosts: Ask the priests about the law: ‘If someone carries holy meat in the fold of his garment and touches with his fold bread or stew or wine or oil or any kind of food, does it become holy?’” The priests answered and said “No.” Then Haggai said, “If someone who is unclean by contact with a dead body touches any of these, does it become unclean?” The priests answered and said, “It does become unclean.” Then Haggai answered and said, “So is it with this people, and with this nation before me, declares the Lord, and so with every work of their hands. And what they offer there is unclean.” – Haggai 2:11-13
Holy things can’t make other things — perfectly normal things — holy. Similarly, clean things can’t transfer their “cleanness” to unclean things; but unclean things can very quickly spread their uncleanness. (There is a distinction between cleanness and holiness that is outside this scope, but a simplified explanation is that holiness is an advanced version of cleanness. The emphasis is on the “set apart” nature of the holy thing.)
This transference explains why lepers were forced outside the city and equally contextualizes the second devastating command for lepers. “The leprous who has the disease shall…cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’” (Leviticus 13:45) Imagine that every time you saw a person walking in your general direction, you had to yell to them, “Stay back! If I touch you, you’ll be tainted. If I touch your belongings, you’ll have to scour them clean or destroy them.” Imagine having to shout your diagnosis every time someone tried to interact with you. Except this was more than a medical diagnosis — it was a badge of exclusion. It’s not just that you were sick; you had to remind everyone — and yourself — day after day, hour after hour, that you weren’t like them.
I hope when you’re reading this set of arcane rules in Leviticus, you begin to empathize with those who bore the name leper. I hope the reality of their plight begins to take shape. But for many of us, you may not have to imagine. Whether forced by societal convention or personal shame, the person you see in the mirror has been stripped of their name and identity, to be replaced by “outsider.” You don’t know any other way to introduce yourself because that’s the most important thing about you.
Leviticus is an incredible book but as the apostles would later tell us, the old covenant could only do so much. And now we arrive in Luke 17. A group of ten lepers are living on the outskirts of a village somewhere between Samaria and Galilee. That statement hints to us — and the story later clarifies — that these lepers are a mix of Jews and Samaritans. That’s notable because, as John 4:9 tells us, Jews don’t mingle with Samaritans. So what’s a Samaritan doing here? Perhaps the lepers realized that their contrived hostility wasn’t worth it. A normal Samaritan was less unclean than a diseased Jew; at least the healthy could walk through one another’s villages. Not so for these ten. It didn’t matter what status they had before, they were all equally rejected by their friends and enemies.
And then Jesus walks by. Remember, we’re thirteen chapters and three years into His ministry at this point in the gospel of Luke. These lepers have heard the stories. And even if they exaggerated Jesus’ power ten times over, there was still a chance He could heal them. Remember the one thing lepers had to say? “Hello, my name is Unclean.” That was their lot in life. But not when they saw Jesus. They looked at Jesus and they break their one rule. The moment they look at Him, their voice shifts from their own identity to Jesus’ identity. Full-throated, unabashed, reckless screaming.
No longer did they call themselves outcasts. They called Him Savior.
No longer did they say, “I’m rejected.” They called Him Master.
No longer was their name “leper.” They named Him Merciful.
The second they dropped their identity, they latched onto His. Sure, they still kept their distance. Society had probably forced them — literally — off the beaten path. They won’t come too close just in case everyone in the crowd isn’t as compassionate as the Rabbi they’ve heard so much about. But they believe.
So, what does Jesus do? He quotes Leviticus to them. He tells them to go to the priest.
A massive chunk of Leviticus 14 is directives for what to do if a leprous person is made clean. The priest has to examine the former leper and declare them clean. Then they have to go through a purification ritual, offer a sacrifice, and quarantine themselves for a week. But it means they get to come back into fellowship instead of living on the outside. Leviticus doesn’t offer any cures for leprosy. As the apostles and prophets said, the old covenant was good but insufficient. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless. That’s why Leviticus 14 is here. It’s whispering of a future day. It’s saying, “This Law can’t cure your leprosy. Your disease will always keep you on the outside. But the Lawgiver is coming. And when He comes, you’ll know. Because he doesn’t abolish these words. He fulfills them.”
Jesus enters the scene and bridges the gap between the laws for leprosy and the laws for cleansing lepers. That chasm couldn’t be crossed by religious ritual, no matter how faithfully kept. But when Jesus shows up, he just skips to the end. He tells them to go as if they have already been healed. And my goodness, to their credit, these guys go. They had no guarantee that anything would happen — but they had the words of Jesus and that was good enough for them. Their healing finds them in their obedience.
And just like that, Leviticus comes to life. What happened when they heard the first rumor that the Healer was on the way? Did the lepers start reciting the laws of cleansing? Did they mentally review all the things they’d need to complete the purification? Did they pass a message to their family on the inside asking them to get animals ready because maybe — just maybe — they might get healed? If I were a leper, Leviticus 14 would no longer feel like a taunt of an unreachable alternate reality; it would become my lifeblood. Leviticus is boring only if you have no stake in the story. But the second it becomes personal, the second it becomes real, the second Jesus speaks it, you have no choice but to fall in love with it. When the lepers left to present themselves to the priest, they were following religious ritual, yes, but ritual electrified by the voice of the Master.
And now we turn to the Samaritan leper. The half-breed. The outsider among outsiders. You know what makes his story special? He couldn’t enter the temple. He was a Samaritan, and though he technically had half-Jewish blood, the other half was enough to disqualify him completely. He was excluded to the nth degree. And yet he obeyed a Jewish teacher who told him to go to the priests. No wonder he came back running. Joel 3:17 prophesied that when God dwells in Zion, the city shall be holy and no strangers will pass through her gates. Was Joel preaching anti-foreigner rhetoric? Or was he glimpsing the future Pentecost when the Spirit would fall on all flesh, where every tongue and nation was gathered in Jerusalem and united in the same family? The Samaritan recognized something about this Jesus. He understood what all the Law and the Prophets were saying this whole time: in the Kingdom of Heaven, no one is an outsider.
The Samaritan, in presenting himself to Jesus, unwittingly and prophetically identifies Him by a new name that the others didn’t: Priest. Jesus told the lepers to present themselves to the priests, after all. It was the priests who would have diagnosed them as unclean and the priests who would have to rescind that diagnosis. And what better priest to present yourself to than the High Priest above all High Priests?
He was supposed to bring animals as offering. But instead, this Samaritan made Psalm 40:6-9 his liturgy:
Sacrifice and offering You did not desire; My ears You have opened. Burnt offering and sin offering You did not require. Then I said, “Behold, I come; In the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do Your will, O my God, And Your law is within my heart.” I have proclaimed the good news of righteousness In the great assembly; Indeed, I do not restrain my lips, O Lord, You Yourself know.
Jesus acknowledges just how radical this Samaritan is. Falling face down at the feet of a Jewish man? Thanking him for anything at all? This man demonstrated grateful humility better than perhaps anyone else in Scripture. He could have, once he saw he had been healed, just gone home. But no, he retraces his steps to find Jesus.
What do you think the outskirts of that village meant to him? Sure, there were memories of the loneliness, the isolation, the rejection. But they instantly were supplanted by a new memory — the sight of the mysterious Rabbi walking to town, speaking one sentence, and healing him. The place of his deepest hurt was now the genesis of the rest of his life. Jesus dismisses the Samaritan to go home. He knew full well that the man couldn’t have gone into the temple in Jerusalem and released him from that task. But he closes with a remark of approval: “Your faith has made you well.” The heavenly equivalent of, “Ya did good, kid.”
Where do you find yourself in this story? I hope more than anything, you identify with the Samaritan leper. Not because you have some kind of psychological need for self-abasement. But rather, because you see (even if just a glimmer) that Jesus doesn’t exclude you. No longer on the outside but on the inside. You are part of the family. He makes you clean.