Jesus had just come down from the mountain where He had set forth the great truths about what it meant to be His disciples. Among them, He said that it was easy to love people who love you. More difficult, Jesus said, was to love those who do not love up. Matthew's gospel tells us that no sooner had He come down from the mountain than He had to put into practice some of the very things He had been preaching. Almost immediately, it seems He had three encounters with three very different types of people. From them we can learn a great deal about what it means to be His follower and to be a citizen of his kingdom.

First, we can see that He Touched the Untouchable. Matthew tells us that this untouchable was a literal untouchable, a leper. Luke's description of the same Eencounter says the man was "full of leprosy." Apparently, this man did not have just one lesion or a few snowy white spots on the skin. To paraphrase, it night be said that this man was eaten up with leprosy. In The Miracles of Christ, David Redding describes leprosy in this way:

"No other disease can touch its hideous talent for mixing agony with horror. It strikes a small spot on the skin silently, like a viper, and no one notices until the dreaded numbness sets in and the deathly snow-white color gives it away. Then the victim is subjected to a savage siege of terror as the killer advances slowly, relentlessly, spreading like a venomous stain, finger by finger, often erasing the face first, leaving behind a messy trail of ugly scabs and sores like open sewers. The hands are frozen into claws long before they drop off. The feet boil up into bandaged stumps before they are left behind. The leper's voice breaks into a cracked record of its former self and his features draw tight into the infamous leonine look until they too leave. The flesh rots off, bones give up, inch by creeping inch. Where it stops nobody knows. In odor and appearance, leprosy has no competitor."1

Of all the diseases described in the Bible, no disease was more horrible than leprosy. Horror and pain bombarded the leper daily. Jewish law forced these victims outside the mainstream. Lepers were considered cursed by God and suspected of terrible sins. After all, why else would God punish someone so terribly unless they had done something awful. At least this is what they believed.

Of all of the miracles performed by Jesus, few were as spectacular as those where He healed lepers. We don't know why this man came to Jesus in such an advanced state. Surely, he must have thought his leprosy was so terrible that even Jesus could not heal him. He perhaps heard that Jesus told of a God of love, and lived a different lifestyle. Jesus was moved with compassion. "He touched him." Jesus didn't have to touch him. He healed others without a touch. Why did He do it? I believe He did so to show compassion, to affirm and to reassure. It had been so long since this man had known human touch but Jesus sensed that he needed it. He loved someone very different from Him.