Biblion Bible Commentary
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A Man Full of Leprosy
Luke 5:12-16
12 While he was in one of the cities, behold, there was a man full of leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, saying, “Lord, if you want to, you can make me clean.” · WEB
He touches the one man in the country nobody was allowed to touch, and then withdraws to pray.
Behold, there was a man full of leprosy Luke 5:12.
Full of is the writer's own grading again, and it means an advanced case. The healing is told in the earliest account Mark 1:35–45.
What the law required of such a man governs the whole scene. He was to live outside the camp, tear his clothes, and call out unclean to anyone approaching Leviticus 13:45–46. He is under a sentence of separation, and it is not cruelty — it is public health in a world with no other instrument. What it produced was people who had not been touched in years.
When he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, saying, "Lord, if you want to, you can make me clean" Luke 5:12.
The request is exactly built. He does not doubt the ability and he will not presume on the will, and the whole question is put on the one point he cannot know. It is one of the most careful prayers in Scripture.
He stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, "I want to. Be made clean" Luke 5:13.
The answer takes his words back in order — I want to answers if you want to — and the touch comes first. Nothing required it; the word alone had emptied a synagogue of a demon and driven out a fever. Under the law, touching that man made a person unclean, and here the traffic runs the other way: the uncleanness does not transfer, the cleanness does.
A man who had spent years being kept at a distance is touched before he is healed.
"Tell no one, but go your way and show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing according to what Moses commanded, for a testimony to them" Luke 5:14. The instruction sends him into the system rather than around it. The law had an elaborate procedure for certifying a cleansed leper Leviticus 14:1–32 — a procedure that can rarely have been used — and the priests are to receive a man requiring it.
But the report concerning him spread much more, and great multitudes came together to hear and to be healed by him of their infirmities Luke 5:15. The instruction fails, as such instructions do in the Gospels, and the ministry gets steadily harder to conduct.
But he withdrew himself into the desert and prayed Luke 5:16.
The last verse is this account's addition and the tense matters — he kept withdrawing, as a practice. The pattern is now established twice in two chapters: the bigger the crowds get, the more deliberately he leaves them.
settled What this mark means