Daily Devotional

The last verse surprises us. We might expect Jesus to parade this man from town to town as living proof of his power. Instead he says, See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest. Say nothing? If we had healed a leper in front of a crowd, we would have called the news station. Yet Jesus tells him to be quiet and go to the priest. There are at least two reasons, and both reveal his love.

The first reason is compassion. Leviticus 14 laid out a process by which a priest examined a healed leper and officially declared him clean. Only then could he go home, hug his wife, hold his children, return to his town, and worship again in the synagogue. Jesus is not being cold; he is being thorough. He does not merely want the disease gone. He wants the man all the way home. As Doriani and Adams stress in their application, Christ restores whole people, not just bodies. He treats this man as a person with a family who love him, not as a prop.

The second reason is proof. When the man arrived, the priest would have to open Leviticus 14 and work through a cleansing ceremony that, as far as we can tell, had almost never been used, because leprosy simply did not get healed. A question would begin to form in the priest’s mind. Who has the power to do the one thing we all agreed only God could do? Later, Acts 6 tells us that a great many priests came to faith. Perhaps it began with moments exactly like this. Jesus, the King who came down the mountain, is also the King who fulfills the law he came not to abolish but to complete. The silenced man became a walking sermon.