When I was a child, the story of Jesus miraculously healing the leper in Mark 1:40–45 made me thankful for two things: that Jesus had power over all diseases and that I didn’t have leprosy. The story didn’t seem relevant to me, a nonleper, beyond teaching me about Jesus’s amazing power to heal even the vilest of diseases—diseases that I probably wouldn’t have to worry about thanks to modern medicine.

But is there more to the miracle? This brief article will explore the biblical-theological significance of the leper’s cleansing.

Leprosy, the Priesthood, and the Need for Cleansing

The focus of Mark 1:40–45 is on cleansing, not healing, though the two are related. The words “clean” or “cleanse” appear four times in the span of five verses (vv. 40, 41, 42, 44). Leprosy, which refers to various skin diseases in the Old Testament (Lev. 13), rendered people ritually unclean according to the Mosaic law. Anyone who touched a leper would’ve also become ceremonially unclean (see vv. 45–46).

As a matter of uncleanness, leprosy’s significance is more theological and symbolic than biological and medicinal. Lepers needed a priest to pronounce them clean, not a doctor to prescribe them medicine. According to Leviticus 14:19, the priest had to offer a “sin offering” to “make atonement” for the leper as part of the leper’s cleansing process. Without the sin offering, the leper would remain unfit to worship God at the tabernacle. He was cut off from God’s presence—a dead man walking, much like Adam outside the garden. The law provided atonement and cleansing for the leper, but it was merely an external and ceremonial cleansing. It is, after all, what comes out of the heart that ultimately defiles a person (Mark 7:20).

Mark recorded the miracle of the leper’s cleansing because he wanted us to see that Jesus is a superior priest who offers a cleansing that runs deeper than the skin.

A few verses earlier in 1:24, a man with an unclean spirit identified Jesus as the “Holy One of God,” a title attributed to Aaron in Psalm 106:16 (cf. Num. 16:1–3). The Aaronic priests of the old covenant could pronounce a leper clean, but they couldn’t make anyone clean. Jesus was able to do both. Jesus’s priestly cleansing and his instruction to the leper to go to show himself to the priest set the stage for Jesus’s conflict with Israel’s religious leaders in the narrative that follows (Mark 2:1–3:6) and anticipates his confrontation with the high priest in 14:53–65. Mark wants his readers to ask, “Who is the true priest?”

The Aaronic priests of the old covenant could pronounce a leper clean, but they couldn’t make anyone clean.

The shocking nature of Jesus’s miracle is that he touched the leper without becoming contaminated. Perhaps Jesus’s touch symbolizes that he identifies himself with sinners to secure their salvation. He takes our stain; we get his holiness. The cleansing this priest provides runs deeper than the skin’s surface; it cleanses the body and the heart.

Leprosy as Exile and Death

The Old Testament associates leprosy with death. When Aaron and Miriam sinned against Moses, God struck Miriam with leprosy (Num. 12:1–15). She became as “one dead” and as a stillborn infant (v. 12). Lepers were to assume a posture of mourning—as though they were mourning the dead—by wearing torn clothes, letting their hair hang loose, and covering their upper lip as they cried out “Unclean, unclean” (Lev. 13:45; cf. 10:6; Ezek. 24:17, 22–23). They lived outside the camp in their leprous condition, where they experienced their own deathlike exile, cut off from God’s life-giving presence.

As a symbol of death, leprosy was also associated with Egypt. God afflicted the Egyptians with boils when Pharaoh refused to let Israel go (Ex. 9:8–12). Boils are among the skin diseases associated with leprosy in Leviticus 13. After God delivered Israel from Egypt, he warned them that if they failed to keep the covenant, he’d strike them with the “boils of Egypt” and with “scabs and itch” of which they wouldn’t be healed (Deut. 28:27). Leprosy’s association with Egypt and death suggests lepers needed a cleansing that would follow the exodus pattern.

God delivered his people out of the tomb of Egypt through blood (Passover) and water (sea) and brought them to his life-giving presence at Sinai to make them a kingdom of priests (Ex. 19:6). A cleansed leper followed the same exodus movement from the place of death outside the camp to life with God in Israel’s camp after being sprinkled with blood and oil and washed with water (Lev. 14:1–14).

As part of his cleansing, a leper was restored to the covenant community the same way that priests were consecrated to God. He had sacrificial blood applied to the lobe of his right ear, the thumb of his right hand, and the big toe of his right foot (Lev. 14:14; Ex. 29:20). He regained his place among the kingdom of priests to serve the living God.

Leper’s Exodus and Ours

The leper in Mark 1:40–45 is a man under the sentence of death and a symbol of exile. He has Egypt’s disease. He’s a microcosm of Israel. Israel may have been in the land when Jesus came to them, but they remained in spiritual exile, alienated from God. They needed deliverance not from the bondage of Egypt or Rome but from the tyranny of sin, Satan, and death.

Perhaps Jesus’s touch symbolizes that he identifies himself with sinners to secure their salvation. He takes our stain; we get his holiness.

Mark wants us to understand the leper’s cleansing as part of the new exodus that Jesus came to lead in fulfillment of Isaiah 40:3: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’” (Mark 1:3). Isaiah anticipated a day when God would make a highway in the wilderness to lead an exodus out of exile and back to Jerusalem (Isa. 35:8–10; 40:3). On that highway—the “Way of Holiness” (35:8)—no “unclean” person will journey (35:8), and in the restored Zion, the “unclean” will not dwell (52:1, 11).

When Jesus “stretched out his hand” to touch the leper, he imitated God’s action in leading the first exodus out of Egypt (Mark 1:41; Ex. 3:20; 7:5). Indeed, Jesus didn’t merely imitate God; he’s the same God who saved Israel from Egypt and the same God who promised through the prophet Isaiah to redeem his people from exile. Jesus cleansed the leper to make him part of the end-time Israel—a new class of cleansed and consecrated priests.

Far from being merely a man with an awful skin condition that we don’t have to worry about thanks to modern medicine, the leper is a mirror to our own plight. The leper reminds us we too must cry out to Jesus for cleansing from sin’s defilement and the sentence of death. The good news of the gospel is that what Jesus said to the leper, he says to everyone who comes to him in faith: “I will; be clean.”