Daily Bible Reading 19th May 2026 // Luke 5:12-15
12 While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” 13 And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him. 14 And he charged him to tell no one, but “go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” 15 But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities.
It is this compassion that explains the touch of Christ's hand upon the leper (13). It was not the touch that cleansed him; it was Christ's word, 'I will; be thou cleansed', that cleansed him. The touch was not needed for the cleansing: what it did was to assure the man of the care and love of God. It was God saying to him, 'Yes, I do have a care for such as you'. As the hymn puts it,
None too vile or loathsome
For a Saviour's grace.
The man had been an outsider for years. He had almost forgotten what the touch of a human hand felt like. He had walked alone and in a terrible isolation. And the touch was Christ's discernment of the comfort and assurance the man needed that the long loneliness was now over. It was his reinstatement into humanity, his welcome back into human fellowship, a touch that told the poor outcast that he mattered to God.
The illustration this lovely story gives us of the spiritual realities of the gospel can hardly be in doubt. What Jesus did here - the touch He gave to the leper - is simply a parable of His Incarnation, in which He came in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, taking our sinful flesh, identifying Himself with it, touching it, yet not being defiled, in order to take its defilement away. And in the word He spoke we have a parable of the mighty, saving, cleansing word that He speaks to men today in the gospel, in Word and Sacrament. We could hardly find a more moving - or more accurate - description of the good news of the gospel than in these words of Jesus: 'I will: be thou clean'!