Jesus Reveals His Power and Authority to Make Clean (1:40-45).
Here Jesus power and authority is revealed in no uncertain fashion. Firstly because He overrides the law of uncleanness. And secondly because He heals the skin diseased man visibly in the sight of all. The incident is also important because it stresses that Jesus faithfully observed the teaching of the Law in commanding the man to fulfil its requirements.
We must not underestimate Jesus' approach to this disease, nor the lesson that it brings home. To touch such a person was normally to be rendered ritually unclean. A Pharisee would usually take the utmost precautions against even the remotest chance of doing so, and the skin-diseased person himself was seen as having a firm responsibility to ensure that he had no contact with others who were not unclean. And yet Jesus deliberately chose to touch him. He could have healed him at a word, so why then did He touch him? The answer is that it was because it was a gesture of supreme religious authority. By it He was claiming that He could not be rendered unclean by His contact with the skin-diseased man because as the Holy One of God (Mark 1:24) He was the source of all cleanness (the title has prepared for this incident). Rather than He himself being made unclean by the touch, cleanness passed from Him to the skin-diseased man. In any other person the claim would immediately have been dismissed. But what could be said of a case where the disease simply disappeared before their eyes? Here truly was One Who could make clean.
Analysis of 1:40-45.
a And there comes to him a skin-diseased man, pleading with him and kneeling down to him, and saying to him, “If you will, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40).
b And being stirred to his very depths he stretched forth his hand, and touched him, and says, “I will, be made clean” (Mark 1:41).
c And immediately the skin disease left him and he was made clean (Mark 1:42).
b And he sternly charged him, and immediately sent him away, and says to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go your way, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing the things that Moses commanded for a testimony to them” (Mark 1:43-44).
a But he went out and began to proclaim the story in detail and to spread abroad the matter in so much that he could no more openly enter into a town, but was outside in desert places. And they came to him from every quarter (Mark 1:45).
Note that in ‘a' the skin-diseased man approaches Him in his illness, and in the parallel goes out from His presence proclaiming his wholeness. In ‘b' Jesus speaks the word of cleansing, and in the parallel commands him to go to the priests and do what is necessary to certify his new cleanness. Centrally in ‘c' the skin disease leaves him and he is made clean.