The leper's request is a question about Jesus' character. 12"Lord, if you will, you can make me clean." He does not doubt Jesus' ability. Leprosy has left him no illusions, and he has likely spent years outside the camp, calling out "unclean" to warn people away. What he does not know is whether Jesus is willing to reach toward someone like him. Jesus answers with the man's own word, "I will," and does what the law would never allow a priest to do: he 13"stretched out his hand and touched him." Under the Law, contact with a leper made a person unclean (Leviticus 13-14), and everyone knew which way contagion ran. Jesus reverses it. His cleanness spreads to the leper, and the man is healed at the moment of contact.
Then Jesus sends him to the priest with the offering Moses commanded, 14"for a proof to them." He wants the healing verified through the proper channel. The word spreads anyway, faster than he can outrun it, until he withdraws to pray simply to find quiet.
The second healing is public from the start. Four friends cannot get a paralyzed man through a crowded doorway, so they carry him up, open the roof, and lower him on his mat before Jesus. Luke says Jesus acts 20"when he saw their faith," theirs as well as the man's own, their refusal to let a crowd or a roof stand between their friend and Jesus. Sometimes the faith that reaches him belongs in part to the people who carried someone there.
Then Jesus says something that has nothing to do with the man's legs: 20"Man, your sins are forgiven you." The scholars catch the weight of it faster than anyone: 21"Who can forgive sins but God alone?" They are right about the theology, which is why the claim scandalizes them. It is the first time that accusation surfaces in Luke, and at the end of his life it is the charge that condemns him. Jesus proves his authority with the one thing the eyes can check: 23"Which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven you,' or to say, 'Rise and walk'?" Both are equally easy to say and equally impossible for a mere man. Only one can be verified by everyone watching. He says to the man, 24"Rise, pick up your bed and go home," so that they may know the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. The visible miracle becomes proof of the invisible one.
Here Jesus first calls himself the Son of Man in Luke, a title from Daniel's vision of one given dominion and a kingdom that will never pass away (Daniel 7:13-14). He claims the authority of that figure while standing among ordinary people in Galilee. The crowd's response says as much: 26"We have seen extraordinary things today." They had come expecting a healer, and they left having seen something larger.
Ask who carried you to Jesus, and whom you might carry.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a Son whose answer to our "if you will" is always "I will." Thank you for friends who carry us toward you when we cannot get there ourselves, and for a forgiveness proven real by a power we can see. Give us the leper's honesty about our uncleanness and the persistence of the paralyzed man's friends for those we love who cannot yet reach you alone. In Jesus' name, amen.