The leper says, 2"Lord, if you will, you can make me clean," and Jesus hands the word straight back: 3"I will; be clean." Then he does something the leper could not have expected and the law never allowed. He touches him. The law kept lepers outside the camp, shouting their own uncleanness, and touching one should have made Jesus unclean. The leper is instead clean, and Jesus is not defiled. Whatever this healing is, it runs backward from how uncleanness was supposed to work.
Then a centurion, a Roman officer in occupied territory, someone pious Jews were taught not to visit at home. He comes anyway for a servant he cannot heal himself, and when Jesus offers to come, he stops him: 8"Only say the word, and my servant will be healed." He reasons from his own life. He gives an order and soldiers obey without his lifting a hand. If Jesus has that authority over sickness, a word is enough. Jesus is astonished, and says aloud, 10"With no one in Israel have I found such faith." A Gentile occupier has out-believed the nation whose Messiah Jesus is.
What follows is a hard line. 11"Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness." Faith was always going to be the entrance requirement.
Then something almost domestic. Peter's mother-in-law lies sick with a fever, and Jesus 15"touched her hand," the same gesture he used on the leper, and she gets up and serves. Here an ordinary woman in an ordinary house receives the same attention as an outcast and a foreign officer. By evening a crowd has gathered, and Jesus 16"cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick," the very thing the centurion had trusted him to do from a distance.
Matthew explains it with Isaiah: 17"He took our illnesses and bore our diseases." Matthew is not yet at the cross, and the verse points to who Jesus already is, this early. The Servant who will carry the weight of human sin is carrying, in these Galilean days, the weight of human sickness, one leper, one servant, one fevered woman at a time.
A leper who could not enter a town. A Roman soldier whose house a devout Jew would not enter. A woman on her sickbed. No purity code of that world would have let the three stand in one room. Jesus touches or speaks to each in turn, and by the end of these seventeen verses all three are well.
Ask whom you have kept at arm's length, and whether Jesus has. The three people in this passage would each have expected to be left outside, and the passage is a record of what happened when they were not.
Prayer
Father, thank you that your Son reaches toward exactly the people the world has agreed to keep at arm's length: the diseased, the outsider, the ordinary and overlooked. Give us his willingness to touch what everyone else avoids. Teach us that faith is what you have always looked for. When sickness comes, ours or someone else's, let us trust the Servant who carried it then to carry it now, in whatever way his timing allows. In Jesus' name, amen.