If You Will, You Can Make Me Clean

As I lie on these hospital tables, beds, and gurneys – shuffled from one test or procedure to another – one Scripture verse keeps echoing through my mind: If you will, you can make me clean (Mark 1:40).

A leper, suffering and solitary, kneels before Jesus and makes this plea. How he came to believe in Jesus, we don’t know. But I do know the desperation behind those words. I feel it.

I have excellent, highly trained specialists working on my case. I trust them completely. But as each one would admit, they can’t simply will away the disease that is slowly trying to kill me.

These men and women give me hope. But none of them are Hope. Only the man standing before the leper is that.

And of course, Christ is willing. The leper is healed.

That’s where I want to be, too. Everyone facing illness or trauma wants that healing. It’s easy to get frustrated and cry out:“He can do it! Why hasn’t He healed me? So many are praying! Lord, please will that I be healed! Please…”

Silence.

But not inaction.

What do I mean? Well, look at what Mark says happened next: After Jesus cured the man, the leper went out and told everyone what had happened, while Jesus remained outside, in deserted places (Mark 1:45).

In other words, Jesus traded places with him.

So what am I saying – that Jesus has traded places with me? In a very real way, yes.

In His divine nature, Jesus can only love infinitely. And that love was most fully expressed in His suffering and death on the cross. As He said, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for a friend” (John 15:13). And by His wounds, says Isaiah, we are healed (Isaiah 53:5).

Love is healing, and there is no love without suffering.

As I have lain here, I’ve realized something: I’m glad I have this cancer instead of my wife, my children, my siblings, or anyone else. I don’t mean that in a self-congratulatory way, I just mean that this suffering is shaping me. It’s making me a better man, in the sense of showing me even more clearly the vital importance of love in action. Love has to drive everything I do: every conversation, every act, every moment… joyful or painful.

That’s how Christ lived, and how he calls me to live, too; not just in the good times, but also in the worst – to the cross and beyond.

And that’s why Christ is my true Hope. Not because I expect him to will away my disease with a word (though of course he could), but because, out of love, he already healed the deeper, spiritual disease: sin and eternal separation from him.

He asks me to unite myself to the Father’s will just as he did, and to trust that I’m not forgotten any more than he was. He took upon himself the leprosy of sin and went into the wilderness of suffering in my place so that I can proclaim, even where I am now, the love that is stronger than death (Song of Songs 8:6).

Will my cancer be healed? I don’t know. Maybe God will heal me through the people at this hospital. Maybe He’ll heal it directly. Maybe He won’t heal it at all.

But, no matter what, He loves me. He has taken my place. And in doing so, He has already made me clean in the only way that truly matters.

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