“And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean.”
Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched him. I am willing, he said. Be clean — the textual tradition is divided: many manuscripts have moved with compassion while earlier manuscripts have indignant (orgistheis). Most textual scholars prefer indignant as the harder reading more likely to have been softened by later copyists. The indignation is directed not at the leper but at the disease and its power to exclude — the same righteous anger at evil that drives the exorcisms. The touch is the radical act: touching a leper created ritual impurity for the one who touched; Jesus reverses the equation, extending purity to the leper rather than receiving impurity from him.
Church Fathers on Mark 1:41
After that the serpent-tongue of the devils was shut up, and the woman, who was first seduced, cured of a fever, in the third place, the man, who listened to the evil counsels of the woman, is cleansed from his leprosy, that the order of restoration in the Lord might be the same as was the order of the fall in our first parents.
Mark puts together circumstances, from which one may infer that he is the same as that one whom Matthew relates to have been cleansed, when the Lord came down from the mount, after the sermon. [Matt 8:2]
For he said not, If thou wilt, pray unto God, but, 'If Thou wilt,' as thinking Him very God.
Read all 17 entries in the readerCatena Aurea · St. Thomas Aquinas, tr. J. H. Newman · public domain
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