Last year, my youngest went to kindergarten. This may not seem like such a monumental moment for most family, but because of our circumstances, it was a big shift for me, personally.
Two years previous, my wife went back to work as a music teacher at the elementary school. Since my youngest was only three at that time, that meant he stayed home with me. We had a blast. Every single day, we hung out, laughed, went on “adventures” (A.K.A. baseball games and sporting good stores), and just enjoyed time together. We got really close.
That first morning he went at school, I was a basket case. Not because my youngest had started kindergarten, but because I missed my little buddy. Even now, more than a year later, the emotions still get to me. Our house became very empty and very quiet, very quickly. For me, it was a hard to get used to the quiet.
That’s a lot of how I imagine a leper’s life to be. One minute, you’re with your family; the next, you’re surrounded by people who have a visible death sentence all over their bodies.
But more than that, it’s lonely. You miss everything about your old life, and even worse, you’re not sure you’ll ever see it again.
The cleansing process for a leper is explained throughout Leviticus 14, but before any of that happens, the priest has to declare you clean.
Because you’re ceremonially unclean though, you can’t enter the camp. To examine you, he has to meet you “outside the camp.”
If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because Hebrews 13:11-13 talks about Jesus’ death on the cross as happening “outside the camp,” as well. His crucifixion was deemed so shameful by the local governing bodies, that He was killed beyond the eyes of the everyday person (as were most crucifixions).
Think about the correlation, though. Throughout Hebrews, Jesus is talked about as being our High Priest, the One who mediates for us day and night. Old Testament typology is thick in this book.
If our sins have kept us away from God—as a spiritual leper—then how fitting is it that Jesus comes out to us to make us clean? Instead of meeting Him in the city, we go to Him, “outside the city.”
The priests in the Old Testament were forced to go to the lepers to cleanse them, but Jesus willingly did this. He laid aside any airs of self-pride and glory to meet us where we are, with the idea of bringing us back into the camp.
For that reason, the moment of decision doesn’t have to be fearful. Though the lepers waited anxiously for the decision from the priests as to whether or not the leprosy had gone away or not, we know what our decision is: clean.
That doesn’t mean we stay in the leper colony though—we leave that old life of sin and spiritual disease behind us, and follow the priest back into the fold of God’s people. Back to our home and with the loved ones we so desperately want to be united with.
