If any life was lifeless, it was the life of the lepers. Lepers were, in Jesus day, "the walking dead." They were considered outcasts. Their skin diseases were mistakenly considered contagious and, therefore, they were segregated in order to protect the healthy parts of society from their diseases.

But something deeper than disease was also at work. Lepers generally were presumed to be people who were being punished for their sins. Their illness was evidence that God was punishing them. Can you feel just a bit of the awfulness of such a condition? If people are both contagious and sinful one would not want to have anything to do with them. So lepers were segregated in the society, pushed into little colonies where they all lived together in anguishing isolation.

When they came into the p…