Hidden Hebrew

Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Luke 5:13

Reached Out His Hand – The gospel writers paint New Testament pictures with Old Testament colors. If you aren’t looking for it, your appreciation of the stories about Jesus will be color-blind. You just won’t see the hidden Hebrew.

This phrase (ekteinas ten cheira – literally “to stretch out the hand”) draws attention to Jesus’ physical movement. But from the perspective of the plot of this story, it is an unnecessary detail. If we heard this story in the typical twenty second sound bite, we would have been satisfied with “he touched him”. If that’s all we heard, we would have the color-blind version. By adding “stretched out his hand”, we are thrown back into Old Testament full color spectrum.

Throughout the Old Testament, we read of God’s power described with the imagery of stretching out His arm or hand. Consider Deuteronomy 4:34, 1 Kings 8:42, 1 Chronicles 21:16 or Isaiah 45:12. When Luke incorporates this detail, he draws a connection between Jesus and God. In fact, he uses language that every Hebrew reader would see as a description of divinity. Even in the gospel colors, Jesus is God.

Now that we see the symbolism, the story becomes much more dramatic. This is not an encounter between a leper and a prophet. It is an encounter between the unclean and the holy, between a defiled sinner and the God of power. It is a picture of exactly what has to happen to us. Unless God reaches out His hand to touch us, we will remain diseased, defiled and unforgiven. It takes the strong arm of the Lord to remove the decay that clings to me. My sin rots my flesh. It cannot be washed away by any means that I might try to use. It can only be cleaned by God’s hand.

The story of the leper is my story. My sin made me an outcast from the Father. I had no standing in His presence. But God the Son was willing, willing to touch my disease and take it away. It is His stretched out hand that saves, just as it has been for centuries.