In Mark’s Gospel the incident had served to illustrate Jesus’ emerging conflict with the priestly establishment. It was the priests’ role to determine who was ritually “clean” or “unclean”. The Jewish establishment was no longer of interest to Luke since it had been wiped out with the Roman invasion of Israel in 70 AD. For Luke the incident was simply another indication of the compassion of Jesus. Mark had appropriately situated the incident in the countryside, since lepers were ostracised from habitation until declared “clean”. Luke located it in an unidentified city, since city, not countryside, was the home base of the Christian communities of the Empire.
15 Word about him spread all the more, and numerous crowds gathered to listen him and to be cured of their weaknesses.16 But he would go off to deserted areas and pray.In fact, after touching the leper, Mark assumed that Jesus incurred ritual uncleanness and was consequently unable to stay in inhabited places. Luke was not interested in such detail and put the reason for Jesus’ withdrawal to the desert as his desire to pray. It is significant how much Luke emphasised the prayer of Jesus. In his view, prayer would be essential also for disciples if they were later to acquire the mind and the heart of Jesus.
For Mark this incident had illustrated Jesus’ confrontation with the legal establishment, represented by the scribes (teachers of the law) who were present. Whatever about scribes having come from every village of Galilee (there were about two hundred villages!), the fact that some came from Jerusalem seemed to indicate an official contingent. Luke’s main interest, however, was not the encounter with the Jewish power structures, but the matter of forgiveness.
The use of the passive voice: Your sins are forgiven was an accepted way of indicating God’s action. God forgave sins. Yet Jesus saw himself as the agent of God, the one with the authority on earth to forgive sins.
Luke’s comment that the power of the Lord was with him (Jesus) to heal would seem to indicate Luke’s conviction that Jesus’ healings were due to the power (the Spirit) of God working in and through his human agency.
Though the scribes were clear that only God could forgive sins, nevertheless forgiveness was to be granted only by means of the right rituals, under the right conditions and through the right intermediaries. The scribes believed this to be their domain. They determined the conditions; the priests performed the rituals. For Jesus, explicitly forgiving simply illustrated further the advent through his ministry of the Lord’s year of favour. Jesus’ God was a God whose mercy could not be constrained.
For the first time in the narrative Jesus used of himself the title Son of Man. He would use it again. The title referred to a vision in the Book of Daniel. In the vision, the figure seemed to indicate both an individual and at the same time the Jewish people as a whole who had remained faithful to God at the time of the persecution of the Hellenic ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes, in the middle of the second century before Christ.
The title conveyed a context of:
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