Remember, too, that according to the Mosaic law it was forbidden to
any but the priest to touch a leper. Therefore, in this act, beautiful
as it is in its uncalculated humanity, there may have been something
intended of a deeper kind. Our Lord thereby does one of two
things--either He asserts His authority as overriding that of Moses
and all his regulations, or He asserts His sacerdotal character.
Either way there is a great claim in the act.

Further, we may take that touch of Christ's as being a parable of His
whole work. It was a piece of wonderful sympathy and condescension
that He should put out His hand to touch the leper; but it was the
result of a far greater and more wonderful piece of sympathy and
condescension that He had a hand to touch him with. For the 'sweet
human hands and lips and eyes' which He wore in this world were
assumed by Him in order that He might make Himself one with all
sufferers and bear the burden of all their sins. So His touch of the
leper symbolises His identifying of Himself with mankind, the foulest
and the most degraded; and in this connection there is a profound
meaning in one of the ordinarily trivial legends of the Rabbis, who,
founding upon a word of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, tell us
that when Messias comes He will be found sitting amongst the lepers at
the gate of the city. So He was numbered amongst the transgressors in
His life, and 'with the wicked in His death.' He touches, and,
touching, contracts no impurity, cleansing as the sunlight and the
fire do, by burning up the impurity, and not by receiving it into
Himself.

Note the Lord's word, 'I will; be thou clean.' It is shaped,
convolution for convolution, so to speak, to match the man's prayer.