Aids

What Does Leprosy Have to Do with AIDS?

In Jesus' day, leprosy was a slowly progressing, chronic, highly infectious, incurable skin disease with serious social implications. Today, leprosy is rare thanks to sulfone drugs and better hygiene. Now known as Hansen's Disease, the once-dreaded malady has been virtually eliminated.

Now the world struggles with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), a scourge that bears some remarkable similarities to leprosy. Biologically the diseases are quite different. But like the lepers of the ancient world, many AIDS sufferers are socially ostracized out of fear that they will contaminate others.

The situation is complicated by the fact that many AIDS cases have resulted from sex outside of monogamous, heterosexual marriage or from intravenous drug abuse—behaviors that oppose biblical precepts and principles. That introduces a moral dimension to the problem. But if there are moral issues involved in the spread of AIDS, there is also a moral issue involved in determining a Christlike response to AIDS.

In biblical times, leprosy was thought to be very contagious and hereditary. It was also believed to be a divine punishment for sin, even though the actual instances of that, such as Miriam (Num. 12:9–10) and Uzziah (2 Chr. 26:16–23), were exceptional. The Law was very specific about the diagnosis and treatment of leprosy (see Lev. 13). If a priest detected suspicious symptoms—pimples, scabs, sores, nodules, or white spots on the skin “like snow”—he ordered a quarantine of the infected person for seven days to protect the rest of the society. If the symptoms did not fade away within a week, another week of quarantine was prescribed.

Weeks could drag into months and months into years. Quarantined persons became social outcasts, living outside the Israelite camp. They fended for themselves as best they could. Some perhaps received occasional supplies from relatives, but most were reduced to begging. Those who actually had the dreaded disease slowly wasted away. As the disease took away sensation, they easily injured themselves without feeling pain, leading to deformity and “half-eaten flesh” (Num. 12:12) and, eventually, death.

Quarantines never cured a leper. Only divine intervention could. So when Jesus healed lepers, it demonstrated His divine nature and caused people to turn to Him. Surely His compassionate treatment of lepers is instructive for those of us living in a day of AIDS. We continue to seek for a cure, just as leprosy was eventually cured through modern medicine.

In the meantime, believers need to consider what a Christlike response would be to people with AIDS. Jesus reached out to lepers with love and healing. What compassionate, redemptive responses can we show toward our own, modern-day “lepers”?