When John the Baptist sent two disciples to Jesus to ask if Jesus was really the Messiah, Jesus listed a number of mighty works that bore witness to his messiahship: "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them" (Luke 7:22).
We can understand why Jesus included "lepers are cleansed" in this list. The book of Leviticus gives instructions for the priests on how to identify a defiling skin condition, but it is not expected that the priests could take such a condition away. In Jewish tradition, taking away a skin condition was considered to be tantamount to resurrecting the dead---b Sanhedrin 47b. This tradition is based on Num 12:12.
So it was an amazing miracle when Jesus removed this kind of skin condition. One of Jesus' disciples was known as "Simon the Leper" (Matt 26:6; Mark 14:3), and it has been speculated that Jesus healed Simon of his condition.
That speculation is believable in light of other things that we read in the Gospels. Mark 1:40 says that a man with a skin condition approached Jesus and implored him, "If you will, you can make me clean." This man exhibited a commendable faith in Jesus, and Jesus responded by touching the man and taking away his condition (vv 41-42).
The ESV says that Jesus was "moved with pity" in this situation. Some early manuscripts, though, say that Jesus was "moved with anger" (see the NRSV footnote). Textual scholars believe that this may have been the original wording, since it is not likely that a scribe would have wanted to attribute anger to Jesus.
Matthew Thiessen suggests that the most likely answer is to be found in the man's qualifying clause "if you will." How could the man, with all his faith, not realize that Jesus had come for the purpose of overcoming all the forces of death? He wanted the man to know this, and he wants us to continue to know and proclaim it.
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