Why did Jesus tell the leper not to tell anyone about his healing?

  "The answer is that the fame of that presence would have quickened the drying of human tears. It would have made benevolence easy. It would have congregated the world of Jewish sufferers round a common center. It would have dispensed with the need of private enterprise. It would have relieved many hearts of anxious responsibilities. It would have sent each inquirer to the fountainhead.     "Just because of all these benefits; just because the visible presence of Jesus would have made charity an easy thing.'

Remember what it is that Jesus desires. It is not simply the healing of humanity; it is man's education to be the healer of humanity. From the moment in which He became head of the disciples, His 'league of pity' His primary object became not the abolition of the hospital, but the training for the hospital.

To Him the most precious part of that sympathy was the seeking out of disease; 'The Son of Man,' He says, 'is come to seek that which was lost.' These words express a real fact of His experience; they express the conviction that for Him all sympathy must begin in seeking. Therefore He desired that His followers should also seek.

 He did not wish all cases of distress to be brought to the door because then there would be no help in aiding them. If His power would have been proclaimed, there would have been a visible earthly center around which would have circled the victims of sorrow. Then the disciples would have been spared the pain of locomotion, spared the pain of seeking and investigating. There would cease to be any need for "considering the poor." The function of sympathy would be limited to the hand. It would no more require deliberation, judgment, discernment. It would lose its character as an intellectual power. It would become an attribute rather of the body than of the soul.

Therefore in the days of His earthly presence He forbade its members to make Him known - forbade them to render easy that path of benevolence which ought to be a path of anxious inquiry." Matheson.