11.01 | Touch
Matthew 8
“And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.
Matthew 8:2-3
Jesus touched him.
It’s difficult for us to grasp just how radical a moment this was. It slammed into a cultural taboo and did the unthinkable. Watchers would have gasped. Awkward glances would have been exchanged. Whispering behind hands would have begun. It shattered a paradigm of thought that had been a bedrock of what holy living was supposed to look like for over a millennia.
And then the whispering hushed. Hands dropped to sides.
Because the man became clean.
The backstory here goes back to the time when the Israelites were a nomadic community in the wilderness. God gave them specific laws to govern their way of living, laws that, as we saw last week, pointed to fullness and yet did not reach it. A significant, and rather complex, part of these laws regarded those with diseases in their skin (which the Bible groups under the single title leprosy).
Those with skin diseases were infectious, and so the camp needed to be protected. So those with skin diseases were commanded to live outside the camp. More than this, they were commanded to wear torn clothes, with their faces covered. When they approached, they were to shout out ‘Unclean, unclean!,’ heralding their arrival and warning others to get out of the way.1 If anyone did touch them, they had to engage in purification rites to become ‘clean’ again.2
When this leper, then, approaches Jesus, the crowd would have parted. They’d have pulled their children back, and held a hanky over their mouths. His arrival was inconvenient. It was awkward. It invaded their cleanliness.
All of this backstory had given the crowds a specific paradigm.
The paradigm was this: Brokenness (and all things of sin and death) were viewed as contagious. Holiness, then, was about avoidance of all things of death — including leprosy. Don’t touch. Don’t talk to. Don’t go near. Get it out of your camp. Build fences. Avoid eye contact. Protect your children. And hold your nose.
But Jesus inverts the framework. His Kingdom is built on a new paradigm.
Because in the paradigm of Jesus, it is not He who is infected with leprosy, but rather it is leprosy that is infected by Him.
Put another way, in the paradigm of Jesus, it is not the things of death that are contagious, but rather the things of life.
Contagious life, overspilling into a dying, hurting world.
As today’s passage goes on, this is what we see continuing. From the healing of the Centurion’s servant (a non-Jewish man, with who a Jewish person would not even have been allowed to eat a meal), to the healing of the many in Capernaum, to the liberation of the demonised men, to the stilling of the storm,
LIFE
is invading the things of death.
Crossing cultural barriers.
Desecrating the sanctimonious ideals of the religious.
Restoring the excluded.
Stilling the storms.
And healing the hurting.
Heaven is invading hell.
Followers of Jesus follow. And thus our invitation is to imitate. Every day. This contagious life is the overflow of living with Him who is our greatest priority—above homes and comfort, and even above the demands of our closest family. It flows from lives that are relentlessly focused on Him.
Because where He goes, we go.
Loving the unloved.
Touching the untouchable.
Refusing to ignore or withdraw, or to let our religion become about fear and barriers and exclusion and withdrawal.
Because, in the paradigm of Jesus,
Life is contagious.
And therefore, with eyes on the rabbi,
We are willing,
And we
touch.
Reflect:
What people and situations feel beyond the reach of my religion today? Where might the Spirit be inviting me to step out, change the paradigm, and touch?
Pray:
Lord Jesus,
I make you my number one priority again today
Let nothing be more to me than you.
No task, no person, no opinion, no comfort.
Root out of me every place where my understanding of your heart has become about tidy religion, withdrawal from pain, and the fears that hide love
Help me to engage,
To be willing,
And to touch.
Show me today to see where you want to invade death with life
That my walk with you may be so close
At the very intersection
Where the light meets the darkness
Where your Kingdom is advancing
That your Way be my way
In your name,
Amen.
Old Testament
For those of you also reading the Old Testament, your additional readings are here:
Genesis 26-27 | Psalm 7
Leviticus 13:45-46
You can read all about it in Leviticus 14