He Kept Reaching

A leperThe "leprosy" of Leviticus (Hebrew tzaraat) is not the modern disease but a range of surface conditions — on skin, cloth, even the walls of a house — and the most severe of the uncleannesses, spoken of as a kind of living death (Num 12:12). Unlike most defilements it had no wash-and-wait cure; the leper had to be pronounced clean rather than scrub himself clean (Lev 14). See also: What He Was Willing to Touch. More came to Jesus once and asked to be made clean, and instead of healing him from across the road — the way he healed so many others, with only a word — Jesus reached out his hand and touched him. We looked at that touch in an earlier post and asked what “unclean” even is, since Scripture never once calls it sin. But there is something we passed over in our hurry to reach the question. He did not touch the leper because touching was the only way. He could have spoken, and the man would have been clean. He reached out anyway.

And once you notice that, you start to see he did it again. And again.

On his way to the house of a man whose daughter was dying, a woman reached through the crowd and touched the edge of his clothes. She had been bleeding for twelve years. Under the lawFrom the Hebrew Torah — instruction, direction — rooted in yarah, to aim as an archer toward a target. Never primarily legislative. The stone tablets were hidden inside the ark, inside the most holy place, mediated by a priest. The promise was always to move that instruction from stone to flesh — from concealment behind a veil to working from within the person. Synonyms: Torah, nomos, instruction, teaching, commandment, mitzvah. More a woman with that flow was unclean, and so was whatever she touched — the bed she lay on, the seat she sat in, the stranger brushed in a crowd (Leviticus 15). She knew it. That is why she came from behind, why she reached for the hem of his garment and not his face. By every rule she carried, her touch should have left him unclean.

It went the other way. The bleeding stopped. Whatever had been wrong in her for twelve years met whatever he was, and it was her flow that ended, not his cleanness. He felt it go out of him, and he turned — not to scold her, but to find her. He called her “daughter.”

He was still walking to the dying girl. By the time he reached the house she was dead, and the mourners laughed at him for saying otherwise. He put them outside, took the dead child by the hand, and told her to get up. To touch a corpse was the deepest uncleannessIn Leviticus, unclean (Hebrew tame') names a state of ritual impurity, not a moral fault — its usual causes are the body's own processes (birth, illness, discharge, contact with death), and it is never listed among the sins (Lev 16:16). Its remedy is washing and waiting — purification, not forgiveness (Lev 15:31). See also: What He Was Willing to Touch. More the law knew — the one defilement that needed a special water and seven days to undo (Numbers 19). He took her hand the way you would wake a child for breakfast. She stood up, and he told them to give her something to eat.

Two of them in a single afternoon. A flow of blood and a dead body — two of the states the law drew its heaviest lines around — and both times the line ran backward. He did not catch what they had. They caught what he had.

It is tempting to read all of this as the holy one stooping to the unclean, reaching down from somewhere clean and safe to lift them out of it. But that is not where it began. Before he touched a leper or a bleeding woman or a dead child, he had been carried for nine months inside a woman — and a woman who had just given birth was unclean. The law set aside forty days for her purifying, and named the offering she would bring at the end of them (Leviticus 12; Luke 2:22). He was nursed across those forty days. The arms that first held him had not yet been declared clean.

He did not reach into the unclean from outside it. He was born inside it. The reaching we keepFrom the Hebrew shamar — to watch over, guard, protect, give attentive care to. A shepherd shamar the flock. The keeping the feasts and sabbath requires is the attentive, protective engagement that creates the conditions for seeing what they reveal — not external compliance with a schedule. Synonyms: shamar, observe, guard, watch over. More noticing — the hand held out to the leper, the woman, the dead girl — was not someone leaning in from a safe place. It was someone who had been on the inside since his first breathFrom the Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruach — both meaning breath or wind: invisible in itself, known by its movement and effects. The theological debates surrounding personhood and the Trinity are later developments; the original words are grounded in something physical and immediate. Synonyms: Holy Ghost, pneuma, ruach, Spirit of God, breath, wind. More, choosing to do again what he had already done by being born.

Notice what he never does in any of it. He never forgives them. There is nothing to forgive — we saw before that “unclean” is not sin; Scripture never calls it that, and its remedy was never forgiveness but washing and time. The leper is not pardoned; he is made clean. The woman is not absolved; her flow simply stops. The girl is not let off; she is alive again. Whatever “unclean” was, the answer to it was never forgiveness. It was a change in what they were.

And the deepest unclean thing of all is death — the corpse, the seven days, the water kept for it alone. He took that one by the hand too.

We were handed “unclean” as a way of knowing who to keep at a distance: them over there, us over here, the line running clean between. He spent his time crossing it the wrong way — toward the very ones it was drawn to shut out — and every time he crossed, it was the uncleanness that gave way. If even death let go when he took it by the hand, then whatever the cure for what we are turns out to be, it was never going to be a pardon. It was going to be a different kind of life — one the old uncleanness cannot reach.

But that is a door for another day. For now it is enough to watchIn plain English, to observe means to see attentively — to give careful, focused attention to something. This is precisely what the Hebrew shamar points at: watchful, protective attention toward something valued. In religious usage, particularly in the Church of God tradition, "observe" has been reduced to performing an external requirement. The original sense — attentive seeing that allows something to reveal itself — is what the feasts and sabbath are actually asking for. Synonyms: shamar, keep, watch, guard. More where he walked, and to notice that it was always toward the thing the rest of us still will not go near.

See also:

Further Study

These are not the only times he crossed the line. Read as few or as many as you like:

• The widow’s son at Nain — he touched the bier (Luke 7:11–17)
• The man among the tombs, living with unclean spirits (Mark 5:1–20)
• At table with tax collectors and sinners (Mark 2:15–17)
• A sinful woman, weeping, touching his feet (Luke 7:36–39)