Preached at Silverton Friends Church
May 14, 2023
I have been thinking about touch. We use touch as a metaphor when we stay “in touch” on social media or by snail mail, when we find news stories “touching.” And these metaphors work because of the emotional component of touch. Touching is communication without words. A touch can be selfish, taking something without permission from someone else; a touch can be desperate, grabbing something in order not to be lost or destroyed; a touch can be consoling, wiping someone’s tears away or brushing back a sick person’s hair; a touch can be healing. When we touch someone else, we move into their space with intention, and truly only we can be sure of the goodness of those intentions. (I will also add that asking permission to touch is a helpful practice.)
There is also the word “untouchable.” We use this to describe athletes who cut through defenses like butter, who run away from the crowd in races, and so on. We use this of people who seem to live charmed lives, untouched (!) by poverty, sorrow, sickness, slander. It has an overtone of invulnerability. (And it is often an illusion.)
But the saddest meaning of the word untouchable is quite literal. This person cannot, must not be touched. In historical India, the lowest class of people was and is called the Dalit, the broken, scattered, divided. They were and are outsiders within their own culture. But every culture has its untouchables, including ours. In Jesus’s day, the Mosaic Law recorded in Leviticus defined a number of people as unclean and therefore untouchable, and if you touched them, you were also unclean, at least until the day had passed and you had undergone a ritual bath. Lev. 5:2 says, “If a soul touches any unclean thing, he also shall be unclean and guilty.” Lev. 10:10 says that the priests are responsible to teach and enforce “the difference between holy and unholy and between unclean and clean.” Proper behavior towards unclean people helped define your religious commitment, your holiness.
As you already know, Jesus didn’t care about the proper behavior towards unclean people. Jesus came as a prophet, both in his words and in his actions. We can look at what Jesus does to understand what he taught and the reverse as well.
One of the causes of uncleanness was the skin disease that caused discoloration called leprosy in the Bible. (It does not seem to be the same as what we call leprosy today, by the way.) Leviticus spends a lot of time on leprosy. People afflicted with leprosy were required to leave their homes and communities and stay outside the city. (Lev. 13.3) They were not allowed to join in festivals or pilgrimages or religious ceremonies. In Jesus’s time, we see them sometimes travelling together. So it is remarkable that, as recorded in Matthew 8 and Mark 1, Jesus reached out to touch a leper.
Now a leper came to him, imploring him, kneeling down to him and saying to him, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Then Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I am willing; be clean.”
The physical seat for compassion and sympathy and mercy was considered at the time to be the bowels. I find this imaginatively engaging. We probably would use the word “visceral” or “guts” so as not to be disgusted, but it carries the idea of an irresistible movement from our depth toward the outside. It is love and caring that must be expressed. And Jesus makes it visible with a touch.
Now, by rights, Jesus was unclean as a result of this touch, and he doesn’t seem to care about it.
Another group of unclean persons were women who had “an issue of blood,” whether menstruation, postpartum, or a chronic condition. They themselves were unclean, and thus outside of religious observance, and everything they touched and everyone who touched them was unclean as well. Irritatingly, women were unclean for a week after giving birth to a boy and two weeks after a girl. (Not sure about boy-girl twins…) There were upsides to this, namely that during “an issue of blood” a woman was pretty much set free from wifely and housewifely obligations, but there were significant downsides if the bleeding persisted, as it did for a woman in Jesus’s time. Mark (5) tells the story of the woman who pushed through a crowd in her desperate search for healing and touched Jesus’s robe. Jesus perceived that healing power had gone out of him, and he asked who had touched him in that way. When she confessed, he praised her for her faith. At the same time, Jesus was now unclean, and he didn’t seem to care about it. (Of course, all the other people she pushed by were unclean as well, demonstrating the nightmare of keeping track of who is clean and who is unclean.)
Another source of uncleanness was death. A dead body and anyone who touched a dead body were unclean. When the woman touched Jesus’s robe for healing, he was, according to Mark, on his way to see Jairus’s daughter, despite the news that she had died. He took her by the hand and told her to get up, and she did.
In Luke 7, Jesus was walking and a funeral procession passed by. He touched the open coffin, immediately becoming unclean, and told the young man in it to get up. Which he did.
Jesus did not care that touching the dead person would make him unclean. His compassion for the living moved him to meet a need, and he did so.
No wonder that in the Acts of the Apostles, God taught Peter that no one is unclean through a vision and a visit to Gentiles (unclean). And Paul wrote in Romans 14:14, “Nothing is unclean of itself.”
It is unsurprising, given their religious law, that the people of Jesus’s time and culture distanced and diminished those identified as unclean and therefore unholy. What is surprising is that in our time and culture, and in our individual hearts, we also have people we consider unclean and unholy. I have people I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Maybe you have some of those also.
But what Jesus teaches us by example is that no one is actually an untouchable. Jesus also teaches us by his word that when we are moved with compassion, we need to reach out with loving, healing touch, whether literal or figurative. We feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, give water to the thirsty, clothe the ragged and naked, set the captives free, and do even more good together than Jesus was able to do in his short life. Jesus takes all those loving actions as done to him.
And, just to get real personal, sometimes we have parts of ourselves we despise and consider “untouchable”—we want to partition it off from the rest of our selves and isolate it outside the camp, so to speak. But what would Jesus do with that aspect, that part of who we are? Wouldn’t Jesus reach out a hand to stop the bleeding, to give life, to make whole? Could we be similarly compassionate to ourselves?
I think in Jesus we can see someone wholly at peace with himself and with God, and the result of that is that he does not need to hate or fear anyone else. All he really complains about in other people is their unwillingness to admit who they really are, and when they do admit it, he meets them with compassion.
