Jesus' ministry is well known for healing diseases and making the unclean clean again. But to appreciate this, we need to understand the Old Testament, levitical context for this. Sometimes we are ashamed of some physical attribute. Some of us are prone to cavities. Others have birthmarks. Some of us are bald. Others are heavier than they'd like to be. Were Pharisees just body-shamers - excluding people arbitrarily for their deafness, their leprosy, or their flows of blood? Was Jesus basically just saying "stop the bullying?" No. Questions about purity and impurity have to do with the spread of flesh and death, as we've been maintaining in these posts. We'll see that the Pharisees falsely manipulated Torah, but this only shows us how God's good Torah was being overtaken by flesh. This is humanity's core problem. War and victory over flesh and death will constitute re-entry into Eden.
If we look closely at the way levitical law treats skin issues, we'll be in a position to appreciate what is unique about Jesus' ministry of cleaning.
The purity regulations all had to do with putting flesh to death. Concern about defilement had to do with flesh's basic propensity to spread and pollute:
"Impurity infects because it is the spread of flesh - menstruation...emission, flesh showing through the skin." (Delivered, 111-112)
Flesh also pollutes:
"Skin disease pollutes when flesh shows through the outer covering of skin (Lev. 13-14). Emissions from the genitals pollute, and Leviticus uses basar (flesh) to describe genitals (Lev. 15:2, 3, 7, 13, 16, 19)...Flesh is not only a static source of defilement. Flesh spreads pollution, so that the woman with a flow of blood defiles any who touch her, and dead flesh spreads death to the entire space where it lies. Flesh is a potency whose power must be controlled and arrested if Israel is to be near Yahweh's house. And every time an Israelite washed away the stains of flesh when he drew near, he was carrying on, in a small way, Yahweh's war with flesh." (Delivered, 100-101)
For this pollution, the levitical law of Torah brought cleaning. Purity rites would clean with blood. "If a priest offers a purification offering, blood is taken into the Holy Place and smeared on the horns of the golden altar of incense. If a common Israelite sins, the blood of the purification is smeared on the horns of the bronze altar." (A House for My Name, 93)
How does blood clean? Leithart says two things. That it isn't magic, but it also isn't arbitrary. It isn't magic in that there isn't some inner natural quality to blood that cleans, but rather it is a given and attributed quality. God has given it that these natural materials used in these ways (levitical law) will achieve a certain effect. But it also isn't arbitrary. Blood contains the life of the flesh: "Any Israelite or any foreigner residing among you who hunts any animal or bird that may be eaten must drain out the blood and cover it with earth, because the life of every creature is its blood. That is why I have said to the Israelites, "You must not eat the blood of any creature..." (Lev. 17:13-14...nephesh or 'flesh' comes up three times in this passage) Offering up the blood, or the fleshly life of an animal substitute brings the death of their flesh, and is a participation in God's war against flesh:
"By offering up the life of the animal to God, the worshiper expresses both the renunciation of flesh and the faith of Abraham, who abandoned his fleshly future to God to do with what he would - and received a "new son" back in return...The blood of the animal, emblematic of the fleshly life of the worshiper, is spread on the furniture of the sanctuary so that the sanctuary bears the guilt and impurity of the worshiper. Torah's sacrifices enact a ministry of condemnation - a condemnation of flesh for the purpose of transforming it to Spirit. (Delivered, 113)
In Matthew 4:23-25, we see Jesus' mission of healing and cleaning:
"Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them." (Matt. 4:23-25)
What is startling about this is, in light of what we've been saying in this post, is that Jesus is touching people who are unclean: he touches lepers and dead bodies. He touches a woman with a defiling flow of blood. But instead of "contracting their contagious miasma, his cleansing life flowed to them." (Delivered, 138). The lepers were healed of their leprosy. The woman's flow of blood stopped. The dead were raised. Not only did Jesus do this. He taught his disciples to do this.
Jesus' ministry of cleaning recapitulates Torah's ministry of cleaning. He does all the things the tabernacle did. He accomplishes all the healing qualities that God had given to sacrificial blood. As we'll continue to see in these posts, the life of the Spirit is opposed to the life of the flesh. Here, we see that Jesus lives by the Spirit, and flesh doesn't spread to him.
To conclude, it is also worth noting how even though the levitical law was meant to be a soldier in God's war against flesh, the main problem with Israel over the course of the New Testament is that they had become primarily an accomplice to flesh. Nicholas Perrin describes how the temple functioned as Israel's predatory lending bank:
"The windfall income that would accrue to the temple leadership through illegal gain could then in turn be quickly turned around for punishingly high-interest-rate loans to the destitute. By being in a position to leverage usurious, high-risk loans, the temple financiers were then able to foreclose quickly and efficiently on landholders struggling to eke out an existence. Increased temple landholdings eventually meant more wealth for the priestly elite, more wealth meant even more high-interest loans, more high-interest loans meant more foreclosures on the land, and the cycle went on - crushingly so, for those at the bottom of the economic ladder." (Perrin, quoted in Delivered, 148)
In other words, Israel had become Egypt. Just as Egypt enslaved the Israelites in the time of Moses, so Israel was enslaving Israel in the time of Christ. They presented as scrupulous obedience to levitical law what was really an appropriating of the law for their own selfish boasting. They used the levitical law not for putting flesh to death. They used it to set up fortresses to protect their own flesh. This is most pronounced in their exclusion of the unclean. Rather than cleaning them, they excluded them. Rather than relieving their burdens, they added more. This is where the pressure point is. Much as Egypt had trusted in its own gods, Israel trusts in their misappropriation of Torah. And just as God enacted plagues on Egypt's gods in Exodus, God also enacts plagues on Israel's gods in the gospels. But instead of plagues of destruction, Jesus brought plagues of healing:
"Jesus came as a new Moses, and as such he brought "plagues" that destroyed "Egypt's" world of worship in order to make way for a new one. The plagues included eating with sinners; healing on the Sabbath; showing kindness to tax collectors and Gentiles; touching lepers, corpses, and women with flows of blood. He instructed his followers to subvert the world order by returning kindness for harm, blessing for insult, by bearing others' burdens. Jesus came with plagues of mercy that subverted the perverse Torah-regime of the scribes and Pharisees and the brute force of the Romans." (151)
Jesus shows us restored Eden in his touch, in his presence. His life overcomes the pollutant of death. His health overcomes the pollutant of disease. His accusers see in him a sinner who eats with sinners. His followers see a living embodiment of what the tabernacle was meant to be - a hospital for the healing of sinners so that they can be restored to Eden and to God's presence. It's even better than that, because this Jesus-hospital is Eden. This Jesus-hospital is God's presence.
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