5.18.26 – Behold the Lamb of God, Part 2

 In our study yesterday, when Yeshua heals the man with leprosy (biblical tzara'at), He sends the healed man to the priest to offer a sacrifice as Moses commanded. We touched on this because He is honoring the established order. He is not bypassing the priesthood. He is doing something the priesthood was never able to do. That is our first study.

Our next case is the woman with the issue of blood (Mark 5)—an ongoing discharge. How long? Twelve years. I need you to understand the significance of those twelve years for her: twelve years of separation, of restriction; twelve years of embodied weakness; twelve years unable to participate normally in sacred life, in family life, in intimate life. And she has not sinned morally. The Torah does not condemn her. She is suffering from a condition that turns her body into a boundary between living and feeling dead, between belonging and separation. Twelve years, and she comes to Yeshua completely desperate. She is in the crowd. She probably knows she should not be there. She reaches out and touches the tzitzit (tassels) of His garment. And by every rule of what we know, that impurity should have traveled out of her, up His garment, and into Him. But that is not what happens. What happens? Power goes out from Him. Her impurity could not defile His holiness. His holiness dried up her impurity. And the direction is once again reversed. What gets restored is not removal of blood, but her access, her participation, her purity, possibly her fertility. I mean, think about the depth of this.

I know from experience the pain of infertility for women that I have visited with over the years. I understand this to a small degree. Twelve years, and with one touch it is gone. He restores her life in the community of God. Reconciliation. Oh my stars!

Our third story is the father of all impurities. It is called death. Corpse contamination. Death. The highest level. Death is the final contamination. The most severe. Mortality has accomplished its work. A corpse defiles everything. Stepping on a grave defiles the person because of the death and its impurity going out. And yet Yeshua moves toward what everyone backs away from. Jairus's daughter: He takes her by the hand (Mark 5:21–24). The widow's son: He touches the coffin (Luke 7:12–14). Lazarus: He stands at the grave and calls him out (John 11).

Every one of those encounters should have defiled Him—everyone. But death does not conquer Him because life goes out from Him. With tzara'at, the living resemble the dead. Chronic flow of blood drains life away continuously. Corpse impurity is the full reality of death. In every case with Yeshua, the current does not run backward, and impurity does not spread. Holiness should withdraw, but it does not. Their relationships are restored. These are not random miracles, even considering their placement from tzara'at to the issue of blood to death. The Gospels are trying to show us something. There is a way that they are telling who this is.

Ritual impurity—especially major ritual impurity—belongs to the realm of mortality, loss, decay, brokenness, and death pressing in on human life. This is the framework of the Gospels. Yeshua is not battling the strict purity laws of the Torah. He is not just doing nice things. He is not just being compassionate. It is not just that He had power. He is confronting the forces of death with His life. Because we know the sacrificial system could address the effects of impurity as they pressed against sacred space (we have spent a lot of time talking about that), but it could never do this. The temple could not cleanse those people. The temple could, in many ways, manage the consequences. But Yeshua addressed the source. That is what He is doing! Please do not miss this.

If you can remove the source of major ritual impurity themselves—not just managing their aftereffects and not just certifying that anyone is clean or contained, but if you can remove them—it is telling the world that something different is here. Something very different! And John's moment of pause, which opens with his acknowledgment, echoes this: "Behold the Lamb of God... the One I told you about, the One the prophets told you about, the One God promised." If He can do these things, He can do those things—major things. He can accomplish the deeper purification that the prophets longed for. The forgiveness of sin is within His life to achieve it.

These are analogies in action, actually. These are the Gospels' way of showing that God is finally dealing with the pollution of the heart. This is why, this is why in Matthew 12 Yeshua can say that something greater than the temple is here:

"But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple."
(Matt. 12:6)

No matter what you have heard previously, that is not an anti-temple line. This is not Him saying the temple was bad, that the priesthood is illegitimate. The temple is holy. He went there. The priesthood is appointed. He deferred to them. The temple, holy as it was, could not do what He is doing. Something greater is here. He said that not because the temple was wrong, but because God's own cleansing power has arrived. That is greater!

He has come! And He is coming again! 

Shalom,
Alan