I remember when I got the chicken pox as a kid. It all began with a kid named Doug; he was a distant classmate of my brother Eric, so it wasn’t that big of a deal (not to me anyway; I’m sure it was to Doug). But then Dustin got it. He was a closer friend to my brother; his family lived only a couple blocks away from us. And then my brother got it, which inevitably brought it on me as well.
The attitude of most adults in those days was that it was good to get it while you’re still young. You’ll never get it again (so the thinking goes), so it’s just best to get it overwith. (Often that’s true, but years later I met someone who had contracted it three times). But as for me, I wished I’d never had chicken pox to begin with. I was absolutely covered; it was miserable. Chicken pox is highly contagious but, thankfully, is not permanent and rarely is it lethal. Other contagions are much more dangerous though, including this present coronavirus. These thoughts came to mind as I looked at some of what the Bible teaches on contagions… Numbers 5:1-4 briefly addresses the concern of contagion. The Israelites were living nomadically in those days, having been delivered by God from slavery in Egypt. God gave them lots of rules, including provision for exiling people outside the camp who were a spiritual/physical risk to everyone else. It later led to more detailed rules of defilement associated with things like leprosy, discharges, and dead bodies. God wanted to protect His people, so some folks had to be isolated from others in the camp. Leviticus 13:2-3 addressed the case of leprosy in specific, giving rules for official diagnosis. Today we tend to separate the medical and religious establishments, but back then they all blended together. So the Israelite priest was the one who made the diagnosis. They were trained to look and see whether it was it just a skin rash or if it went down deeper. In the latter case, the person was pronounced as defiled – and this had huge consequences. Leviticus 13:45-46 gave some rules the leper had to follow after being diagnosed. Lepers were exiled from the camp. They had to keep their hair disheveled as a physical sign that they were not well. They also had to give out warning yells as people came near, to warn them to keep their distance: “Unclean, unclean!” It must have been awful. You don’t have to read into the text much to conclude that people must have really felt bad for these folks. They were their family members, neighbors, and fellow citizens. They must have been praying for them, for God to restore them to good health. Leviticus 14:2-32 is a lengthy text that suggests that healing and restoration sometimes happened. It made me think of Raymond J. Donovan, who served as Secretary of Labor in the Reagan administration. After he was acquitted in 1987 of financial corruption charges he famously asked, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” Sometimes lepers got better, and they wanted to be formally restored to the community. The prayers had been answered. The symptoms went away; conditions improved, but there was still a lengthy process for restoration. Different provisions for ritual cleansing were used based on how much money a person had. But in either case the recovered leper had to be certified by the priest; and they didn’t just immediately go back to normal life. They had to shave their hair; there were faith offerings to be made; there were anointings given on the ear, the thumb, and the toe. And they weren’t allowed back in their tent until after a period of waiting. It was a long and drawn-out process – probably for the purposes of bringing assurances to everyone around that a thorough cleansing from defilement had been completed. Part of this had to do with the sense of sanctity that the Israelites had for worship. The tabernacle was their designated space of worship, and Leviticus 15:31 makes it clear that they took its consecration seriously. Imagine if profanity were spoken from the pulpit of a church today. There might well be a deep-felt sense of desecration. There were several kinds of designations for defilement in the Old Testament. Some of them involved language, but most often they were physical conditions – and I believe that sometimes God gave the provisions because of the hardness of people’s hearts (cf. Mark 10:5). Sometimes (but not always!) conditions of defilement are based on peoples’ own fears and prejudices, rather than on what God ultimately wants. All of this comes to mind with a reading of Matthew 8:1-4, Mark 1:40-45, and Luke 5:12-16. These are parallel accounts of Jesus healing a leper. There are several interesting things to note here:
So how does this affect us today? I’d point to several things…
God bless you. Pastor Andrew McHenry First Congregational Church
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Andrew McHenryI am a husband, a Congregational pastor, and a native Kansan currently living in Thermalito, California. In the past I have also been a prison chaplain and a youth pastor. Interests include reading, railroads, prog rock, KU, and the KC Royals. Archives
March 2024
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