First Sunday after Trinity 2023

 

Gospel: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Have you ever felt ‘really alive’? Or do you have days when you feel you are merely existing? Of course, in a material sense this doesn’t make any sense: the very fact that you can feel more, or less, alive is because you are alive, not dead. And yet, we can probably all relate. There is more to the world God made than what can be seen or understood logically.

Again and again in the Bible, we are implored to choose life. Jesus said that he was sent into the world that people might experience fulness of life. Another word for life is holiness, or union with God, the Maker and Preserver of all things, visible and invisible.

For Jesus’ people, the material world that God has created points beyond, to the invisible dimension of the world. So, certain things were considered more holy—fuller of life, and the potential for life—than other things. For example, the Sabbath is more holy than the other days God as made: the week flows from it and builds towards it again. Conversely, certain conditions, that spoke of absence of life, made a person ritually impure (not morally evil) and thus temporarily excluded them from holiness, considered unable to receive or transmit the divine presence. For example, a woman is ritually impure following menstruation or childbirth, not because these things are ‘unclean’ or defiling, physically or morally, but because women are like God in the ability to create life, and the empty womb points to the potential of absence of life—of holiness—as the contrast. Anyone who touched her, or anything she had touched while ritually impure, became ritually impure themselves.

In the Gospel set for today we see Jesus in three situations where people are ritually impure. The first is Matthew and his syndicate of tax gatherers, who would at least be suspected of breaking the ritual pure/impure dietary regulations on account of their partnership with gentiles. The second is a man who is temporarily excluded from the synagogue where he has responsibilities as an elder of the community by the death of his daughter, and of course the daughter herself, for a corpse and whoever touched a corpse (and he would have both held her and overseen her being washed) was ritually impure. The third was a woman who had bled, not on a monthly cycle but continuously, for twelve years—as such she would have been excluded from the life of the community for that entire time—and the crowd she moved through—for anyone who had any physical contact with her would have been excluded, temporarily, on each occasion.

Three situations where the received wisdom, where the way in which the material world pointed to greater invisible realities—the choice between life and death; holiness, and separation from God—meant it was understood that the blessing of God’s presence could not be received or passed on to others.

And in these three situations, Jesus—the embodied Word of God, having become human, one of us, the very epitome of the material pointing to the invisible—does something that is both ordinary and incredible. He willingly takes on ritual impurity in touching, and being touched by, those who are ritually impure. This is ordinary, he is not unique in the story in this regard, for humans know that it is impossible to keep ritually pure while having any kind of relationship or interaction, while being human. But in the very place where God’s presence had previously withdrawn—as the days of the week withdraw from the Sabbath, only to return; as the full moon wanes away, only to wax again—God’s presence returns with life in all its fullness. Jesus is the Sabbath. Jesus is the full moon.

Jesus is the life that pays life forward (in contrast to the tax gatherers who levied a retrospective charge).

Fully human, Jesus is routinely ritually impure. Fully God, he is life, and health, and community; he is wholeness.

In the days when I feel temporarily excluded from being alive—for we may have set aside ritual practices, but our bodies keep time with eternity, the material with the invisible—on such days Jesus draws near, bringing healing. And on the days when I feel fully alive—for life is not observed from the stands but played out on the pitch—on those days Jesus rejoices with me.

Either way, he is to be found and followed, leading us from death to life, always and everywhere.

Where will you encounter him today?