In tomorrow’s first reading from The Letter to the Romans, St. Paul tells us that you, me and all creation is suffering in this world that is as imperfect and incomplete as we are. God created the world and proclaimed it to be good. Then God created humanity and proclaimed it to be very good. It was all good until humanity opened a portal for sin to enter the world. Sin that in last Friday’s first reading was personified and an entity seeking to corrupt the good of the world and people, seeking to reign over all, and rob us of glory God intended for us. It is as St. Peter (1 Peter 5:8), evil is on the prowl and means to devour you.
All this leaves us and creation corrupted and unable to be fully in the presence of God as the children and heirs that St. Paul proclaims us to be. Being in the presence of God is a big deal, as big as it comes. Being in God’s presence was lost in Eden and perhaps the rest of Scripture can be thought of as God’s efforts to restore us to that intimate presence afforded to the family of God.
What could keep us from that presence? In the language of the Old Testament, it is because something has rendered us “impure” in that we have come in contact with Death. Death that entered the world through the sin of one man. The Book of Leviticus has two whole sections on ritual and moral purity. Leviticus provides rituals of thanksgiving and atonement with one purpose in mind: that we be mindful that we worship the God of Life – Life that is meant to be whole, complete, and without the corruption of decay. Life that is meant to be lived in the presence of God. Life that is Holy as God is Holy.
In the Old Testament, there were regulations to keep the faithful from contact with that which would make them impure and not ready to enter into the presence of God. These regulations were designed so the impurity of forbidden things (e.g., a corpse) would not “infect” the person. The rituals were to restore the person.
In the New Testament, Jesus reaches across those regulations to touch the ritually impure. The lepers, the blind, and in today’s gospel, the woman who was “crippled by a spirit” and as a result was so “bent over” that she was “completely incapable of standing erect.”
Jesus reached out to touch her. Jesus was made corrupted and rendered impure. No, his holiness “infected” the woman, removing that which was never desired or intended by God. Now she stands upright, a child of God, an heir to the glory of God.
Now she may draw near into the presence of God.
Image credit: Healing of the Crippled Woman. By Theophylact, Byzantine Archbishop of Ochrid and Bulgaria. 1055 AD | PD USA