Do Not Touch!

We all know, are feeling that it’s hard not to touch, not to hug family and friends and not the be touched and hugged by them.

Our New Testament takes us into a situation where the motto is the same: ‘Do not touch!’ A leper has come to Jesus. He seems to be in the early stages of his illness and therefore not isolated…yet. But he knows what his future is; he sees his fate looming: abandonment, complete rejection. For in addition to his physical illness and the suffering that comes with it, he is deemed as being unclean. And in his despair, he kneels before Jesus; trapped in the darkness of what lies ahead of him, he begs Jesus

‘If you will, you can make me clean’.

He asks Jesus to make him clean. He desperately hopes that Jesus wants to make him clean, while knowing that he, the leper, is not to be touched. So, will Jesus do what the man desires? Will He make Him clean from a distance?

The first thing that happens after the man’s plea is not something that Jesus does. The first response to the man’s plea is something that happens to Jesus, within Him:

He is struck by compassion, by pity and that overwhelming feeling makes that Jesus does something.

He touches the man.

Think back for a second of that moment in history when Lady Diane shook the hand of the person that suffered from aids. Just as that patient would not have expected to be touched by the princess, so did this man not expect to be touched by Jesus.

But that is what happens, from within that overwhelming emotion of compassion; from within His heart, Jesus touches him. Only after that, as a consequence of what happens in Jesus’ heart, the ‘Do not touch’, motto goes out of the window.

Jesus is not afraid to be challenged. He stretches out His hand and makes physical contact with the man. Then, the man receives what he asked for, when Jesus says,

‘I will, be clean’.

And the man was clean.

In the story everything happens so quickly. The story is read within a few minutes and that can make you overlook the order in which things happen, and then you fail to notice certain things.

One of those things is that Jesus has His own plan. He gives the man what he asked for, but not straight away. There is the sense of suspension that easily gets lost. The sick man asks Jesus to make him clean- Jesus feels compassion- Jesus touches-the man receives what he asked for.  There are stages.

How is that in our lives, when Jesus addresses us, in our needs?

While we think and are focused on our thoughts and wishes, Jesus feels and thinks, He has a plan and it’s always a plan that is rooted in His love and remains immersed in His love.

Jesus can touch in mysterious ways. And it can take us a long time before we realize that He does. Much longer than the seconds in the story of the leper.

It is possible to not realize that God makes contact with us. And if that’s the case, He has time and takes time to let you learn to discern and recognize it.

For He wants to be known by you, recognized by you for who He is.  And it takes time to get to know Him. This getting to know Him, it’s part and parcel of training in and growing in faith. Faith in God who feels passionate love for us in His heart.

The compassion that makes Jesus touch the man, comes from the heart of God.

As we have it in our Old Testament passage:

Is Ephraim my dear son?
Is he my darling child?
For as often as I speak against him,
I do remember him still.
Therefore my heart yearns for him;
I will surely have mercy on him,
declares the Lord.

The compassion, this intense love of God that we find in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, that is the same compassion that Jesus feels for the leper. It runs throughout the bible, it runs throughout our lives, at all times, on both good and bad days.

God cannot, will never let go His love. Even though that love is not recognized, acknowledged, knocked down. It remains unshakable, unwavering. He is patient.

The Lord is a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, (Exodus 34:6)

He is patient in the face of the statement that was once made by the French Philosopher Nietzsche, the statement that God is dead. Nietzsche made that statement on the basis of his conviction that only reasoning is the source of life.

When we reason, we form our own thoughts, we control them.

But this year, we all had to un-learn that we are in control of our lives. This year we all faced our vulnerability. Maybe, hopefully awareness of our vulnerability makes us acknowledge more than ever that the God of the Bible is a living, loving God. The God who during this difficult year, was present and whose presence, whose touch was felt in ways we could not have imagined and cannot imagine; in ways we could not have imagined and cannot explain by reasoning.

When the sick man is healed, he is told by Jesus to remain quiet about what’s happened to him. Instead of telling people, Jesus wants him to go to the priests and do what is required of him by Moses.

So, having followed His heart, Jesus remains the Jew who obeys the law. That is another thing that is easily overlooked. If we do, we don’t let Jesus be who He is.

But why does Jesus want silence?

Isn’t this an opportunity for mission? Sharing the good news?

Yes, but timing is a crucial thing in Jesus plans. His timing is His Father’s timing and it’s different from ours.

Jesus is very sensitive. Talking about what Jesus had done for the sick man at that point in time, would make people see Him as a miracle worker. People shouldn’t think too quickly that they know who He is from what they hear. Who He is to people will have to emerge by discovering who He is, bit by bit. No shortcuts, no running ahead.

So here’s something else that is not to be overlooked: the times of silence that are incorporated in God’s plans, for His reasons, reasons that are mysteries for us and with which we have to live.

The story starts with the anticipation that the leper would end up in desolate places. But it ends with Jesus ending up in desolate places as the result of the spreading of the news by the man, which Jesus told Him to not to do.

Getting to know God means becoming aware that He addresses our needs in His way; through His, and not our plans. So let‘s not run ahead, but stay behind Him and let Him set the pace. Learn from Him, who in His own mysterious ways moves and says,

Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Amen

 

kingship vs Kingship

Dilemmas, we all know them. Someone says this about them:

‘It is difficult to manage the thoughts in our heads with the feelings in our heart…because only one of them is right.’

Einstein had his solution: If your head tell you one thing and your heart tell you another, before you do anything, decide first whether you have a better head or a better heart.

We all find ourselves struggling with dilemmas, small ones and big ones. My heart melts when I see a puppy, but my head says, ‘No, don’t give in’.

Our New Testament reading gives us the struggle that the apostle Paul has with the conflicts within himself. It’s the last paragraph of a passage where he spells out what causes the conflict between His love for God and sin that, he says, lives in him. He, Paul, who always loved, with all that is within him, the God of Abraham, Isaak and Jacob, Paul wrestles….A Dutch bible commentator says: ‘The dyke of his faith is undercut by the seepage water of sin’.

But then…Paul’s joy, when he thanks God for Jesus Christ, who breaks through that impasse: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Less than two months now, before Christmas. Whatever the restrictions and changes will be, the reason why it will again be Christmas remains unchanged. That reason is that it was God’s initiative, driven by pure love for the world; for his suffering world, to break through its darkness, as a light that started to shine from within that insignificant stable in Bethlehem.

Bethlehem. That takes us to our Old Testament reading. It is where Samuel is sent to, by God, for a mission. And that mission is to anoint a new king for Israel, a king with which king Saul was to be replaced.

Saul was the king that had been given to Israel by God, when Israel asked for a king. But Saul turned out to be a king that did what he wanted, not what God wanted. And because of his disobedience to God, Saul was rejected by God.

God too has regrets, as it says in an earlier chapter:

“I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments.. (1 Samuel 15:11)

So Samuel was sent to anoint the king with which God wanted to make a new beginning. In Bethlehem, that was where that king was. All very well, but to do that while Saul is still king, that was risky. No wonder Samuel wasn’t keen:

‘How can I go? If Saul hears, he will kill me’

but God offers the reluctant, scared Samuel a solution:

‘Take a heifer with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the Lord. And invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do. And you shall anoint for me him whom I declare to you’ (1 Samuel 16: 2,3)

Samuel knows only so much, so little of how God will help Samuel complete this mission. God tells him only very little about His plan. He only tells Samuel what he thinks Samuel needs to know.

Isn’t that a situation we often find ourselves in? In our personal lives. In the church with all the changes? We do what we feel we have to do. But just as God was building something new for Israel then, with Samuel, so He is the One that builds something new with us, now. Our efforts are to be given with the awareness that God Himself remains the creator of new things. As the Psalmist says,

Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain. (Psalm 127:1)

Everything we do, has to be done from within that humility towards God.

So Samuel does as he’s told, he goes to Bethlehem. When the people in Bethlehem, the elders, see him they wonder why a prophet has come to their town. So they ask, ‘Have you come in peace?’ ‘Yes, I have come in peace’, Samuel replies, still unsure and unsettled.

And then he meets Jesse with his seven sons. Eliab the eldest, a tall young man, is the first one passing Samuel. Seeing Him, Samuel thinks, ‘he must be the one. He must be the new king’. However, Samuel got it wrong. He was misled by what his eyes saw and therefore was corrected by God:

No, Samuel, don’t look at his appearance. It’s not about what human eyes see. It is about what I see. And I don’t look at outward appearances. I don’t look at what is obvious to human eyes. I look at the heart.

The second son comes forward, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth…None of these were God’s chosen one. Well, it must be the seventh then. But no…The new king God had in mind was not there.

What now? What is this? A failed mission? Has Samuel come all the way to Bethlehem with a heavy heart for nothing?

‘Are these all your sons, Jesse?’

‘Well, there is still one, the little one. It can’t be him. He looks after the sheep’.

‘Call him, Jesse’, Samuel says.

They were all ready to start the meal, but they couldn’t, because the little one wasn’t there yet. Samuel, Jesse and the seven sons of Jesse had to wait for the eight son of Jesse.

Eight is, in Jewish thinking, a number of God. We have seven days. Our eight day would be Sunday, which is the first day.

So we don’t have an eight day, it’s not on our calendar. But in the bible, crucial things happen on this eight day. Israel’s sons get circumcised on the eight day, including God’s son Jesus. In Luke it says,

 And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. (Luke 2:21)

When the little David arrived, the child of Jesse that didn’t count, this is what God said,

“Arise, anoint him, for this is he.” Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward. (1 Samuel 16: 12,13)

It makes sense that it was Jesse’s eight son with whom God wanted to make a new beginning. It doesn’t make common sense, but biblical sense. The eight day in the bible is the day of a new beginning. It stands for God’s time, a time of the highest order, when a reality from that highest order enters our lives. When He begins something within us and with us; something that we never could have thought of ourselves.

The Spirit of God rushed upon David from that day forward…Does that mean that David was the perfect king? No. David too was human. Like Paul, David struggled with sin; with conflicts like all of us do; in which we all can be stuck.

But David let God correct him. David had to be the king to God’s own heart, by remaining the humble shepherd he was, in his heart

There is not one dilemma, not one struggle that God doesn’t know about; from which He doesn’t want to save us. But we have to let Him do it His way. To be able to do it His way, God needs that what we don’t like, our humility…

What God saw in David’s heart was humility. That’s what made him the opposite of king Saul. With that humility God started to build something new in Israel. For through David, God pointed at and  started to build a kingship that was of the highest order, His own Kingship. For from David, the shepherd in Bethlehem, generations and generations later, the little Jesus was born, in the same Bethlehem, the King of all kings, the Shepherd of our lives.

Amen