The Hand That Cannot Be Defiled

This happens almost every time I take my kids to the grocery store. I tell them not to touch anything. Don't "grab" whatever you want, especially not in the produce aisle. Don't eat the grapes before they're paid for, because they are charged by weight. And yet, as if drawn by some invisible magnetism, those small fingers reach out toward the grapes, the bright apples, the candy, the cellophane-wrapped pastries that sit just at eye level.

"Don't touch!"

To touch is to claim, to risk, to make a mess. To touch is to take responsibility for what one's hand encounters.

We learn very early in life that touch is dangerous. A child who touches a hot stove learns to associate hands with pain. A teenager who touches something forbidden learns shame. An adult who touches the wrong person at the wrong moment learns scandal.

By the time we reach maturity, we have an entire ethics of touch wired into our bones.

We sanitize our hands after shaking another's. We pull back from the grimy panhandler on the corner. We avert our eyes from the suffering we cannot bear to handle.

Our hands, we know, are easily defiled.

This is why the opening scene of Matthew 8 is so startling. Jesus has just descended from the mountain where he preached the longest and most demanding sermon ever recorded. Crowds are following him. And then comes a man whom no one in his right mind would approach: a leper. The Mosaic law was unambiguous about such a man. He was to dwell alone, outside the camp, with torn clothes and disheveled hair, crying "Unclean, unclean!" to warn off any who might draw near (Leviticus 13:45–46).

To touch him was to become him, ritually speaking. To touch him was to inherit his exile.

And the leper, breaking every social and religious convention, comes to Jesus and kneels before him, saying, "Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean" (Matthew 8:2, NRSV).

Notice the precise structure of that confession. He does not say, "If you can." He says, "If you choose."

The leper has already settled the question of power. What remains is the question of will.

And this is the first hint at something far deeper than a healing story.

 

A Theology of Two Hands

Matthew is careful to record what happens next: "He stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, 'I do choose. Be made clean!'" (Matthew 8:3).

There is a great mystery hidden in that small word "touched." In Greek it is hēpsato, from haptomai, the same verb used in countless ritual contexts where touch transmits impurity. By every reckoning of Levitical law, Jesus has just become unclean. The contagion of leprosy, considered a kind of living death, has flowed up his arm.

Except it has not.

Something has happened in reverse. The healing has flowed downward from him to the leper. The contagion has run the wrong way.

This is the great inversion at the heart of the gospel: the holiness of Christ is more contagious than our impurity.

His cleanness overwhelms our defilement. His hand, unlike ours, is not easily soiled.

Saint John Chrysostom marveled at this scene, observing that Jesus could have healed with a word alone, as he does later with the centurion's servant. So why does he touch? Because, Chrysostom suggests, Jesus wanted to demonstrate that he was not subject to the law as a slave but as the law's Lord, and that to the pure, all things are pure (Homilies on Matthew, Homily 25).

Here is the difference between two kinds of hands. Our hands are receptive. They take on whatever they touch. They are stained by ink, blackened by soot, infected by germs, marked by the world. We must wash them constantly because they cannot help but pick up what surrounds them.

His hand is generative. It does not take on; it gives off.

It is, after all, the hand by which "all things came into being" (John 1:3).

The hand that scooped the dust of Adam from the earth, that wrote on tablets of stone at Sinai, that traced something unknown in the sand before the woman caught in adultery. This hand cannot be defiled because it is the source of every cleanness there is.

To be touched by such a hand is not to soil it but to be remade by it.

 

The Untouchables We Know

The leper in Matthew's gospel is not a museum piece. He stands in for everyone our world has placed beyond the bounds of acceptable contact. And the categories of untouchability shift across cultures and centuries, but the dynamic never changes.

In some times and places, the untouchables have been those whose bodies bore visible disease. In others, those whose skin was the wrong shade, whose accent betrayed the wrong origin, whose papers documented the wrong nation. In still others, those whose addictions made them unpredictable, whose criminal records made them unemployable, whose past sins made them too embarrassing to invite to family gatherings.

We have our own catalog of untouchables today.

They sleep under overpasses. They sit in prison cells. They die alone in nursing homes where no one visits. They check the "yes" box on background forms and never receive a call back. Their names are on registries. They confess in tears to a confidante and watch the friendship cool by degrees.

They live among us, and they know exactly who they are.

And here is the sting: sometimes the untouchable is the one who looks back from the mirror.

We carry within ourselves regions of the soul we consider beyond the reach of grace. The particular sin we cannot stop committing. The wound we have nursed for so long it has become a part of us. The shame we have decided is simply who we are.

We become our own lepers, our own exiles, walking through our days crying inwardly, "Unclean, unclean."

To all of these, the leper of Matthew 8 offers a strange and demanding instruction. He does not protest his exclusion. He does not stage a complaint about how unfair his condition is. He comes and kneels, and he places everything in the will of the One who alone can make him clean.

 

The Faith That Astonishes God

Then comes the centurion. And if the leper challenged the boundaries of ritual purity, the centurion challenges the boundaries of ethnic and social belonging. He is a Gentile. He is an officer of an occupying army. He is a representative of pagan Rome, the very power crushing Israel underfoot. By every measure of first-century Jewish piety, he too is outside.

Yet when Jesus offers to come to his house, the centurion responds with one of the most theologically dense statements in the gospels: "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed" (Matthew 8:8).

Matthew records that Jesus "was amazed" (Matthew 8:10). The Greek verb is ethaumasen, meaning to marvel, to wonder.

The same Christ who knew what was in human hearts (John 2:25) is here described as astonished.

Only two things astonish Jesus in the gospels: the great faith of this Gentile centurion, and the unbelief of his own people in Nazareth (Mark 6:6).

Faith and faithlessness. Both can stop the Son of God in his tracks.

What is the substance of this astonishing faith?

The centurion has worked out something profound about authority. He knows that he himself, though under the authority of Caesar, can speak a word and have it obeyed. How much more, then, the One who stands beneath no authority at all?

The centurion grasps that Jesus' word is sufficient because the entire universe is under his command. No barrier of geography, of ethnicity, of social status, can resist that word. No 'systemic injustice' over the fact that he happened to be born a Roman rather than a Jew can prevent Him from the Kingdom... if the King Himself allows it.

The centurion's house is not too unclean for Jesus' word to enter. The centurion's foreignness is not too foreign for Jesus' grace to cross.

And Jesus declares: "Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith" (Matthew 8:10). Then comes the prophecy: "I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 8:11).

The barriers we thought defined the kingdom have been redrawn. Or rather, they have been revealed never to have been what we thought they were.

 

What This Faith Is Not

It is worth pausing here to notice what the faith of the leper and the centurion is not. It is not merely a confident assertion that Jesus has the power to heal. Demons believe that, and shudder (James 2:19).

Nor is it a posture of indignant protest, demanding that Jesus correct what is unfair about one's circumstances.

Neither man complains about his lot. Neither asks why God allowed him to be in this position. Neither demands explanation or apology. Neither complains about a "systemic injustice" in the fact that the Leper didn't choose his ailment but suffered it regardless, or that God first chose Jewish people to carry His Word into the world nor do they demand reparation.

Their faith is something more searching. It is the conviction that Jesus' touch and Jesus' word are not subject to the limitations the world places upon them.

The leper believes that uncleanness cannot block the healing flow. The centurion believes that distance and ethnicity cannot block the authoritative word.

Both believe that whatever the world considers a barrier, Christ does not.

This is the faith Jesus marvels at. This is the faith that opens the kingdom.

 

Living This Today

How, then, do we live in light of this passage? A few practical movements suggest themselves.

First, examine the categories of untouchability in your own heart. Who is it that you instinctively pull back from? Whose name causes a small tightening in your chest when it comes up? Whose presence makes you wish for a different errand to run? These are the people Jesus is moving toward. To follow him is to allow him to lead your hand toward what your hand would not naturally choose. Begin with one. A phone call, a visit, a willingness to sit with someone whose suffering or sin or station you have quietly excluded from your fellowship.

Second, surrender the regions of yourself you have written off. The pattern of sin you have decided is too entrenched. The wound you have decided defines you. The shame you have decided is the truth of who you are. Bring it to him with the leper's words: "Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean." Notice that you do not have to clean yourself first. You do not have to make yourself presentable before approaching. The leper came as he was, kneeling in his contagion, and it was the touch that made the difference.

Third, refuse the temptation to define your worth or your possibilities by the hand you were dealt in life. The centurion did not waste his faith arguing with his circumstances. He did not say, "If only I had been born a Jew, things would be different." He doesn't claim "victim status" and try to use it as some kind of social currency to demand change. He took the position he was in and reached, from that exact position, toward Christ. Whatever your circumstance, whatever the apparent disadvantages of your birth or condition or history, that exact position is the posture from where your faith reaches, and finds His touch, His kingdom.

Fourth, learn to amaze Christ. Let your faith be the kind that stops him in wonder. Such faith does not arise from privileged circumstances but precisely from constrained ones, from positions where the world says there is no hope. The kingdom is given not to those who have the most but to those who reach the farthest.

There is a hand that made the world. That hand was extended on a cross, pierced through, opened for any who would dare to draw near. It is extended still.

And whatever you are, whatever you have done, whatever has been done to you, whatever exile you have inherited or earned, that hand has not been defiled by reaching toward you.

Only kneel. Only ask. He will be amazed by such faith, He will clean you, heal you, and welcome you into His kingdom.