Links for today’s readings:
Read: Leviticus 11-12 Listen: (7:20) Read: Acts 8 Listen: (5:10)
Scripture Focus: Leviticus 12.6-7
6 “ ‘When the days of her purification for a son or daughter are over, she is to bring to the priest at the entrance to the tent of meeting a year-old lamb for a burnt offering and a young pigeon or a dove for a sin offering. 7 He shall offer them before the Lord to make atonement for her, and then she will be ceremonially clean from her flow of blood.
Reflection: Our Purifying Sacrifice
By John Tillman
Ritual impurity or “uncleanness” is not about a “gross” factor. God created women’s bodies, sex, childbirth, blood, and normal bodily functions and is not grossed out by them.
As Lindsey Ponder writes in the notes for the Bible Project podcast episode on the topic, “Ritual impurity is any sign of death, decay, and life outside of Eden (it’s not about a person’s sin). Israel’s laws regarding purity and impurity kept life and death—their own mortality—ever present before them. Because Yahweh is the creator and sustainer of all life, anything dying or exhibiting signs of decay can’t be in his presence.”
When Cain spilled Abel’s blood, the ground cried out, not because it was gross but because death claimed its first human victim. (Genesis 4.10) Blood from the experience of childbirth is also a cry to God. It is the cry of Eve, ever suffering and risking death to bring forth life, anticipating the day that her seed crushes the serpent’s head. (Genesis 3.15-16)
The women “purified” according to Leviticus 12 were purified from a battle with death, not from sin or grossness. Thus Mary, who carried Eve’s seed to term and delivered Jesus, made this sacrifice to celebrate her battle won. (Luke 2.22-24)
Like the Israelites, we live in an unclean world, marked by death and decay. Childbirth is not the only way that we “bleed” in our struggle against sin and death. Our bodies cry out from our first breaths to our last. We “touch” death, or are touched by it, in daily life.
Eve and Mary were called to carry Jesus to the world and so are we. A sword pierced Mary’s soul. (Luke 2.35) We will be no different. When contending for the gospel, standing for the truth, and serving and loving sinners, sin, death, and decay oppose us. They touch us. They can harm us.
Harm may come from enemies or friends who resist righteousness or refuse to see the truth. Suffering insults, frustrations, losses, or deaths, both literal or emotional, we may be embittered, angered, or injured.
We may be tainted by the world’s touch, but Jesus never is. He touches the unclean and cleanses them, speaks to the dead and awakens them.
Whatever harms you encounter, whenever sin, death, or decay touch you, take time to be purified. Be purified in the arms of Jesus, our purifying sacrifice.
Divine Hours Prayer: The Small Verse
Keep me, Lord, as the apple of your eye and carry me under the shadow of your wings.
– Divine Hours prayers from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.
Read more: Separateness Not Superiority
The Spirit of Christ is within us and we are his body. We have Christ’s power to touch the unclean and make them clean.
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