Lepers, Bleeders, and Dead Body Touchers: What Numbers 5 Teaches us about Repentance
When the pastor at my church assigned me to preach on Numbers chapter 5 verses 1 through 4, I did my best to write the following. The passage is pretty obscure, covering the ancient quarantine regulations for those with leprosy and unsanitary genital discharges. Not exactly the kind of inspirational stuff you put on coffee mugs and shirts for the Youth Group winter retreat! But I think there’s some wisdom in there that can still be used today.
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The passage is the following, Numbers 5:1-4:
The Lord said to Moses, “Command the Israelites to send away from the camp anyone who has leprosy or a discharge of any kind, or who is ceremonially unclean because of a dead body. Send away male and female alike; send them outside the camp so they will not defile their camp, where I dwell among them.” The Israelites did so; they sent them outside the camp. They did just as the Lord had instructed Moses.
I read this verse and thought “good to know about the ancient middle eastern quarantining practices, but how am I going to make a sermon out of this passage?”
Here are a couple of tricks to reading the Bible. If you ever come across something Jesus says that you don’t understand, go back and see if it was mentioned in the Old Testament. If you come across a verse like this Numbers 5, go forward and see what Jesus had to say about the topic. In fact, Jesus does have something to say about leprosy. It turns out Jesus encounters a man with leprosy immediately after giving the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon on the mount has been called (by me) Jesus’s greatest Netflix special. As he walks offstage it says in Matthew 8:1-4:
When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, “See that you don’t tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”
So generally, in western culture we tend to focus on the first part of this story – “Lord if you are willing”, “I am willing”, “Be clean!”, ect. . We see it through the lens of our individualistic culture: that Jesus can heal us and that he is willing to heal us. We see that Jesus reached out and touched the man. We also want to be touched by God in a profound and personal way.
There are other readings of this passage as well. A more collectivist reading would ask the question – why isn’t this man out in the leprosy camp? Why is this man wandering into the middle of a large crowd? He has come into contact with Jesus, the disciples and others who are crowding around him, all of whom will now become ceremonially unclean. A somewhat similar modern example would be an actively symptomatic person with COVID-19 rushing the stage after a packed event at an arena. This man was a leprosy super spreader!
We can also assume that this man sat through the entire sermon on the mount. How was his presence at that event experienced by those ceremonially clean and otherwise respectable listeners in the crowd?
When Jesus heals the man, he does something that we would not. He says don’t tell anybody. When a dramatic healing like this occurs, our inclination is to shout it from the rooftops, start a YouTube channel and post it all over Facebook. We would invite this man onto the church circuit to give his inspiring testimony. In fact, the only testimony that Jesus asks this man to give is to the priests, Moses and the Levitical tradition. “But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”
We tend to read the gospels through the lens of Jesus versus the temple establishment. After all, the religious establishment were the ones who got the ball rolling on Jesus’ mock trial and execution. Take for example this passage from the bible commentary “True to our Native Land”
“The healing of this leper constitutes a challenge to the temple authority. In Jesus resides the power that once belonged exclusively to the priests. Again, we see that the power of God can disrupt existing power structures.” [1]
This passage is true, and also incomplete. That’s because Jesus is a Jewish rabbi and his listeners are well versed in Jewish law and culture. Jesus says in Matthew 5:17-18 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.”
So, when he instantaneously heals the man with leprosy and then goes on to say “But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” He is tipping his hat to the Levitical tradition and directing listeners to the fact that there is still a very important value in the cleansing process one has to go through for leprosy and other skin diseases.
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This takes us back to Numbers chapter 5. All those lepers, bleeders, and ceremonially unclean dead body touchers living outside the camp. Whatever happened to them and what did they have to do to rejoin society again?
Well, when Jesus tells the man to present himself to the priest, he is telling him to initiate a very specific and systematic process of purification that is outlined in Leviticus chapter 14. What I have done, for the sake of illustration is to put Leviticus 14 into the form of a chart. Verses are listed on the right and step numbers are listed on the left.
Far be it from me to comment intelligently on Leviticus chapter 14. This one chapter could be the entirety of a doctoral degree in theology. Instead, just appreciate the visual quality of the chart. The phases and steps laid out, along with the specific actions, each with their own cultural and spiritual meaning. Each step with its own healing and restoring qualities. This is a PROCESS, just like you would see in any 12 step or rehab program. It has defined criteria and steps, like those seen in a modern hospital when deciding whether a patient is healthy enough to go home or not.
When it comes to our different readings of Jesus’ healing of a man with leprosy, both sides of the coin are true. He does heal instantly and he also directs attention to the process element of repentance and healing. Lest those of us non-lepers zone out from this and begin to day dream about our bag of pizza rolls we’re going to eat later this afternoon, know that Numbers chapter 5:1-4 has been applied in a modern sense towards God’s attitude about sin. Sin, both individual and collective, infects our lives, families, communities and world in a manner just as destructive as any novel virus. Jesus forgives and at the same time directs us towards a process of repentance that can result in real, tangible wholeness.
If you place yourself in the shoes of the man with leprosy, suppose he had only been healed, but did not follow Jesus’ set of instructions? He went to go see the great physician, but didn’t go to the follow up visit or get the doctors prescription filled. Taking the miracle, but ignoring the wisdom. His repentance and his healing would have been incomplete.
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Part of the reason for the continued popularity[2] of the Bible (still holding its own against Fifty Shades of Grey), and especially the five Books of Moses (i.e. the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers), is that it is a narrative that we can all identify with on some level. The story of Israel’s slavery, release, testing and wandering in the wilderness, and entry into the “Promised Land” is the very story of the struggle it is to be human.
The title for the book of Numbers in the Hebrew bible is “In the Wilderness”.[3] It’s a good title, much more appealing than ‘Numbers’. The Hebrew bible title seems to indicate that there is something more instructive about this book and it is not in fact just ancient Israel’s giant excel spreadsheet – filled with census data and impossible to pronounce Hebrew names.
When I used to think of the Jews wandering for 40 years in the desert I pictured a small group of tired, thirsty, dusty people just walking. They were constantly walking and complaining, like cranky kids in the back of a station wagon asking Moses, “Are we there yet!?” With all that walking and all that dust, it always confused me why they’d be so unwilling to enter the Promised Land, a place flowing with milk and honey.
In fact, in the timeline of their 40-year desert journey, the majority of their time was not spent walking, but in a desert oasis called Kadesh Barnea. The introduction to the book of Numbers from the New Oxford Annotated Bible says that:
“According to priestly chronology, one year elapsed from the Exodus to the erection of the tabernacle (Ex. 40.2); the legislation of Leviticus covered one month (Num 1.1); and nineteen days after the census, Israel left Sinai (Num 10:11). Moses’ farewell address was given at the end of the fortieth year (Dt. 1.3). With time allowed for the march from Kadesh to the plains of Moab, this means that Israel spent well over thirty-five years at Kadesh.”[3]
So rather than walking a dusty marathon, literally dying for it to be over, the Israelites were camped in the trees of Kadesh Barnea – not an ideal situation, stuffy but bearable. This is like the spiritual desert oasis in which many of us find ourselves. Afraid and unwilling to move forward, we are free, but not thriving, we are healed but not whole. We are “In the Wilderness”, a place that is familiar but not ideal, safe but not sustainable. Kadesh Barnea, the small dream, versus the Promised Land, the big dream. God put a dream deep inside all of us. For the man with leprosy it was to be whole. It was to join the community again. He was willing to risk it all to get there. He pushed through crowds and good manners to get there. He ignored cultural norms, he broke the rules of the game. He was also willing to go through a systematic process of healing and repentance.
What about you – how much would you give up for your dream?
The purification process as outlined in Leviticus is just a microcosm for the massive spiritual culture change that God was putting Israel through in the desert. For many, the appeal of the oasis was enough to keep them from entering the promised land. After all, oasis beats slavery.
The same challenge applies to us. How badly do we want to give up the comforts of Kadesh Barnea and enter the uncertainty, the struggle, and the inheritance of God’s promised land?
REFERENCES:
1. Blount, Brian (editor) et. al True to our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary. (2007) Fortress Press.
2. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-book-of-non-fiction
3. New Oxford Expositor’s Study Bible. Introduction to Numbers.