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Healing in the Tassels (4 of 4)

Shane Willard

Page 4 of 7
Now once you were declared tahor, which means clean, you were baptised in a mikveh in public. They would baptise you to say this person can now be touched again.

If a lady had an issue of bleeding for 12 years, that made her Tamei, which has huge implications. She would not have been purposely touched in 12 years. She would not have been purposely hugged in 12 years. When she walked in a room, people would put their hands behind their back, so as to avoid having to touch her.

Can you imagine living a life for 12 years where nobody purposely touched you? Can you imagine the rejection, the abandonment, the feeling of: I've been wronged?

Has anybody ever felt like God gave you a bad deal? Can you imagine that feeling? Can you imagine the times, on her bed at night, where she would have wondered: what did I do to deserve this? How many of you know, you don't have to ask that question very many times, to come up with some ideas?

She would have thought about all the sin she's ever committed. She'd have thought about things that she did - maybe God is mad at me. I'm sure there was some lovely Pentecostal preacher there to remind her that God might have been mad at her.

Remember when they run across this guy, and His disciples say: Jesus, who sinned, that he became like that? Jesus said: nobody, why does anybody have to sin, for somebody to be like that? See, it's just in us to automatically think: if something's going wrong, there's got to be sin somewhere.

Anybody who touched her, it was treated like the plague. Now if you touch her, you're tamei - now you've got to go and be cleansed. You've got to be re-baptised. This would have been a major, major problem.

So she elbows her way through the crowd - can you imagine that? Everybody she's touching now is becoming unclean. She elbows her way through the crowd, and the Bible says that she grabs the corner of Jesus' garment - which is a bit weird.

This is where the story turns weird. Jesus says: who touched Me? Power has left from Me - which let's be honest, doesn't that have like a Star Wars flavour to it? Like, doesn't Jesus go a bit Ohi-Wan Kenobi on us there? WHO TOUCHED ME? Power has left from Me - which leaves us with a couple of questions.

Did Jesus know who touched Him? Of course, He was Jesus. So then why would a First Century Jewish rabbi make a public spectacle out of a lady with an issue of blood touching His clothes? Why would He do that? He wouldn't do that. Like this is so important.

Hebrew people always think function; Greek people always think form. It's all about function. It's not about the tassels; it's about what it represents. It's about the faith that it draws. It's about the remembrance that it brings.

There's nothing magical about it. It's just a faith, a response, a function. There's a Son of God coming, with healing in His wings, and this lady pushes through, so everybody's tamei.

Laying on of hands has nothing to do with this. Would a rabbi have touched a sick person? No chance, because they would be unclean – tamei; but did rabbis lay hands on people? Yes. It just has nothing to do with touching people.

To lay hands on somebody came from the concept of Yom Kippur, when they killed the goat. They would have the scapegoat; and they would also have the other lamb, that was slain for the sins of the nation. They would bring the lamb in, and lay the lamb on the altar. The priest would lay hands on the lamb, which was called malah. He would take the sins of Israel, and place it on the lamb. Rabbinical tradition says that the pressure of the sins of Israel going onto the lamb would cause the priest to have to turn his head.