Cooties, Cleansing, and the Kindness of Christ

I am a proud recipient of the ‘Cootie Shot’. In fact, throughout my elementary
school days, I received that shot on hundreds of different occasions from the
playground doctors (all of which were little girls who were equally as terrified of
boys as I was). For those of you who do not know what this is, it is a ceremony
performed on playgrounds across the world that says “Circle, circle, dot, dot, now
you have your Cootie shot!” Only someone who has received this shot can give it
to others. This ‘vaccine’ is supposed to keep you safe from contracting the ever-dreaded ‘Cooties’ – the germs that are given to you from the opposite gender
interacting with you in some way. This shot keeps you ceremonially clean for all of
your days on all the playgrounds in all parts of the world.

In Mark 5:25-34 we meet a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.
She had spent all of her money trying to find a solution, ‘suffered much under many
physicians’, and had been outcast by society because of this chronic illness. Leviticus
15:19-33 gives us insight into why this woman was treated the way she was.
According to Jewish law, the woman as well as everyone and everything she touched
was deemed unclean. Days had to pass, rituals had to be done, and sacrifices had to be
made to bring her, as well as anyone who came into contact with her, into
cleanness. She was desperate-- to be healed and to be brought back into society
again. Enter in Jesus.

With a great crowd around him, Jesus comes to her town. The passage says
that she had heard of him – it is safe to assume, based on the passage that she was
hopeful that what she had heard of Jesus was true. “If I touch even his garments, I
will be made well,” she thought as she grasped the hem of His coat. If we refer back
to Leviticus, according to the thinking of that time, by touching the hem of Jesus’
garment the woman would have made Jesus unclean. Praise God that His nature and
power operate far above us because that is not how it worked in this miraculous
scenario. The blood dried up. The woman was healed…immediately. Jesus made her
clean and made her whole. He even went so far as to call out for who
touched him as he felt the power leave his body. Jesus announced to everyone,
including the woman that she was healed because of her faith. How kind of him.

So often, in my own life, I tend to harbor and hold onto my sin, shamefully
thinking that The Lord cannot handle it or that it will damage Him in some way.
However, the truth in this passage is that when His kindness leads me to
repentance, it doesn’t make Him a sinner, it makes me clean. When humans sin, it
can infect all relationships around them-causing people to stumble into sin,
damaging emotions, and the consequences can be endless. However, with The Lord,
the relationship is different. We don’t pass sin back and forth infecting each other
with it, He provides healing from it. We have a way out from the destruction of sin in
our lives. As believers, we can be whole. As we grow in sanctification, I pray that
our propensity toward hiding from the Lord with sin decreases and we grow into
habitually stretching out and grasping for the hem of his garment, knowing that he
fully heals, saves, and forgives. If you ask me, that is a far better promise than the
hypothetical promise of being clean from the cooties.

These articles supplement our church wide reading plan. To read the bible with us click here.