It seems like all we do around here anymore is just disclaimers where I come on at the beginning and I tell you this one's gonna be really offensive again. And if you have kids, you know, look out because of the offensive stuff. So you've been warned that this time around it's gonna be offensive, and the kind of offensive that it's gonna be this time is the menstruation kind. Now, let me tell you, when it comes to things that I am not an expert in, I would put female bleeding disorders like right at the top, maybe like number three. I just don't know how this works. I don't really understand it. I had health class in eighth grade, that's the last time I really did any meaningful research on this subject matter. But what I do know from the Bible is that the bleeding thing had some connotations, and those connotations included a time of uncleanness. And one of the things that you'll hear a lot when you hang around on the internet is people are like, that's completely unfair. How can somebody be declared ritually or ceremonially unclean? How can somebody have ritual distance between them and the community because of something that is built into their body and something that's built into their body for like a really good thing? And I want to say that is an absolutely reasonable and fair questionslash pushback, but I would also say that it's supposed to strike you that way. It's supposed to feel like a raw deal. So why are we talking about menstruation and female bleeding disorders? This is unbelievably weird. This is supposed to be a family program. Here's why it's happening. We're in Matthew chapter 9. We're in these chunks, these clumps of demonstrations of authority that are coming on the back side of the Sermon on the Mount. And Jesus is one by one lining up things that nobody really has authority over because it's just bigger than any human, it's bigger than the whole story. And then he comes along and he does something amazing and miraculous, or he says something amazing to go with the miraculous, and then you come away and you're like, whoa, okay, well, Jesus does have authority over that. Maybe he could rewrite all of existence. So in Matthew chapter 9, we just got done with the weird party at Matthew's house, the same guy who wrote the book, with all of the repugnant cultural others and all of the religious elites, and then the weird people from the desert who probably dressed like John the Baptist and smelled bad, and they came and asked questions about fasting. And we flip right around, and as this party is wrapping up, maybe Jesus is milling around in the courtyard or outside or by the beach because this would have been a fancy house in Capernaum. Then all of a sudden, this guy comes rushing in, is the leader of the synagogue. His name is Jairus. We talked about him at length yesterday, and he's like, hey, right up to Jesus, and he goes, Hey, my daughter has just died, but come and put your hand on her and she will live. Jesus doesn't say anything, he gets up and he goes with the guy, and the disciples follow along. So, having been to Capernaum, I know the next verse couldn't have happened very much after the previous verse, and it couldn't have happened very far from it because Capernaum's just little. This was not a gigantic community on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. And so getting around there would have been a quick walk, which means that the lady that we are about to meet in verse 20 of Matthew chapter 9 was looming. She was hanging around on the fringes of this thing, kind of like the leper from the beginning of chapter 8 coming off the mountain in the Sermon on the Mount was looming on the fringes of this thing. It says, just then, so as we're walking out of this party with Gyrus to go and apparently heal his daughter, just then a woman who'd been subject to bleeding for 12 years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, If I can only touch his cloak, I'll be healed. Of the many things that are interesting about this particular anecdote, one is that apparently this bleeding disorder, in either reality or her perception, was so bad and so anathema and so gross and culturally off-putting and culturally distancing from everybody else that she couldn't even go to the party where the repugnant cultural others were. She's waiting outside that party. So she's like the repugnant cultural other to the repugnant cultural others. She's completely socially homeless. And why? Because she has some kind of weird genital bleeding thing? I mean, come on, that seems ridiculous, but in fairness, it is in the Bible. And if we turn over here to Leviticus 15, which I marked for convenience and I didn't write down the verse. Okay, I'm scanning, I'm scanning. I know it's in here somewhere. I mean, the name of the chapter is Discharges Causing Uncleanness. It is verse 25. Here we go. It says, When a woman has a discharge of blood, sorry, you were warned on the front end of this, for many days at a time other than her monthly period, or has a discharge that continues beyond her period, she will be unclean as long as she has the discharge, just as in her days of her period. Any bed she lies on while her discharge continues will be unclean, as is her bed during her monthly period. Anything she sits on will be unclean as during her period, whoever touches them will be unclean. He must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean until evening. And then after she gets cleansed from discharge, she has to count off seven days, and after that, she will be ceremonially clean. But, verse 29, on the eighth day, she must take two doves or two young pigeons and bring them to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meetings. Then the priests sacrifice a sin offering, and then other things happen, and then finally, she can go to what we would say is the equivalent of church again. She can participate in society again. She can, according to this religious structure, have the distance between her and God, because in the Old Testament, God lives in the temple, in the tabernacle, and so if you can't be there and you can't participate in worship, you you're not hanging out with God right now. So this really is a gigantic deal. And don't worry, I still have a pen in the thing about whether or not this is fair. I have not forgotten about that. But did you see also how this is contagious? And we've talked about this a while back when we went through and we looked at all the different expressions of the law, civil law and ceremonial law and the moral law and stuff like that. And you might remember from when we were talking about that stuff that if you get around unclean, that unclean gets on you. Remember the kid that I wrestled with and he smelled real bad and his pig smell got all over me, and then that pig smell affected my social standing? It's like that. And so people don't want to be around her not just because she's unclean, so she can't do any of the social church stuff that they can do, but also if she's been bleeding and they touch her, they can't go to church, they can't go to the picnic. And for those of you who are here who don't do the church thing at all, which by the way, you're awesome. Thank you for hanging out with me, even though this isn't actually your thing that you do every day. You gotta understand, the church might seem like kind of an ancillary thing. It's something that some people do in society, but it was society for people in the Old Testament, for people in Jesus' world. And so for her to be boxed out of that is to be boxed out of life, of everything. It's built in loneliness and humiliation. Like you think male pattern baldness is bad? This is next level stuff that she's dealing with here. I don't even know why I went with that particular example. No reason whatsoever. And on top of that, this has been going on for 12 years, bro! 12 years this lady has had this thing going on. I mean, Mark V tells us that she burned through all kinds of money trying to get this thing straightened out with doctors and official people who might have been able to do something and nobody could help her. How is that fair? How is that right? If God is just and righteous and we've got all these values of the kingdom, why would he make a rule where if your body just does the thing your body naturally does, you're unclean for a few days every month? Or worse yet, if your body does that hyperactively for an extended period of time through no fault of your own and you can't get it straightened out. And the reality is that what we see in Leviticus, what we see as we get further through the Old Testament into Isaiah and a passage we're gonna look at in just a minute, and what we see as we get to the New Testament especially is that this clean, unclean thing is a metaphor for sin, for the fallenness of humanity. And I know that when we talk about that, the first thing that comes to mind is naughtiness. We tend to think of scandal, we tend to think of naughty, we tend to think of speaking of nobody's looking, and then something bad happens and you feel guilty and you're ashamed. But the fallenness of humanity that we see described in the Bible is so much more than that. It's this perpetual, unfixable state of entropy, of brokenness. And some of that brokenness is stuff that we do because we just felt like it and we like us and we sized things up and decided to do something that maybe we knew was wrong. Some of that brokenness is a result of sizing things up and trying to get it right. But it turns out that after the fact, oops, that was actually not the right thing to do. Some of it is other people maliciously doing awful things to us. Some of our brokenness is other people trying to help us, but screwing it up, being ham-fisted and dumb, and they actually did damage. Some of our brokenness has no face to attach to it. It's just how things are. Tragedy and failure and heartache are baked into the DNA of this also beautiful, glorious existence that is life, that is humanity. It's this weird mixed bag. Now, the clean and unclean language is something throughout the Bible that is a distinction between the fallenness of imperfect humanity, even the really impressive people still fallen, and the not fallenness of God, who's just 100% perfect. Now, on the fallenness side, you have a wide range of the degree of broken that different people are. I mean, you got like really screwed up people who just wantonly do awful, horrible things. Those do exist. It's a bummer, but they're out there. Then you got the people who are like, ah, they're kind of trying, but they're sort of rascally and sometimes they get in trouble. And then you got the people who act like they're really well behaved and everything, but deep down they have real problems. Yes, my hand is raised. And then you got the people who are just really, really good people, but they all have one thing in common. If the only two settings are a one or a zero, one being perfect, zero being not perfect, all the people are a zero in that regard. God, on the other hand, is the unique, singular, perfect being. His cleanness is what he imparts to people in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, but our very existence is held out as a reminder of our need for that cleanness of God. So when you get to Isaiah 64, there is this like all-time great Bible euphemism in verse 6. It says, All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags. We all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind, our sins sweep us away. That filthy rags part is the catchy part. Because in terms of the original language there, we've euphemized this enormously in all of the modern translations. Because I guess like parents don't want their kids flipping through the Bible and being like disgusting used soiled feminine hygiene products. Like that apparently it would just be a huge turnoff in church, and so they will go with this much more sanitary version, no pun intended, though it was awesome now that I think about it. The point being, all of human attempts at righteousness fall enormously short. All of our attempts at not brokenness are impossible. There's still only two settings, perfect and imperfect, clean and unclean. And even if you really, really, really clean up something that has one dash of unclean, it still of those two categories falls into unclean. And so is it unfair that this stuff is ritually unclean, this bleeding stuff? I mean, yeah. I I guess as much as anything is unfair in the grand scheme of the universe. But it's there for a reason, and that reason is to demonstrate that unlike modern Christianity, which mostly only associates our fallness with our naughtiness, the Bible has a much different read. God has a much different read, and he goes way out of his way to craft laws and to say things that make it clear that our fallenness and our uncleanness is not something we can help. It's just on us. Even in those things that are natural and inevitable, they separate us from God and remind us of our imperfection. And that is the state of being this woman is in in Matthew chapter 9. And the original audience would have got to this passage and been like, oh, we're doing the function of the female body that shall not be named. But I know exactly what that means, and I know exactly what images that conjures, and I know exactly what the implications are in terms of what this means for her and church, and her being a social outcast, anathema, and oh my goodness, she's in a crowd full of people. What if somebody touched her and they became unclean and they didn't know it? And they went to synagogue, your church, you gave sacrifices. Oh, gross. Oh my goodness, she's gonna touch somebody. And tomorrow we're gonna find out what happened when she does. A Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.