My eighth-grade wrestling partner was the worst-smelling human I've ever encountered in my entire life. I've never experienced anything like it in all my travels, anywhere with people of any age in any circumstances, that was the worst. And his reputation around the middle school was that he had bad butt hygiene because he he smelled a lot like poop, to put it lightly. But I knew the truth because I'd talked to him a couple times. His family worked on a pig farm, and I just honestly think he didn't know. He was just around the pig farm and with the pigs and in the pig poop all the time. And I think he thought he maybe cleaned up, but you know, eighth grade, we're not exactly good at hygiene anyway, as dudes. And then add to that, you know, a working pig farm. And the kid would just come to school reeking every day. And and it smelled like butt as a result. Well, I'm in wrestling and he's in wrestling, and to my horror, I get assigned him as my all-year wrestling partner that year. And so unsurprisingly, that was a horrifyingly unpleasant experience, grappling with him, getting all sweaty and rolling around, and it was just nasty. And there were times when I would have to battle back the impulse to gag. And I had been trained by my parents to be a very nice young man, so I really didn't want him to feel bad. I never said anything about it, other than to thousands of you on a podcast. So, as you would expect, this kid suffered socially horribly. Nobody sat by him at lunch. I mean, you couldn't, you could not eat and smell that at the same time. It was just impossible. However bad you're picturing it being, it's worse than that. And in school, nobody sat by him, and people would give him a wide berth. He was a nice enough kid, but it just it was impossible. You couldn't function around it. So my eighth-grade brain was not surprised to find that it was horrible to wrestle with that. What my eighth grade brain was surprised to discover is that that stink transfers. All of that sweat, and back then I had like hair on my head and stuff, it would just get into your pores, it would get into your stuff. And it didn't matter how vigorously I washed, I could smell it all that year. It would just be on me and around me, and it started to affect me socially. Not that I was particularly good at social things in the first place, but I started getting comments about, dude, you smell bad. What is that? Like, what am I supposed to say? Oh, it's my friend who I wrestle with. I have his stench on me. But literally, by touching him, I became not only physically stinky, but I became socially stinky to other people. And likewise in the Bible, you've got this concept of clean and unclean that we talked about several episodes back that carries over from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Now, there are several layers to this law that was put in place in the Old Testament for the Jewish people, and one of those layers is clean and unclean. Now, these cleanness laws didn't really have to do with naughty and nice. It wasn't like, ah, you went and did something really bad. Now you're gross and unclean. I mean, it could be related to that in a few circumstances, but for the most part, clean and unclean was just a question of state of being. I mean, menstruation made somebody unclean. That's nobody's fault. If you're a woman, you gotta menstruate. I don't know what else you're gonna do. That's just the natural order of things. If you're some poor middle school kid and you had what the Old Testament called an unclean emission, while you're just laying there helplessly trying to sleep, and then you wake up and you're like, oh, nuts. You're unclean. You didn't do anything wrong. It wasn't sin. You didn't volitionally choose anything. I mean, if you're kind of loud, you were asleep. But there is still this clean and unclean stuff throughout the Old Testament. A lot of people want to just write that off as being completely irrelevant, but it's there for a theological purpose. And the theological purpose of uncleanness in the Old Testament is to demonstrate that humanity lives in a fallen state, and there's nothing we can do about that state on our own. That uncleanness before God, that imperfection before God is not necessarily volitional. There's that aspect as well. It's just who we are. We're broken, we have problems, and even things that you couldn't rightly call a problem is just how the human body works, is still something that produces something that we viscerally find to be unclean at times. I don't need to go through each of the examples of what that might look like, but you're smart. So, as well as the Bible holding out the idea that there is an uncleanness that is declared by God regarding our state of beings and our bodies. So there is also just a visceral human reaction to certain stuff about our bodies that is unclean. Think about your McDonald's food when you get it and you go in there out of desperation and you're like, oh, I'll just eat this, and you get it, and you're like, you know what? This is all right. But the second you're done, get this crap away from me. I can't smell it or be around it. It's just this strange human ability to experience revulsion. And as we said a while back, all the people who are on the hill for the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 through 7, trying to get a sense of who Jesus is and what this kingdom he's talking about is all about. Remember, they're bringing with them all of the stuff from what we call the Old Testament, including all these different types of laws, civil, ceremonial, moral, ethical, and then the clean and unclean stuff that we're talking about. Now you'll recall that as we got into the first chunk of the Sermon on the Mount, people would have no doubt been wondering, well, what do we do with the law and the religion we already do have then? And that's where we get Jesus' famous Matthew 5.17 remark. Don't think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. So then we hear a bunch of other cool stuff from the Sermon on the Mount, and naturally everyone is asking the question, okay, your kingdom thing, your speech was great, but what does it look like to fulfill a religion, to fulfill the law? And do you have the credibility to do this? And what are you gonna do to give us any reason to believe that this is anything more than a really great speech? So we come down from the mountainside and people don't clear out. They want to see what's gonna happen next. And that's where we pick it up in Matthew 8:1. When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. Well, obviously, it's like the kid in the driveway in the Incredibles who's just waiting to see something incredible as Mr. Incredible flings around his Yugo. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, Lord, if you're willing, you can make me clean. There is so much going on in this sentence, and because there's so much going on here, this is going to be another one of those two-parters because it's just a complex passage. So, right off the bat, the original audience is going to notice that the guy had leprosy. Okay, leprosy is clearly delineated in the book of Leviticus as a skin affliction. Leprosy didn't refer to one singular disease as we might think of it now or lately, but leprosy referred to all kinds of different skin diseases. So it's a catch-all for a bunch of stuff. Obviously, they hadn't divided out and denominated out every single skin affliction into all of the subcategories that we now understand today. They just understood that there was stuff that attacked the flesh, that caused the flesh to rot. Some of that would have been more contagious, others would have been less contagious. But there's a whole chunk of Bible, and maybe we'll get to that tomorrow, that deals with not just what the disease looked like, but how to handle it, what your uncleanness would look like, what you have to do to deal with the uncleanness, and how to get readmitted back into society. That stuff sounds crazy and foreign and weird until you have a global pandemic for the last three months. And now I think it's a lot easier for us to understand some of those clean and unclean laws that we see going on in the Old Testament without treating them as archaic inventions of primitive Stone Age people, but instead something that, given the resources they had to work with, makes a lot of sense because even given the resources we have to work with today, we've still effectively created new clean and unclean laws for ourselves in the last few months, regardless of how you feel about those clean and unclean laws. So the guy is leprosy, and one of the basic foundational rules of having leprosy is you stay out of the way. It's incumbent on you to let people know that you have leprosy. You've got to walk around and alert people, like the weird nun with the bell walking Cersei Lannister down the avenue of shame, dinging the bell and calling out shame. Attention, everyone! Shame is happening here. Be near it or distant from it as you deem appropriate. Likewise, you straight up had to call out unclean. You had to notify people that you had a problem. Now I know there are a lot of different opinions about masks right now, but how much more heated would that debate be if you had to go around yelling out your state of health or lack thereof at any given time? I guess I intuitively did this uh yesterday in Shields. I walked through and I had like a little just you know clutter in my throat. It wasn't a cough even, but I just did the and then I felt the need to yell out, not anything, just clearing my throat, seasonal allergies at worst. And yeah, people kind of laughed and humored me a little bit, but I could tell they wanted an answer. So if you get that, then you get what the expectation was legally for people to do, not just to avoid contact with others, but further to notify people to avoid contact with them, both by personal appearance and physical maneuvering, as well as by verbally letting people know that you were sick. Again, as we've experienced lately, if somebody didn't do that, it was an act of aggression. It was like, I want to give you my leprosy, which is a death sentence at minimum socially, at maximum, an actual literal death sentence. So a guy with leprosy came and knelt before Jesus as this whole crowd is coming off the mountain. What an insane moment this is! And we're going to break down all the implications of this insane moment tomorrow and maybe also the next day, because there's a lot to think about. To you and me, this sounds maybe just like a sick person going to a religious person in the middle of a big crowd and saying something that sounds nice and religious. Maybe it makes you think of like a Pentecostal healing service or something like that. But the implications here are completely different than our knee-jerk response to this and far more important. So I'm not going to rush it as we get down the stretch here. Let me just land the plane for today by saying this. I knew what unclean was when I saw it and I smelled it in eighth grade. What I had not thought about was that unclean transfers. You can get it on you if you get too close or you touch it. Not just physically unclean, but also socially unclean. And what Jesus is confronting right here is a whole crowd of people who've agreed on a set of norms who see a situation where it's like, uh, this guy is in Jesus' orbit. You can't be there. You can't stand right there. What are you doing? And so within seconds of walking off that hillside, Jesus' upside down values of the kingdom are going to be put to the test. What do you do in this situation? And we'll see how Jesus responds. Manna. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Catch you in a bit.