What do you want?!
Sometimes I read the Bible and questions arise. Well, let me rephrase, OFTEN I read the Bible and questions arise. This happened recently.
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.”
Seems simple enough. Jesus heals a man of leprosy and tells him to go show himself to the priest. Why do that? Because the Levitical law required that the priest approve his cleanness before he entered the temple again.
Again, simple enough. But I read a different story, and it came out differently. Mark 5:25-34 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask ‘Who touched me?’” But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
The heart of my question was this: Why didn’t Jesus tell her to go to the temple and show herself to the priest and offer a sacrifice for her suffering? This was required by law that any woman who had a continued issue of blood had to make a sacrifice to YHWH in order to be cleansed after she had stopped bleeding. Leviticus 15:25-30
Why did Jesus not make her do that? Does not make sense….at least on the surface..in English.
The difference is in what they asked. The leper asked Jesus to make him clean….when he asked that he was using the word katharizo in Greek, which means to be made clean, but in a ceremonial, and ritual way. This was tied to temple access and restoration to the community.
The woman with the issue of blood did not give a rat’s turd for community cleanness, she had been rejected for years. She wanted something else….she wanted sozo which means to be made whole. It means complete fullness, salvation, in spirit, soul, and body. The woman with the issue of blood wasn’t concerned with getting to the temple, she wanted the God of the temple.
Yet, Jesus answered both prayers. Many times we ask God to move in our lives whether it be for prosperity, healing, or anything else in an attempt to be benefitted in some way on the earth. But when we are desperate….when we have been completely let down…all we want is him. God will answer both prayers often, but the end of the desperate one is Him.
What do you want? Do you want to be a better person, or to be closer to the King? It’s in what you ask.
