Turning the Tables on a Blood Taboo
So Jesus healed this unclean woman, and by her touch he became ritually unclean himself. He was on his way to the house of Jairus, whose daughter was mortally ill. But Jesus did not stop to follow the law, to purify himself. Ritually unclean, so that anybody who touched him was also unclean, he went to Jairus’s house, and raised the little girl from the dead. Thereby he broke another taboo, going against the proscription against touching a dead body. He touched her, and she was alive, and he suggested that she be given food. Shocking behavior. Everybody he touched, after being touched by the woman with the issue of blood, was unclean. But he brought a dead child back to life, making himself doubly unclean, and the child, also. Ritually unclean, but alive! Jesus acted on the law of love, not legalism. As far as we know, he never did anything about getting himself ritually cleansed. Because love, not law, is the great cleanser. In obeying this higher law he shocked everybody, including his closest friends, in his extraordinary and unacceptable ways of acting out love. Of being Love.
Madeleine L’Engle, from A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob