This Week

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew 
sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, "Follow me." 
And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner 
in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and 
were sitting with him and his disciples.  When the 
Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does 
your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"  
But when he heard this, he said, "Those who are well 
have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go 
and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' 
For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." 
Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, "Why do 
we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do 
not fast?"  And Jesus said to them, "The wedding guests 
cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can 
they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away 
from them, and then they will fast. No one sews a piece 
of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls 
away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made.  Neither is 
new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins 
burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; 
but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both 
are preserved." 
While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader 
of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, 
"My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on 
her, and she will live."  And Jesus got up and followed him, 
with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been 
suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind 
him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to 
herself, "If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well." 
Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, "Take heart, daughter; 
your faith has made you well." And instantly the woman was 
made well. When Jesus came to the leader's house and saw 
the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he 
said, "Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping." And 
they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, 
he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. 
And the report of this spread throughout that district. 
----Matthew 9:9-26

In a society whose leadership is intensely concerned with 
the danger of being absorbed by a more powerful culture, an 
emphasis on social-boundary protection may well be symbolized 
by an emphasis on bodily-boundary protection. In ancient 
times, for example, tiny Israel, constantly overpowered by 
imperial absorption on the political and military level and 
constantly withstanding imperial absorption on the cultural 
and religious level, had, in the Jewish Scriptures, a massive 
priestly legislation concerning bodily function. That meant 
an especial concern with origices, with what should and 
should not enter or exit from the body’s standard openings. 
And that establishes, as it was meant to do, an intense 
concentration on boundary establishment. Those sufferers are 
in mourning for their lost lives, because in an honor-and-shame 
society, where, as we have seen earlier, one’s existence is 
in the eyes of others, they are now quite dead. In such societies, 
with strict distinctions of clean and unclean -not, of course, 
as clinical or medical but as social or symbolic categories: 
the heartbreak of psoriasis was not funny. It was tragic. If, 
by the way, such practices strike you as archaic and pathetic, 
you might ask yourself whether you or your group has ever been 
militarily defeated, socially marginalized, or culturally 
absorbed. Probably for the better, our social boundaries are 
very open, and so, possibly, for worse, are our bodily boundaries. 
----John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

For Matthew and his audience, the social world was organized 
by an elaborate system of taboos and purity codes. Foods, places, 
types of people, and bodily fluids (to name a few categories) 
were ranked by degrees of purity or potential contaminants. Jesus'
 choice of company in Matthew 9 stands in deliberate violation 
of these codes. In the order of "pollution derived from contact 
with things" found in Jewish midrash, impurity contracted from 
a dead thing is exceeded by that from a menstruant. Jesus is 
already contaminated when he takes the hand of the dead girl 
because, on his way to her, he was touched by the perpetually 
menstruating woman. Jesus not only eats with tax collectors, 
but also stresses that it is sinners, not the righteous, that 
he has "come to call." Jesus is not simply interested in healing 
this cast of characters but has chosen these contaminating agents 
as his partners in saving work. 
----Sojourners Magazine, May/June 2002

When we are working, they ask us not to come near them. At tea 
canteens, they have separate tea tumblers and they make us clean 
them ourselves and make us put the dishes away ourselves. We cannot 
enter temples. We cannot use upper-caste water taps. We have to go 
one kilometer away to get water... When we ask for our rights from 
the government, the municipality officials threaten to fire us. So 
we don’t say anything. This is what happens to people who demand 
their rights. (A Dalit manual scavenger, Ahmedabad district, Gujarat)  
-
More than one-sixth of India's population, some 160 million 
people, live a precarious existence, shunned by much of society 
because of their rank as "untouchables" or Dalits, literally 
meaning "broken people" at the bottom of India's caste system. Dalits 
are discriminated against, denied access to land, forced to work 
in degrading conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the 
police and of higher-caste groups that enjoy the state's protection. 
In what has been called India’s  'hidden apartheid," entire villages 
in many Indian states remain completely segregated by caste. 
National legislation and constitutional protections serve only to 
mask the social realities of discrimination and violence faced by 
those living below the "pollution line." 
----www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india




Questions:
 Why was Jesus so often with and touching and 
	healing people who were untouchable?
 How important was this work in his ministry?
 Does Crossan’s idea about untouchability apply to our 
	culture, to India’s?
 Who are the untouchables in our society?
 If we are to follow Jesus in our time and culture, 
	what might we do?