Christ untaintable

Christ untaintable

One of the things I love most about Christ is that he is untaintable.

There is, in the very best of our human nature, a desire for purity. We recognise that we are compromised by our living in the world. It is too difficult to keep our hands clean – even when we desire it. Too often – so very often – we fall from our ideals and find ourselves wallowing in the mud, scrabbling for crumbs, fighting for a slightly better seat in the gutter. If we do not fall, we are often pushed, and, kicked and beaten, we crouch in fear and find that, against our will, our hands are dirty again. And in our darkest moments we revel in the filth.

Yet all the time – all the time, except perhaps for those very few who are completely lost in corruption – a flame still burns. Against all the odds, it still flickers. In blessed moments, a shaft of light pierces our gloom, and, gazing up, we remember. We recall the innocence of our youth and the clear, simple goodness of our ideals. We lift from the earth a half-forgotten object, and, stripping away the layers of dirt, rediscover our dearest treasure, still somehow intact and untarnished, like gold, and holding it gently, it becomes a chalice for our tears.

And so, we find ourselves kneeling, and in the most sacred moments, we take the hand of the person kneeling next to us, and we remember that once we loved, and once we hoped together.

But, there is, in the very worst of human nature, a desire to blame others. To demonise them in futile attempt to cast out our own demons. To pour on them all the dirt and filth that we can conceive of, and then, in comparison, we find ourselves clean. All the anger and hurt that we feel at our own struggle to stay clean, we turn against them, and then imagine ourselves righteous – when really we have simply become self-righteous.

Then, most sinister of all, having made others dirty, we consider that all that they touch becomes dirty. Like a stain that can never be erased, like a contagious disease, they are unclean, and everything that comes into contact with them becomes unclean. Such fear prevents anyone from reaching out, rules out compassion, for it is the unclean who threaten me with infection.

But Jesus touched the leper and made him whole.

Instead of Jesus being tainted by touching him, the leper became clean by touching Jesus. The chain of contagion stopped and was turned back. No, more than that, the disease was transformed into health.

This is what Jesus stands for: absolute untaintability. All who want to condemn him, exclude him, eradicate him are confounded. He is not made unclean; instead, all who are condemned, excluded, on the brink of being eradicated, are made pure. His untaintability is complete and infinite; there is no false accusation that cannot be dismissed by his word, no distorted judgement from which we cannot be acquitted by his authority. And suddenly turning his gaze on us, there is not the shadow of a doubt that some sin could be too great for him to cure.

And that is why I kneel at his feet: Jesus untaintable! No longer kneeling only in penitence and grief, but in joyful liberation. Till he takes me by the hand, lifts me up and says, “Walk with me”.