Leviticus 6:24-30: in context

This is the law of the sin offering, the sacrifice brought to deal with a person's wrongdoing, and it reads like pure ritual technicality: who eats it, where, and what to do with the pot it was cooked in. But one line in the middle turns the usual logic of the book around, and it is worth catching.

Twice the passage calls this offering most holy. The sacrifice that carries sin is itself the holiest thing on the altar. The priest eats it in a holy place, in the court of the tent. Then comes the line: whatever touches its flesh shall become holy. Through most of Leviticus, contact runs the other way. Touch a corpse, a disease, or anything unclean, and the uncleanness spreads to you. Here the direction reverses. This holy thing is catching in the opposite way, and what touches it is made holy rather than defiled. The rules that follow are about that transfer by contact: blood splashed on a garment must be washed in a holy place, and the clay pot that soaked up the offering must be broken because it cannot be scoured clean, while the nonporous bronze can be rinsed and reused.

Underneath the technicality is a real question about which way contact runs. We tend to assume that contamination spreads easily and holiness does not, that one bad thing taints everything it touches while good is fragile and contained. This passage assumes the opposite is at least as true, that holiness also spreads by touch. Do I expect defilement to be more catching than holiness, when God treats his holiness as the stronger of the two?