Numbers 19:14-22: a reflection

14“This is the law when a man dies in a tent: everyone who comes into the tent, and everyone who is in the tent, shall be unclean seven days. 15Every open vessel, which has no covering bound on it, is unclean. 16“Whoever in the open field touches one who is slain with a sword, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days. 17“For the unclean, they shall take of the ashes of the burning of the sin offering; and running water shall be poured on them in a vessel. 18A clean person shall take hyssop, dip it in the water, and sprinkle it on the tent, on all the vessels, on the persons who were there, and on him who touched the bone, or the slain, or the dead, or the grave. 19The clean person shall sprinkle on the unclean on the third day, and on the seventh day. On the seventh day, he shall purify him. He shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and shall be clean at evening. 20But the man who shall be unclean, and shall not purify himself, that soul shall be cut off from among the assembly, because he has defiled the sanctuary of the LORD. The water for impurity has not been sprinkled on him. He is unclean. 21It shall be a perpetual statute to them. He who sprinkles the water for impurity shall wash his clothes, and he who touches the water for impurity shall be unclean until evening. 22“Whatever the unclean person touches shall be unclean; and the soul that touches it shall be unclean until evening.”

This law deals with the unavoidable: contact with death. Anyone who touches a dead body, or is even in the tent where someone has died, becomes ceremonially unclean for seven days. Death, in the logic of the law, spreads a kind of contamination, and it reaches everyone eventually, because death is not avoidable. But notice that God does not leave the defiled without remedy. He provides a cleansing, the water mixed with the ashes of the sacrifice, sprinkled with hyssop, to make the unclean clean again.

There is something honest in this about death's reach. It touches all of us, in the loss of those we love, in the nearness of our own mortality, and it leaves a mark, a kind of shadow that clings. The law takes that seriously rather than pretending death is nothing. And it takes just as seriously that God has made a way to be cleansed of it, to be restored, not left permanently under death's shadow.

This points ahead to something greater. Where the ashes and water gave a temporary, outward cleansing, Christ entered death itself and came out the other side, to cleanse us from death's deeper defilement for good. If the nearness of death has left its shadow on you, grief, fear, the sense of contamination that loss can bring, know that God has always made provision for cleansing, and that in Christ the provision is complete. Death touches you, but it does not get the last word. There is cleansing.

Lord, death touches all of us and leaves its shadow, but you have always made a way to be made clean. Thank you that in Christ you entered death and overcame it. Cleanse me from death's defilement, its grief and fear, and remind me that it does not get the last word.