Our Advent Word today (Dec 18) is Cleansed. It is taken from the Gospel for the 3rd Sunday of Advent, Matthew chapter 11 which includes this: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

Lepers were cleansed by Jesus, to such an extent that when they presented themselves to the Priest to prove they were cured of whatever skin condition they had, they would have been without blemish or sores (side note – I am DELIGHTED priests don’t have that job any more!). The Bible also says WE have been cleansed of our sins by Jesus. 1 John 1:7-9: States, “if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

As a young person this imagery always greatly bothered me. How does blood clean anything from us? I would flash to the movie Carrie, a Stephen King horror story, after the mean kids dumped a bucket of pig’s blood all over her. She was NOT feeling cleansed. If you don’t know what happens next, you must not be a King fan!

There is an old gospel song that also creeped me out in my youth, “what can wash away our sins – nothing but the blood of Jesus”. I would picture blood coming out of the shower head as my sins went straight down the drain!

Of course the blood which “washes away our sins” is the sacrificial blood of Jesus on the cross, one of the theological ways of looking at the atonement. I would rather imagine my sins being transformed by Jesus’ love and healing spirit, imagine THAT feeling as the lepers in one of the healing stories of Jesus in the gospels, ran to show themselves to the priest to be readmitted to the community at last. Healed. Made whole. Back in good graces. That’s the kind of cleansing I prefer!