Jesus, Gentle and Lowly

Excerpts from the Book, “Gentle and Lowly, The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers”. by Dane Ortlund.

“The cumulative testimony of the four Gospels is that when Jesus Christ sees the fallenness of the world all about him, his deepest impulse, his most natural instinct , is to  move toward that sin and suffering, not away from it.

One way to see this is against the backdrop of the Old Testament category of clean and unclean. In biblical terms these categories generally refer not to physical hygiene but to moral purity. The two cannot be completely disentangled, but moral or ethical cleanness is the primary meaning. This is evident in that the solution for uncleanness was not taking a bath but offering a sacrifice (Lev. 5:6). The problem was not dirt but guilt. The Old Testament Jews, therefore, operated under a sophisticated system of degrees of uncleanness and various offerings and rituals to become morally clean nce more. One particularly striking part of this system is that when an unclean person comes into contact with a clean person, that clean person than becomes unclean. Moral dirtiness is contagious.”

“Consider Jesus. In Levitical categories, he is the cleanest person to ever walk the face of the earth. He was the Clean One. Whatever horrors cause us to cringe—we who are naturally unclean and fallen—would cause Jesus to cringe all the more. We cannot fathom the sheer purity, holiness, cleanness, of his mind and heart. The simplicity, the innocence, the loveliness.”

“And what did he do when he saw the unclean? What was his first impulse when he came across prostitutes and lepers? He moved toward them. Pity flooded his heart, the longing of true compassion. He spent time with them. He touched them. …. When Jesus, the Clean One, touched an unclean sinner, Christ did not become unclean The sinner became clean!”

“Jesus walked the earth rehumanizing the dehumanized and cleansing the unclean. So wherever he went, whenever he was confronted with pain and longing, he spread the good contagion of his cleansing mercy.””

quotes from pages 50-52