To purify them, do this: Sprinkle the water of cleansing on them; then have them shave their whole bodies and wash their clothes. And so they will purify themselves. – Leviticus 8:7

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 24, 2018): Numbers 8

Leo Tolstoy wrote that “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Maybe the more pertinent problem is that we have no better idea about how to change ourselves than we possess an understanding of how to change the world. There are many times in life when I wish there were a reset button that could be pressed. Often I feel like the disciples of Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” begging to be able to start again, please. But life doesn’t seem to work that way.

The reality of my life is that I make mistakes. I wish I didn’t, but the truth is that things don’t always go my way. And these moments of wrong take on a cumulative nature; they seem to build up over time. Over the past decade of writing this blog, I can’t count the number of times that I have had moments of “do I really have to relive that time in my life?” Some of those moments are worse than others but amazingly, decades later, they still can cause me pain. Could we start again, please?

Here, God provides a reset button for those called to be workers in the temple. And the button was to go back to the beginning. In Jesus conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3, Jesus insists to this teacher of Israel that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3). Nicodemus’s reply seems to catch Jesus off guard. “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born” (John 3:4)! Jesus surprise may have been that, while this was not what Jesus was trying to get at, the law does contain a way to be “reborn."

The one who wishes to hit the reset button ceremonially is to wash his clothes and shave all of the hair off of the body. The idea is to return to the body to its original state as a hairless baby with clothes that are clean and welcoming to the newborn infant. Then, even as adults, they could emerge from the womb and start life all over again.

As Christians, we believe that in our baptisms we are new creations, that the old has been left behind, that we have been forgiven, and that we get to greet the future as if we had hit the reset button. We get a chance to start again and to move into the rest of our lives possessing the innocence with which we started this life. Satan will still try to remind us of the old stuff, but the reality is that that has been buried deep in our past. We are new creations in Christ, even if we didn’t shave off all of our hair.    

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Numbers 9