Cooties and the Contagious Christ

This sermon was preached for the Second Sunday after Pentecost on Sunday, June 7, 2026.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Fear of Cooties

I do not know if you were raised in quite the same way that I was, with the mortal fear of cooties. As a boy growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s, (and for you young people that is in the late 1900s) I was raised with a mortal fear of getting cooties, which you could contract by touching girls — or more accurately, if a girl were to come and touch you.

The girls were well aware of this, and so they would occasionally declare, “I have cooties.” The correct response in that situation was to run away screaming, and they would chase you until you were either afflicted with the dreaded cootie disease, or you received a cootie shot, which I remember the rhyme but not the gesture: “Circle, circle, dot, dot, now you have a cootie shot.”

Anybody else grow up that way? Is that a thing around Minnesota, or am I just a weirdo? (Well, maybe both?) This morning I want to talk about cooties, specifically because of the purity laws that Jesus comes into contact with in the course of his ministry here in Matthew chapter 9.

The Call of Matthew

First, Jesus is walking along the road and encounters Matthew. Yes, the same Matthew who eventually gives his name to the book that we are reading this out of, whether written directly by him or by the community that bore his name. Matthew’s job at this point in the story is that of a tax collector. I don't know if you are a fan of our Internal Revenue Service, I will tell you I am not a particular fan of them right now because I turned my taxes in on time on April 15th and I still have yet to receive my Minnesota return.

He is hated, because he collects taxes on behalf of the hated Roman occupiers. He is a tax farmer who bid in an auction to raise money for the Roman government, and if he can collect more, he gets to keep it! So guess what he is going to want to do? He is going to want to collect more taxes than he is due.

Jesus is walking along and encounters Matthew. Instead of walking on the other side of the road or avoiding him altogether, Jesus says to this hated man, to this collaborator with the occupiers of Judea, “Follow me.” Matthew, for some reason, sees this itinerant rabbi offering him an opportunity to follow him, and he drops everything and does so. Matthew invites Jesus over to his house that night and gathers other people who need to hear about this Jesus. We assume there has been quite a bit of conversation that is not recorded here, but somehow Matthew is like, "I will follow you! Come have dinner at my house! What I've heard about you and from you is so significant and so amazing that he would welcome someone as hated as me, a tax collector, I have to invite my friends and other sinners to eat with Jesus.

Jesus Eats with Sinners

Now, we don't know what sins these were, but the Pharisees are scandalized by this. They know that this man is inviting other "sinners" to his house. I know that sometimes we have a tendency to dismiss things that the Pharisees say, because the Pharisees are pharisaical, right? They're kind of hypocritical, and so they might not be telling the truth here. But we have no reason to doubt that what they are saying is true. "Why are you eating with other tax collectors and sinners?!" — apparently, whose sin is so publicly known and so immediately obvious to everybody in town that it would be a scandal to even share a table with them.

In other words, these Pharisees are scandalized that Jesus is putting himself in a position where he will catch cooties. The uncleanness of these tax collectors and sinners is going to rub off. That is at the core of the whole Jewish ritual and ceremonial law: there are things which are unclean, and if you come in contact with someone or something that is unclean, you become unclean too. Rub elbows with a tax collector at the table and you become no better than a tax collector. Rub elbows with a public notorious sinner at a table and you share in their uncleanness.

But that's not the only uncleanness that's going on in this story. Jesus says, “Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” In other places, he'll say things like, "I am a physician who has come to heal the sick, not the well."

The Uncleanness of Death

While he is saying that, the second person with cooties comes. It is a leader of the synagogue who gets down on his knees and begs Jesus, “My daughter, my little girl, has just died." — so she's dead, she's not dying, I want to make this clear: she is gone. "But, come and lay your hand on her and she will live.”

What a remarkable thing to say to Jesus! My daughter has died, she's gone, she's dead. She's not a little bit dead (like in Princess Bride), she's all the way dead.

And yet, he believes and confesses that if Jesus comes and merely lays his hand on her, she will live. There is only one problem: If Jesus touches this dead body, he becomes ritually unclean. The uncleanness of death rubs off on him. He will catch cooties. But Jesus gets up and follows him with his disciples.

The Woman with the Flow of Blood

And then, as he is going along the road, the third encounter with ritual uncleanness comes about. Here we have a woman who has been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. Most likely this is a menstrual problem which has continued unabated for twelve years. You can imagine this woman is very sick because she is probably very anemic. Other tellings of this story in the Gospels say that she has been to all the doctors that she can have access to and none of them have been able to help at all. (The other option, a minority of commentators say that it wasn't menses, it was hemorrhoids.)

Either way, the regular flow of blood makes her ritually unclean — and more than that, it makes her unmarriageable. A woman with such a continuous flow of blood is unable to perform the functions of marriage which were expected of her, she has to be sequestered and can't be in contact with any of the clean things in the household. Such an illness would have been grounds for a divorce. She has become isolated by her illness and quite alone. She says to herself, looking at Jesus, If I only touch his cloak, not even his hand, just his cloak, I will be made well. The problem is that if she touches the cloak of Jesus, she renders his clothing unclean. She has cooties.

Jesus is walking along and she reaches out and touches his cloak. He immediately turns around and knows that it has happened and says, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well. Your trust in who am I and what I can do has cured you of this disease that no other person could cure you of." And, instantly she is made well.

Something remarkable is happening here! Jesus, instead of getting uncleanness — catching cooties — from this person who was an outsider, who was not welcome among polite society, who was not allowed to be in the household — instead of uncleanness coming from her to him, instead, cleanness and purity have gone in the opposite direction. Everybody thought that uncleanness was contagious. But actually it is righteousness and health and peace!

Jesus himself, being touched by this woman, instead of him becoming unclean, she becomes clean and pure and healthy again!

Jesus’ Raises the Dead Girl

To underscore this, he arrives at the household of the leader of the synagogue. He puts everybody out of the house. Then he goes and touches the little girl’s hand, and she gets up. The girl who was dead lives again! Instead of Jesus becoming contaminated by death, the little girl catches life!

And the report of this spread throughout that district.

Faith: The Common Thread

The thing that them all together is faith:

• Matthew, who recognizes that he is, in many ways, a social outcast is welcomed by the love of Jesus, and the righteousness of Christ goes to those who know they need help.
• The leader of the synagogue who is willing to confess that Jesus is the Messiah who has power over life and death, who trusts this amazing possibility.
• The woman suffering from hemorrhages, who takes a tremendous risk because she trusts that Jesus is the Messiah.

The thing that these all have in common is that they are amazing displays of faith. It is as St. Paul writes in Romans 4 about Abraham:

“No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”

God has promised to you that by the cross of Jesus Christ your sins are forgiven. He has promised that when you receive the sacrament of Holy Communion, he is present with his body and blood for you, for the forgiveness of your sins. He has promised to heal you and make you whole in the way that matters more than any other way, in your spirit and in the forgiveness of your sins.

May you trust this Jesus Christ. May you reach out and touch the hem of his garment. May you be taken by his hand and live again.

And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord to life everlasting. Amen.