Jesus encounters a man with leprosy. The leper asks to be made “clean.” Jesus touches the man and responds, “Be clean!” As we have already observed, in this healing Jesus reverses the directionality and power of pollution (the attribution of negativity dominance). Rather than the unclean polluting the clean, we see, in Jesus’ touch, the clean making the polluted pure. Here, in Jesus, we see a reversal, a positive contamination. Contact cleanses rather than pollutes.
