Recently I received an email from someone asking me to explain John 20:17 where Yeshua had a conversation with Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, but before his ascension to heaven and said the following:

Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.’”

John 20:17, Touch me not. Touch is the Greek word haptomai meaning “to fasten one’s self to, adhere to, cling to,” and can be used to refer to touching in a carnal and passionate way as between a man and a woman. Perhaps Yeshua didn’t want his disciples to cling to him as a wife clings to her husband, since, in a spiritual sense, they (and us) were/are only betrothed and not yet married to him yet. (The marriage of the saints to Yeshua will occur at his second coming.)

Additionally, Yeshua had not yet ascended to heaven where he would be accepted by his Father as the perfect, unspotted, undefiled and sinless sacrificial Lamb of Elohim. If a sinful human had touched him, this may have ceremonially defiled his state of perfect cleanliness.

In the Torah, for example, if a man touched a dead human carcass, he would become ceremonially unclean and need cleansing (Num 19:11–13). This was the law of the red heifer, which was a prophetic picture of Yeshua dying on the cross for our sins, which had to be perfect and blemish free (Num 19:1–10; Heb 13:10–12).

The lesson here is that all men are dead in their sins until they come into contact with Yeshua the Messiah, which is the lesson of the red heifer.