We moderns can be awfully smug when it comes to Old Testament taboos. Many people assume such taboos were nothing but superstitious, prescientific attempts to avoid disease—as though the Israelites meant to ask, “How do I avoid trichinosis?” but kept slipping into “How do I keep the cooties away?” All this leads, of course, to a triumphant conclusion that we are four thousand years smarter than those people who shackled themselves with barbaric nonsense about eating unclean food and avoiding people with rashes. According to this narrative, the great god Progress has freed us from such ignorant taboos. We now know how to cook pork thoroughly, what causes leprosy, and how to refrigerate shellfish to avoid ptomaine. Gleaming science has perfected what Old Testament barbarians were groping toward in their ignorance.
This self-congratulatory notion that today we are not motivated by strictures of ritual impurity is, however, a tad hasty. For the Ick Factor is as alive and well in our culture as in any other. That’s why we are in no big hurry to brush off some stranger’s dandruff, chat up random women on how their menstrual cycle is going, or touch a corpse. Similarly, before we feel too superior about our coziness with pork and shellfish versus the dietary taboos of ancient Israel, let’s ask ourselves how many insect larvae we’ve eaten lately. Been a while since you’ve had a yen for brains? Or raw blubber? People in other cultures dine on these perfectly nutritious foods without harm, but we won’t touch them. Why? Taboo. The Ick Factor is not confined to ancient Israel.
Scripture, building on this natural human phenomenon, was not establishing a Bronze Age Center for Disease Control. The main focus was on connecting what Israel felt about biological ickiness to spiritual ickiness. Under inspiration, certain things Israelites found abhorrent—leprosy, effusions of blood, eating pork, touching corpses, and so on—got connected with the repellent nature of sin.
We could pretend that such connections would never ever happen in our vastly more advanced culture. We could pretend that nobody would ever, for instance, attach a moral stigma to AIDS or talk as though a lung-cancer victim had it coming because of the “sin” of smoking. We could pretend that nobody in our culture ever talks as though obesity or addiction to alcohol comes from moral turpitude. We could put on blinkers and pretend nobody today treats the mentally ill as guilty of some special sin instead of as victims of disease. But the more profitable thing is to admit that humans in every culture have always made connections between physical impurity and moral impurity. The Jews did this too—and so the Old Testament connected their revulsion to leprosy and pork with revulsion toward sin.
In short, God chose to use the image of pollution—of some all-soiling, all-pervading contaminant like an infectious agent, or leprosy, or sewage-stained water—to portray what sin is and what it does. And when you think about it, it’s an apt image: because sin is not something we can keep to ourselves. It inevitably gets out, like the Ebola virus, and wreaks havoc with the whole of human society. It defiles, infects, poisons, spreads, rots, ruins, and kills.
The problem is that many people learned the wrong lesson from this. Rather than seeing disease as an image of sin, not a few (including the apostles) were tempted to see sickness as proof of punishment for sin. Like Job’s comforters, many are all too certain that sickness equals divine punishment. Jesus would have none of such simplemindedness. When the disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus retorted, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him” (John 9:2, 3).
So Jesus, while using sickness and defilement as an image of sin, did not conflate the image with the reality. Just as he taught that sickness does not mean the victim is a sinner, so he rejected the notion that ritual defilement under the Old Testament means moral defilement:
“Hear me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him.”…And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters, not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man.” (Mark 7:14-15, 18–23)
His point was that God had taken this natural impulse to regard certain things as defiling and, as with many other natural things, raised it by grace to teach a spiritual lesson. The image of food too gross to eat and things too disgusting to touch was and is an apt image of sin, which sickens the soul as much as pork sickened Jewish stomachs. But Jesus also starkly instructed his followers that it was not food that defiled but sin; that disease was an image of sin, not evidence of the sinfulness of the victim.
Similarly, Jesus had no truck with the pharisaic assumption that saw quarantine as the only possible approach to defilement, whether physical or spiritual. The very name Pharisee means “separated one,” and Jesus’ repudiation of all that is no small part of why he was so hated by them.
Note, for instance, how Jesus insistently went out of his way to associate with the ritually impure. He reached out and touched a leper, committing an act that, under the old law, should have rendered him unclean. But instead Jesus cleansed the leper. That act summarized the new covenant in a nutshell. We see the same message repeated over and over. What renders you unclean under the old covenant is instead made clean by the Messiah of the new. Jesus therefore consorted with Gentiles, touched bleeding women and corpses, and (notably for the author of that particular Gospel) welcomed the company of a tax collector named Levi or Matthew. (See Matthew chapters 8 through 10.) The thread that binds all these incidents together is the power of the Spirit to make clean what was unclean. The pharisaic quarantine against defilement is broken.
Of which more next week.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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