Cleansing Mud: Jesus’ teachings on purity and defilement
Scripture Readings: John 9:1-41; Mark 7:1-8; 14-23
There was a bizarre 12th century Belgian saint named St. Christina the Astonishing. Already at 15 she was said to lose herself to contemplation of God, to the detriment of her body. Some accounts of her life say that she eventually starved to death. Her body was brought to the church for a funeral mass and right after the Agnus Dei, she flew up out of her coffin like a bird and sat up in the rafters of the church because she said that everyone in the church “stank of sin” and she couldn’t bear the stench.
St. Christina’s resurrection was the first of her marvels. She climbed trees to perch on the tiniest of branches, she prayed while balancing on poles or curled up into a ball, she would roll in fire and scream in pain, yet remain unburned, she climbed into hot ovens and threw herself under mill-wheels, where she would be carried around under the water yet suffer no apparent injury.
One time a priest was so frightened by her appearance that he refused to give her Communion. Many thought she was possessed by devils, and tried to capture her, but she always managed to escape. A man once broke her leg in the process of subduing her, and tied her to a pillar for safety, but she managed to slip out into the night and lived in the tree tops for some time, kept alive only by the milk from her own breasts. Eventually, St. Christina came to be revered as one of the purest of saints for her unflinching dedication to discipline by not letting any impure substances enter her body.
Lent is a time when many of us think about purity; about purifying ourselves from sinfulness through prayer, repentance, sometimes fasting and general self-denial. It is a time when we try to get clean. In order to get clean, many people give up certain things like chocolate, meat or alcohol. However, denying ourselves things that we enjoy is only worth something if this translates into ethical action. For example, giving something up for lent can help us open our eyes to our bad habits, transform our attitudes, confront our over-consumption and reduce our carbon footprint. These are all cases in which self-purification leads to ethical action. However, purity can also lead to unethical, immoral attitudes and actions.
The word “purity” means unmixed, while the word “impurity” means contaminated, polluted or lacking consistency. Purity requires that things conform to the class to which they belong and that different classes of things not be confused. Confusion and mixing lead to what the Bible calls “abomination”. For example, Leviticus dictates that people should not “lie down” with animals because this is what in Hebrew is referred to as tebhel. Tebhel is translated as perversion, but a more accurate translation is mixing. In other words, people should not lie down with animals because this is improper mixing of the species.
The ancient Indian caste system is an obvious example of different social classes not mixing. The highest caste, the priestly Brahmin caste, is known as the yardstick of purity in Indian society. It is the duty of the Brahmin to practice purity. In Hinduism, the principle of ahimsa, or non-violence, is associated with purity therefore the Brahmin are bound by a code of non-violence. At the opposite end of the caste spectrum are the so-called “untouchables”, the lowest caste, who are considered unclean. Gandhi renamed these people “Harijans”, meaning “people of God” in an attempt to ennoble them and overcome the taboo of classes mixing.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas says that the body is a symbol of any social unit such as a marriage, or a family, or a community. We can speak of being “of one body” in marriage, being a communal body, or being a church body. A pure individual body is a body with its boundaries intact. The social body is also considered pure if its boundaries are intact. Loosened boundaries mean that the social body is weak and susceptible to pollution. Strong boundaries help groups to have strong senses of identity. For example, the Israelites often defined themselves by what differentiated them from the pagan groups around them and any mixing of cultures or religions with the Hebrew religion was considered idolatrous because it threatened the boundaries of Israelite identity. Douglas argues that loosened boundaries are unclear, and what is unclear is generally seen as unclean in many cultures. This is why bodily fluids like blood, which leak from the body, are considered to be pollutants. Death is also taboo in many cultures because the body begins to dissolve and decompose, thereby losing its boundaries.
The word adultery means “to make other” and is closely linked to the concept of purity. Adultery means that one is mixing with an other outside of one’s own marriage. When the Israelites disobeyed God by worshipping other gods they were accused of committing adultery against God. The relationship between Israel and God is often likened to a marriage. Scholars say that the biblical book Song of Songs is an allegorical love story between God and Israel. Chapter 4:12 celebrates the purity of Israel, the bride, saying: “My bride is a garden close-locked, a fountain sealed.” Therefore, the bride Israel is to remain true to God and no other gods.
When the Israelites “cheated” on God with other gods, they expected punishment. They blamed themselves for the occurrence of certain natural disasters. This kind of reasoning, that our actions can cause logically or scientifically unrelated consequences to occur, like sin causing natural disasters, is called “magical thinking” by anthropologists and psychologists.
Jesus encourages magical thinking when he performs miracles through touch. Spiritual healing methods rely on a type of magical thinking called “the law of contagion”, which suggests that once two people have been in contact that a magical bond exists between them. We see an example of this in our reading from John, when Jesus heals a blind man using mud and saliva. In Catholicism, a saint is believed to be able to pass on her power to holy objects called relics that can, in turn, heal people if they have physical contact with the relics.
Purity and impurity have a highly contagious character. The Pharisees in the Mark reading are concerned about Jesus and his friends breaking the rules of ritual purity by not washing their hands before they eat. The Pharisees see this as impure behaviour that could potentially defile others who are considered clean. Jesus responds by saying that it is not what comes from the outside and enters the body that is defiling – it is our own immoral actions that defile us. In other words, others can’t defile us through their uncleanness, only we can defile ourselves through immorality – through immoral attitudes and acts like violence, bigotry, racism, misogyny, slander, cruel gossip, and so on.
It is ironic that Jews, who are themselves so concerned with purity and ritual cleanness, have also been blamed for the spreading of impurity. During the Bubonic plague, fewer Jews actually died of the plague, therefore they were accused of poisoning wells and spreading the disease through magical means. However, it was their kosher laws regarding the clean preparation of food and the command to drink only fresh water from wells that kept Jews from contracting the disease. These kosher laws were really quite amazing, since modern microbiology and germ theory was not understood at the time.
Sometimes purity and cleanliness laws are simply practical, like avoiding the plague. It is when the term “unclean” is applied to actual people that purity becomes unethical. Pat Robertson, a prominent fundamentalist leader of the Christian Coalition and the host of the 700 Club, blames homosexuals and other people deemed sinners for the spread of HIV/AIDS. On one segment of the 700 Club, Robertson said: “[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers.” And in response to those who want the equal treatment of homosexuals, Robertson replied: “If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of our nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it’ll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn’t necessarily something we ought to open our arms to.” Believing that homosexuals have contributed to earthquakes is definitely some magical thinking. And Robertson wants to make scapegoats of homosexuals the way that the Jews were blamed for the plague, as a way of blaming all of the tragedies of the world on one seemingly impure group of people that has spread their contagious impurity to others by association.
The word “scapegoat” originally comes from an Israelite practice that is described in Leviticus. Moses’ brother Aaron was commanded by God to lay all of the sins of Israel onto a goat and send it into the desert as atonement. The Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, celebrates this cleansing of Israel’s sins. Because the one goat took on the sins of the many and was banished from their presence, the group was purged of sin and purified. Similar rituals were held elsewhere in the ancient world to transfer guilt or blame. In ancient Greece, human scapegoats were beaten and driven out of cities to mitigate calamities. In early Roman law, an innocent person was allowed to assume the penalty of another.
Jesus was meant to be the last scapegoat. Through Jesus’ self-sacrifice we are all made perpetually clean. When the disciple Peter shied away from Jesus washing his feet, Jesus replied: “Anyone who I have cleaned needs no further washing; he is clean all over” (John 13:10).
If taken to the extreme, purity is the opposite of morality; in fact, I think that purity can be downright amoral. Morality or ethics has to do with how we treat other people and the quality of our inner disposition toward others. Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said that ethics starts with a face-to-face encounter with the other, not simply with people who are like us, but people from other ethnicities, classes, castes or religions. How we embrace the other determines what kind of people we are. Levinas’ other-centred ethic reflects God’s command to the Jews: “You shall treat the stranger who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you” (19:33). Even though strangers did not always know the cleanliness customs of the Israelites, the Israelites were judged by God according to how hospitable they were to foreigners. Jesus’ overall message stresses this Jewish morality code that prioritizes generosity for the other over the purity codes that prioritize the perfection and cleanliness of the self.
Jesus was not an ascetic like Saint Christina. According to the purity laws, he was defiled, corrupted, unclean, polluted and impure. He mixed with everyone, including prostitutes and lepers – the untouchables, the most impure of all people at his time. He used ritually unclean substances such as mud and saliva to heal blindness, sickness and sin. To make his point even clearer, Jesus’ blood, one of the most dreaded pollutants for Jesus’ community, becomes the very magical substance that purifies us from sin.
Being a Christian is about becoming polluted, about loosening boundaries, about diversifying, about mixing Jew and Gentile, Roman and Greek, maybe even Swiss and Russian! Being Christian is about muddying the gene pool. Jesus declares that nothing that comes from the outside can defile us – the food we eat isn’t unclean, the people we associate with won’t taint us or defile us. The disciple Peter had a dream in which the Lord told him to eat creatures of every kind, even though they were considered unclean to the Jews. When Peter said that he would never eat anything unclean, the Lord says to him: “It is not for you to call profane what God counts clean” (Acts 5:13-15).
Like the Mark reading, in the gospel of Luke, the Pharisees accuse Jesus and his followers of not washing in the proper manner before a meal and Jesus answers: “You Pharisees clean the outside of cup and plate; but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside too? But let what is inside be given in charity, and all is clean” (11:39-41).
Finally, the notion of purity rests on the illusion that we are all somehow able to separate ourselves from one another, when, in reality, we can never physically do that. A physicist named Fritjof Capra wrote: Subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as [a series of] interconnections. Quantum theory…reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate [further and further] into matter… nature appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole (78).
Through physics, Capra affirms that we are all a part of the same reality, we do not belong to different realities where one thing is clean and another thing isn’t and that it is somehow possible to sep
arate the two. The idea of all living things being connected, not separate, is the very foundation of the word religion, which comes from the Latin root “religare”, which means “to bind together”. For Christians, being a part of the same reality means that nothing can separate us from the love of God, in whom we find our being.