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MATTHEW, 27: CONFLICT WITH THE DEVOUT ESCALATES FURTHER (15:1-29)

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Some reminder of where we are at this point in Matthew’s narrative: the story has been running, we might say, on two parallel tracks. One track tells about Jesus’ immense generosity in healing all who come to him and about the crowds that gather to listen to him and seek his help. The other track is a story of conflicts with an increasingly angry group of devoutly religious people. (Matthew has also clued us into another threat to Jesus—the ruler Herod Antipas, who is suspicious of Jesus because of his popularity and because he revives Herod’s guilty conscience regarding John the Baptist.) 

One thing that ties these two strands of narrative together is the issue of purity. It is a matter of cardinal importance to the devout. Jesus, on the other hand, while not rejecting it entirely, subordinates it to another element in the faith of Israel: the love of neighbor. He freely risks impurity by, for example, touching lepers and even an apparently dead body (9:18-26). In chapters 15 and 16, these two strands will be brought into closer relation to each other.

I notice that this time his questioners come from Jerusalem (15:1). Does that make a difference?

Yes. Later on, after the destruction of Jerusalem in the Jewish War, Galilee would become the center of Jewish religion. But in Jesus’ day, that was definitely Jerusalem’s role. So this represents an escalation of the conflict. The local champions of strict piety haven’t made much headway in combatting this wandering preacher and healer. Now, a new team enters the picture from Jerusalem itself. 

But the question they raise is about tradition, not purity, isn’t it?

Yes, but the tradition in question is a purity tradition—the washing of hands before eating. There may be some question as to how universal this tradition actually was among Jews of Jesus’ time. But it’s easy to see why it would have been at least a widespread practice among the devout. The purity of food was always open to question unless it was produced, stored, handled, cooked, and shared under carefully specified conditions. Clean hands helped ensure that the food remained pure. But for a wandering group like Jesus and his followers, water for washing hands might not always have been readily available. 

Still, Jesus responds in terms of tradition.

Quite right. After all, his challengers framed the issue in terms of tradition, even though a purity rule was their example. Since their direct objections about issues of purity hadn’t gotten anywhere, they are trying a kind of flank attack by accusing him of carelessness about tradition. And Jesus responds by saying, in effect, that tradition always has to be subject to higher values, offering as a negative example a tradition that allowed children to circumvent their obligations to their parents by stating that their property had been designated as a gift to God. Some scholars question Matthew’s understanding of the practice, but the practice that Jesus refers to here may not be identical to the form found in later Rabbinic Judaism.

So Jesus rejects the tradition because it violates the Ten Commandments?

Yes, the scriptural honor due one’s parents can’t be compromised by mere tradition. It’s a bit odd, of course, to find Jesus insisting on this when he has repeatedly distanced himself from the centrality of the family and insisted that his disciples will have to do the same. Still, the presupposition of the devout from Jerusalem in this story is that the existing tradition is inviolable, and Jesus counters that presupposition by arguing that there are higher values that even venerable traditions cannot annul.

This is a powerful argument, since his questioners can’t avoid acknowledging the pre-eminence of the Torah. Tradition was supposedto be a way of making the Torah usable in the current era—quite different in many respects from the era when it was written down. It couldn’t, in theory, be used to contradict Torah. But Jesus goes further by attacking his questioners with a quotation from Isaiah 29:13, accusing them of substitutinghuman rules for divine ones. (The quotation comes from the Septuagint and differs a little from the passage as you find it in the NRSV.) Tradition isn’t just something inherited from the the past (“the elders” in vs. 2); it is the creation and property of those who enforce it (“your tradition” in vs. 3, “human precepts” in vs. 9).

But if this argument is about tradition, why is Jesus’ following speech to the crowd (15:10-11) all about purity?

Because purity was the real issue. The complaint, remember, was that the disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating—a purity issue. The authorities from Jerusalem are presenting it as an issue of disrespect for the tradition precisely because other efforts to criticize Jesus’ attitude toward purity haven’t gotten far. Jesus rejects all absolute adherence to tradition as such, but the real chasm between him and his questioners is purity.

In effect, he dismisses purity, too.

It would be more precise to say that he relocates it, though that may not be very different! Purity codes always focus first and foremost on bodily boundaries, particularly bodily orifices. A person’s purity is threatened by what may go into the mouth, by how one treats bodily wastes, by sexual acts. And remember that, as we said earlier, impurity is contagious, which means that purity requires constant vigilance to preserve.

But long before Jesus, people had also begun to extend the language of purity to apply to what we might now call “moral” or “ethical” issues. And, in vss. 10-12, Jesus frames this shift in the form of a definition—one that actually replacesphysical purity with “purity of the heart.” Taking his dictum seriously means that physical impurity simply ceases to be a central concern. That doesn’t make it an evil, and Jesus himself, as far as we can tell, continued to observe it for the most part. But physical purity is no longer a form of access to God, nor is physical impurity a barrier. Cleanliness, it seems, is not in fact next to godliness after all.

This is a pretty cryptic way of saying all that.

Yes, but memorable, isn’t it? A good pithy saying. Jesus’ questioners, in any case, understand exactly what he’s saying and “take offense,” as the disciples report to Jesus. Jesus’ response is very harsh: “they are blind guides of the blind.” With that, he effectively denies them any authority at all. 

On the other hand, the disciples don’t seem to be sure what Jesus meant.

Yes, fortunately for us, they ask for clarification (15:15). Food, even if eaten with impure hands, just goes through the body. It has no effect on one’s purity. True purity must reside in the heart—the body part that metaphorically stands for intention and purpose and integrity, as Jesus explains in vs. 18. This doesn’t make purity any less important; if anything, it becomes more so. But the nature of purity has been radically shifted.

But then Matthew throws us another surprise in the apparently unrelated story of the Canaanite woman. What’s the connection with purity there?

The first clue is the word “Canaanite.” Compare the quite different terms Mark uses in his version of the story (Mark 7:24-30): he describes the woman as “Greek-speaking, Syrophoenician by descent.” Mark’s language is what contemporaries might normally have used. It meant that she came from roughly the area that is now Lebanon and, like many people there, was Greek in culture. Matthew, however, deliberately chooses an archaic term, drawn from the Torah and the Book of Joshua. He was technically correct, for the distant ancestors of the Phoenicians were, in fact, Canaanites; but the word “Canaanite” is used here because it was deeply pejorative. It characterizes the woman as a member of that ancient people whose idolatry and impurity brought down the wrath of God on them and resulted in their destruction in the land of Canaan (roughly modern Israel and the Left Bank) and replacement by the people of Israel, as recounted in the Book of Joshua. This woman is not just any gentile outsider. She’s the accursed “other,” a supreme example of how physical impurity brings on God’s wrath.

And Jesus ignores her!

Yes, he’s being totally aloof. He won’t even acknowledge her existence. But notice that the woman addresses him in Israelite terms: “Lord, Son of David.” That makes it more difficult to ignore her. After all, even at the conquest, some Canaanites were accepted into the people of Israel, most notably the harlot Rahab and her family (Josh. 6:22-24). And this woman has set aside ethnic hatred because she has heard that, in Jesus, the power of God is at work for healing. Why can’t Jesus, too, move beyond ancient enmity? Eventually, the disciples appeal to him to get rid of her, and he responds—not to her, but in her hearing–that he was sent only to Israelites. When she persists, he gets still more insulting with his language about dogs. 

Dogs didn’t have a good reputation in the ancient world. They existed mostly as urban packs, ranging the city to look for scraps. They even feasted on the dead on battlefields, as Homer says at the beginning of the Iliad.(There’s only one “good” dog in the Scriptures. If you’d like to meet him, you should read the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha.) Dogs were about as unclean as anything could get. 

I can’t imagine why the woman would put up with this.

She wants healing for her daughter. And whether she has heard reports about Jesus’ teaching on purity or simply understands intuitively that the God Jesus serves is not constrained by anxieties about purity, she presses him in a way that he cannot say “no” to: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table.” It’s exactly what Jesus himself has been saying over and over. God’s inexhaustible goodness is not limited to the pure. It overflows and erases that boundary. 

Why does he say, “Great is your faith?”

Better yet, “Great is your trust,” the more precise translation. Like the centurion in chapter 8, her trust in God’s goodness has enabled Jesus to cross a boundary. She has, in a sense, converted him to a wider understanding of his own teaching. At the same time, he performs the miracle without touching her or her daughter. Even though purity is no longer essential in approaching God, he continues to observe it. Perhaps that’s for the sake of other peoples’ anxieties—his disciples, for example, who might find too close an approach to this Cananite a little too shocking.

Next up: FEEDING AS MIRACLE AND METAPHOR (15:29-16:12)

MATTHEW, 15: A DECISIVE BREAK WITH THE RIGHTEOUS (9:18-34)

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Here we have the last of the series of miracle stories that began in chapter 8. Matthew’s treatment of these stories is different from the parallel versions of Mark and Luke. He doesn’t offer much in the way of vivid details. He seldom refers to the awe of the spectators—an important element in most miracle stories. What he does focus on is the way in which these miracles create tension and confrontation with the very pious and the religious authorities. Jesus doesn’t stick carefully to the rules of religion as they were taught and practiced around him. Instead, he places acts of love above acts of sacrifice or the avoidance of impurity. The miracles we now come to, concluding the series, continue the same emphasis and also raise the stakes, as it were. The two most contagious sources of impurity in Jesus’ world were death and menstruation, and in the first story he gets polluted by both—at least according to normal reckoning,.
Oh yes! Raising Jairus’ daughter and healing the woman with the hemorrhage.
Yes—though the name “Jairus” isn’t actually found in Matthew; we borrow it from the more vivid accounts in Mark and Luke. (Once again, Matthew shows little interest in telling “a good story.”) And the passage (9:18-26), as you see, is a double story, with one miracle sandwiched, as it were, inside the other. The longer story, with which it begins and ends, is about death—the single worst source of pollution according to Torah.
It begins with a prominent citizen who is presumably Jewish (though the phrase “of the synagogue” in NRSV here was added by the translators and isn’t found in the Greek text). He tells Jesus that his daughter is dead and pleads with him to come, lay his hand on her, and bring her back to life. This will taint Jesus with the impurity that affects everything under the same roof as the corpse,. Nonetheless, he goes without question.
When Jesus reaches the house, however, even before entering it, he announces that the girl is not dead but sleeping. When the mourners react with derision, he has them all turned out of the house. He goes in, apparently alone, and takes her by the hand, whereupon she gets up.
Was she not really dead?
The people who had actually seen her were quite certain that she was. Jesus’ insistence that she wasn’t does curious things to the story. It makes a claim to supernatural knowledge, but it also has the effect of questioning the purity issue. If there was no corpse, there could be no question of his having become impure by entering the house and touching a dead body. Perhaps the statement is deliberately ambiguous. Later Christians, at least, would speak of death itself as “sleep.” But in any case, the declaration that she wasn’t dead creates another awkward situation for Jesus’ critics, comparable to his healing of the paralytic after being criticized for granting him forgiveness. How do you figure out whether someone who has just raised a dead girl to life, while claiming that she wasn’t really dead, has incurred impurity? For that matter, would you rather admit that she wasn’t dead, thus reducing the magnitude of the miracle, or insist that she was and make his exploit all the more amazing?
The intervening story works a little differently. The “leader” who asked Jesus to raise his daughter was at the peak of the social ladder, but the woman with the hemorrhage shouldn’t even have been out in public. A menstruating woman was invariably impure and conveyed that impurity to whatever and whoever she touched. This woman was ignoring purity restrictions in her desperate search for healing. And it was a serious offense for her to touch the teacher’s garment, rendering him unclean even though he would not know about it. But Jesus almost shrugs it off in Matthew’s abbreviated version: “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” As in the story of cleansing the leper at the beginning of chapter 8, Jesus has once against reversed the contagion of purity/impurity. He is in no danger of “catching” impurity: with him it’s purity that is contagious.
He’s had quite a day since getting back from Gadara. All this on top of healing the paralytic on the Sabbath and associating with tax collectors and sinners and letting his disciples off the hook on fasting.
Yes, and it’s not over. But, at least, he’s finally succeeded in getting from the shore to the place where he lives. “When he entered the house” is equivalent to saying “When he got home.” But he still has a couple of blind men asking for help. Like the woman with the hemorrhage, their healing turns on the question of faith. But this time, Jesus makes it explicit that the faith is placed in him and in his power to heal—a stronger assertion of his own role than he has expressed before. And despite his ordering them to keep silent, they spread the news and thus intensify the rivalry between Jesus and the existing religious hierarchy.
And, finally, we get one more miracle, followed by a formal declaration of hostilities. Jesus exorcises a demon that has deprived a man of speech. Matthew, for once, takes the trouble here to note that the crowds are amazed. And it’s the last straw for the pious. Jesus is undermining the standards of religious correctness—and becoming immensely popular in the process. But how can they attack him when he is doing so much good? The battle line has to be drawn. Since they’re convinced that his whole message and ministry is undermining religion, it is a fairly short step to conclude that Jesus is an evil influence, in league with “the ruler of demons.” Thus, they also reassure themselves that they are on the side of God.
This is how religious fights often work and why they tend to turn deadly. We human beings in our religious mode can accomplish great good, but it is treacherously easy to identify ourselves and our way of doing things with God—as if any human being or human institution could aspire to the perfection that belongs to God. Indeed, from Jesus’ perspective, as Matthew presents it, we are quite apt to misunderstand the nature of God’s perfection, which has to do not with accuracy of belief or religious practice, but with the intensity and generosity of God’s love. Remember how he described God’s perfection in Matthew 5:43-48—making rain fall on the just and on the unjust.

Next up: PREPARING THE INNER CIRCLE OF DISCIPLES (9:35-10:16)

MATTHEW, 12: SOME TROUBLESOME MIRACLES (8:1-17)

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After Jesus finishes his great Sermon, he comes down from the mountain—followed now by crowds of people—and begins performing a series of miracles. Matthew had mentioned earlier (4:23-25) that Jesus was healing and exorcising people, but there were no actual miracle stories until now. And they are odd miracle stories.
Yes, looking ahead, I notice something odd in the story of the Gadarene swine (vss. 28-34). I remember it as being a longer and more detailed story than this. And I thought there was just one demoniac, but in Matthew there are two.
Good observation! Mark and Luke both narrate this same episode and, frankly, make a more gripping story of it. Matthew doesn’t seem very interested in the human details here, and the way he uses two demoniacs in his version instead of one is rather like a story-teller in English starting off with “There were a couple of . . . ” The individuals aren’t important in themselves; they’re types. Matthew also keeps his telling of the story (and of other miracle stories, too) quite brief and shapes the stories in a way that underlines the troublesome quality of Jesus’ actions—troublesome from the point of view of the very pious and the religious authorities.
Why would they be troublesome?
For a variety of reasons, many of them centering on questions of purity. In the first story—the cleansing of a leper—Jesus touches the man, thereby violating the most basic principle of purity systems, namely that impurity always trumps purity. That’s why lepers were exiled from their communities—so that they wouldn’t make everybody else unclean. Touching a leper makes you dirty, but it doesn’t work the other way. You can’t make a leper clean by touch. Except that Jesus can and does! With him, the “contagion” flows the other way; he makes cleansing contagious, not dirt. Interestingly, though, Jesus doesn’t seem to want to make a public issue of this. He tells the cleansed leper to keep matters quiet and just go to the priest to perform the ritual that will certify that he’s no longer a leper and can be welcomed back into the community.
So Jesus isn’t going to abide by the rules. But does he really expect to go unnoticed?
Perhaps not. He certainly doesn’t avoid awkward situations in this chapter. But breaking the rules isn’t the point in itself. It’s an expression of his message that God loves everybody, even the unclean and sinful. Even Gentiles—a potentially divisive claim in a Jewish community that had been subject to the domination of Gentile empires for centuries.
Gentiles like the centurion in Capernaum?
Exactly. It’s interesting that Luke also tells this story (7:1-10), but carefully buffers the interaction between Jesus and the centurion by saying that the centurion sent local Jewish leaders to plead with Jesus on his behalf rather than coming himself. Matthew, however, (who in many ways seems the most self-consciously Jewish of the four gospel writers) brings the two men into direct interaction with each other. Jesus even volunteers to go to the centurion’s house. To understand how unsettling this suggestion was, just re-read the story of Peter’s visit to the house of the Gentile Cornelius, also a centurion, in Acts 10. Peter hated the idea of entering a Gentile house so much that he had to be given a special revolution to persuade him to do it. And the revelation had to be repeated three times just so he’d be sure God really meant it.
Jesus not only grants the centurion’s plea for help. He announces to all within hearing distance that this Gentile has just shown more faith than any one Jesus has met in the Jewish community. Jesus even has the temerity to suggest that people like this man might well replace some of the less faithful of Israel in the Kingdom of Heaven. Hard words for his hearers! It’s like suggesting to modern Christian that some non-believers may get better seats at the heavenly banquet than they will. So Jesus isn’t evading controversial issues. He’s quite willing to address them as occasion warrants.
I see that there are some other big miracle stories ahead—Stilling of the Storm, Gadarene Demoniacs, the Paralytic—but the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is a disappointment. It’s so short it’s barely a story.
I agree. Even by Matthew’s standards, it seems like a nub, not a real story. Still, there’s more to it than first meets the eye. It’s not a flashy miracle and it’s done in private, not on the street. But Jesus’ touching of this woman is problematic in its own way. She could have been in a state of contagious impurity—something that menstruation occasioned. There seems to have been a widespread expectation that male religious leaders would avoid contact with women outside their own households—if only as a defense against becoming accidentally unclean.
Of course, there’s also an element in the story that can irritate modern readers—the phrase “and she got up and began serving him.” Some see it as one more reduction of a woman to a servant’s role. I always wondered if she shouldn’t at least have gotten a bit of recuperation time. Perhaps part of the point is that the healing was so complete that it was as if she’d never been sick at all. But, as I grow older and experience a bit more infirmity myself. I find myself reading it another way. Now I think, “Yes, exactly.” When I’ve been under the weather and unable to work, this is exactly what I want—I want to be out working in the garden. Maybe in honor of having a guest and a miraculous healing, I’d have gone a step further: “and he got up and served tea in the garden.”
Now, we’re not through with this series of troublesome miracles. But the scope of the trouble is about to broaden out. It isn’t just the pious and the religious authorities of Israel that Jesus is disturbing. He’ll be doing it to his own disciples and to some neighboring pagans, too.

Next up: MORE TROUBLESOME MIRACLES (8:18-9:1)

THE MORTAL THREAT OF PURITANISM

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I was in the midst of a series of posts here about problems with purity in the church when the massacre of LGBT people in Orlando made the seriousness of the issue still more apparent. That series was prompted by the way in which some conservative Christians have been ripping Christian churches apart in order to create zones of doctrinal and moral purity around themselves—and are now attempting to extend such zones into the larger community on the pretext of protecting their religious freedom. The crime in Orlando, I’m afraid, shows the graver dangers of the obsession with purity.

Puritanism (I refer to the obsession with purity as such, not simply its particular historical manifestation in the seventeenth century)—puritanism can go to much more destructive lengths. The perpetrator in Orlando was not Christian, but Muslim. His motive, however, seems to have been the same kind of reaction to what he described as the “filthy” Western culture. It differed mainly in that he was prepared not just to push aside people he identified as impure, but to kill them.

That Christians are not immune to the appeal of such a move is shown by the now infamous sermon of Pastor Roger Jimenez, of the Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California. Pastor Jimenez claims that he did not advocate such killing (though he did in fact say that the government should be doing it). He only rejected mourning for the dead. That is too fine a distinction to offer much protection to the human beings who belong to the targeted group.

The preacher has taken God’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself and thrown it back in God’s teeth. He has entirely subverted the Gospel of Jesus and replaced it with a purity code that justifies rejoicing over the death of the “unclean.” No matter how many conservative Christians may think that this is the teaching of Jesus, it is not. I pray God will reveal to him his sin, that he will come to repentance, and that he will find that his true mission in bringing others to repentance as well.

Some churches have responded very well in the aftermath of the attack. But there has also been a widespread avoidance of language that might seem to acknowledge GLBT persons as people of worth, as Frank Bruni pointed out in his column “A Time to Stand with Gay Americans” (The New York Times, June 14, 2016). Voices from the Roman Catholic hierarchy (and also the Southern Baptist Convention) seem to have been more concerned to avoid any appearance of compromising their anti-gay stance than to stand with an endangered group of human beings. (Bruni noted the voice of the Roman Catholic Bishop of St. Petersburg as an outstanding exception. I suspect that places him closer to Pope Francis than his colleagues.)

The pussy-footing of those who want to appear sympathetic without actually being so is as sinful in its own way as the open brutality of a Roger Jimenez. The silence of churches during the long evil time of Jim Crow helped whites excuse their infamous treatment of African-Americans in this country. The silence of churches on the targeting of GLBT people has the same effect.

All the more reason to give thanks for the many faithful who are rediscovering the love of God and choosing to share in it. All the more, too, to take the whole issue of puritanism in the church as a matter of serious concern in all its manifestations.

ISSUES OF SEXUAL PURITY IN TODAY’S CHURCH

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In the previous post, I suggested that the church today, as in first-century Rome, is divided by different perspectives on purity. The focus, however, has shifted from food to sexuality. To some readers, these two issues will seem incommensurate. In their world, food purity is mainly a technical, hygienic issue, not one of religious purity, whereas sexual purity has long been treated as an important religious requirement. Some would probably argue that issues like the ordination of women, the marriage of same-sex couples, or the acceptance of transgendered persons are not purity issues at all, but matters of theology and ethics.

I agree that there are important ethical issues in regard to sex, but I don’t think those are what make our current divisions so tense and angry. The purity element is what drives anger, hatred, and schism. Purity, after all, is always, by its very definition, under threat. It is easy to lose and difficult—sometimes impossible—to restore. It occasions not only differences of opinion, but anxieties about contamination.

Fear of contamination has played a clear role in Anglican conflicts about the ordination of women. I was, early on, an opponent of this change myself, but eventually moved away from that position for several reasons, one being a deeper study of early Christian history where I learned that the life of the church has always involved risking new departures to meet the needs of changing situations. This meant, for me, that the Episcopal Church was free to make this departure from the existing tradition in the expectation that it would be confirmed by the fruits of the Spirit. Coming to know ordained women who were excellent priests sealed my growing conviction that this was indeed a movement of the Holy Spirit among us.

Even before that, however, something had given me pause and encouraged reconsideration of the topic. It was the element of anger, outrage, and even hatred that I saw among ardent opponents of women’s ordination. They already had multiple theological disagreements with other people in the Anglican Communion, but none of these evoked such hostile emotion or such a willingness to separate oneself from the offenders. Then I began to notice that opponents of women’s ordination not only refused to recognize their priesthood, but actually began to treat the male bishops who had ordained them as tainted by that action. It was not enough for them to keep their distance from women clergy; they had to avoid any sacramental contact with the hands of one who had participated in such ordinations.

This is actually contrary to the standards of doctrinal orthodoxy. The church long ago, in the face of the Donatist schism, rejected the notion that the sacraments are dependent on the worthiness of the priest. Ordinations are not dependent on the perfect orthodoxy of the bishop who performs them. They depend rather on the action of the Spirit in the church through that bishop. Opponents of women’s ordination, however, now insist on maintaining lines of ordination free of all contact with women, which makes sense only as a purity device. Women ordinands are seen as tainted, themselves, and also as tainting those who ordain them—a taint that those hands would then pass on to subsequent male ordinands. As always, impurity has to be feared as contagious and purity must be closely guarded.

The same kind of reaction is at work in our conflicts about gay, lesbian, and transexual persons. The objections, to be sure, are not presented in purity terms, but as an issue of scripture and/or tradition. But such arguments are not, in fact, compelling. The argument from scripture is cobbled together quite loosely and does not hold up on closer investigation as I showed in Dirt, Greed, and Sex (see especially chapter 12 of the second edition), The argument from tradition is no better. John Boswell’s two impressive scholarly studies, Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Tolerance and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, have been criticized for over-stating their case. But even if that proves so (and his scholarship was formidable), he successfully shattered the assumption that the whole of Christian history was pervaded by the extreme hostility toward homosexual persons that characterized Western culture in the mid-twentieth century.

The anger and hatred that have characterized some conservative Anglicans and allowed them to justify subverting the unity of the church over these issues is not mere odium theologicum (vicious and destructive as that can be), but an effort to maintain a fragile purity in the face of something felt as defiling. Paul, I believe, would say to them as to the weak in faith of his own day, “Your purity is no longer of decisive importance. Our relationship to God and to one another is determined by God’s grace, not by our avoidance of physical impurity. Our trust is in God, not in our own purity.”

The church is still in the process of finding a new norm for the future. We should not be surprised if the process is sometimes painful. We in the West are still emerging from an era of extreme repression of gay and lesbian people during the twentieth century. (Regions formerly colonized by the West seem to have absorbed that message as well.) The depth of that repression set the stage for the crisis of Stonewall and, in many places, for a reversal of public sentiment that has been astonishing in its rapidity but is still far from complete. In the meantime, we must ask anew whether Paul’s advice to “weak” and “strong” might give us help in maintaining the unity of the church in our present situation. More in the next post.

PURITY HAS BEEN A CHRISTIAN PROBLEM FROM THE START

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As I wrote in my previous post, conservative Evangelicals are trying to create a “pure” space around themselves where they can avoid coming into contact with what they regard as impure—preferably at the expense of the people whom they want to keep at a distance. It is a widespread desire—active today across the religious spectrum and even among secularists when they seek an environment purged of religious references. Historically, it’s been a common cause of schism in Christian churches, with the “pure” showing a strong inclination to separate from those they see as unclean, either by evicting them or, if that fails, by leaving the existing community themselves.

This tendency has dogged the church from the beginning. Let me turn to one very early instance of it, described by the Apostle Paul in a somewhat neglected passage of his Letter to Romans. Imagine the meetings of that first-generation church: relatively small groups meet in the houses of the more prosperous members and eat a meal together. The meal begins with the blessing of bread, following the custom set by Jesus at the Last Supper, and concludes with the blessing of the cup. In between, is a full dinner. And that is exactly the problem.

The church gatherings included both people who believe that God wanted Christians to follow kashruth, the ancient Israelite rules of purity, and people who believed God had given grace freely to everyone without any such precondition. Purity in this context, I should note, was understood in an entirely physical sense. All early Christians agreed on what they called “purity of the heart,” which meant surrendering hatred, jealousy, and other evil and harmful motives. The purity that created the problems was the system regulating such physical issues as foodstuffs and food preparation, sexual intercourse, leprosy, and the handling of corpses.

At Rome, food was the problem. Since the life of the church centered at the dinner table, food purity quickly became a make-or-break challenge for it. Did non-kosher members of the community have to observe the rules of Jewish food purity when providing food? Could those who kept kashruth dare eat in gentile houses? The danger was that the church would wind up being split between two entities, one predominantly Jewish (with some gentiles who accepted the importance of purity) and one predominantly gentile (with some Jewish members who believed that God no longer required it).

Modern American Protestants may be inclined to think, “What’s the problem? Separation sounds like just the solution.” Paul was horrified at that prospect. He strongly believed that God, in the Gospel message, wanted to bring Jews and gentiles together in the same community of faith and that this unity was an important mark of Christian behavior.

For Paul, then, it was important to find a way for Christians to stay together without forcing either group to violate their understanding of the faith. But he couldn’t give directives to the Christians at Rome, since he hadn’t founded it. He could only try to talk them into a solution.

In a sense, the whole of Romans constitutes his argument, but he comes to the point in chapters 14-15. There, he describes the division in terms of two groups: “the weak in faith” and “the strong.” The “weak” are those who are pressing for observance of food purity. In modern parlance, we might speak of them rather as “strong” believers: insisting on a full, detailed observance of their religion. Paul calls them the “weak in faith” In the sense of “weak in trust.” To his mind, they lack trust in God. They have a detailed and explicit set of beliefs and practices to which they are committed, but they do not put their trust in God so much as in the practices themselves—exactly contrary to what Paul believed was central to the gospel, namely, justification by grace alone through trust alone.

Paul, in contrast, numbers himself among the “strong,” who trust God to save them without regard to their fulfillment of a specific set of religious duties. This didn’t mean that the strong were indifferent to ethics and morality—just that they emphasized God’s grace in redeeming all people through Christ, Jews and gentiles without distinction.

Paul urges both groups to develop mutual respect and affection. The weak, he says, are inclined to be judgmental. In doing so, they are getting above themselves, for judgment belongs to God, not to them. The strong, for their part, are inclined to be superior and dismissive of the weak, whom they see as just not “getting it.” They feel the weak would be better off giving up their traditional dietary and calendrical practices. Paul wants both groups to esteem one another as faithful fellow-members of the congregation. And he admonishes the strong that they must not put temptations in the path of the weak—in other words, don’t make it difficult for them to follow their own consciences in this regard.

This is surely the only long-term spiritual solution to the problem. If a Christianity that embraces a diversity of people (like Paul’s churches and our own) is to survive, it will always have to surmount the challenge of different basic assumptions among its members. What seemed normal to Greeks in his age did not always seem so to Jews—and vice versa. In order for the community to continue, the whole issue of purity had to be moved out of center place in people’s concerns, whether they were defending kashrut or wishing to be to rid of it.

The church also needed a practical, institutional solution, which it eventually found by separating the rites of bread and wine from the church supper and combining them into the Eucharistic rite that Christians still observe. The issue about the purity of other foodstuffs thus disappeared. Over time, the Jewish component of the church was swamped by increasing numbers of gentiles, to the point that the issue came to seem almost meaningless to Paul’s later readers.

The problem of purity, however, is as crucial today as it was in Paul’s own time, albeit with a changed focus. We are interested not in food purity so much as in sexual purity. Are women pure enough to be ordained? Are same-sex partners pure enough to be included in the sacrament of marriage? What is the status of transgendered people? As the search for institutional solutions to these issues continues, we also need to devote ourselves to the spiritual task immediately at hand: how do we love one another across the lines created by these disagreements? How do the weak stop judging the strong? How do the strong stop despising the weak? More reflections to come on this topic.

Those who would like a more detailed explanation of Paul’s argument in Romans can find it in my book Interpreting the Truth (full information in the column to your right). 

AGGRIEVED EVANGELICALS

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How many Evangelical Christians in the US feel that they are in danger of persecution—or even actively subject to it? It’s hard to have any certainty, but politicians on the Right are convinced that they are numerous and constitute a gold mine of votes. The victories of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primaries seem to bear this theory out. Though he has little else to recommend him to Evangelical voters, he has beaten out more eligible candidates by projecting himself as a strong political figure who will protect them from persecution by gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. The same anxiety has also prompted a raft of recent legislation in heavily Evangelical states claiming to protect religious freedom. Apparently state politicians have keyed into this fear, too.

For an outsider, the fear is difficult to fathom. Evangelical florists or caterers are alarmed that they might be providing services to the weddings of same-sex couples. There is some suggestion that they would seem to be endorsing such a marriage. But one doesn’t hear of any of them claiming the right to pass judgement on, say, the remarriage of divorced persons. Clearly, something more than doctrinal consistency is at stake.

The nearest analogy I can think of comes from the early years of my life, when many states had laws forbidding marriage between people of different races. I grew up in a state that was partly Southern in culture, and there was little doubt that marriages between Euro-Americans and African Americans elicited strong negative emotions in the white community. My guess is that many business owners would have refused to provide services for them. (Because of the particular history of Oklahoma, marriage between Native Americans and Euro-Americans generally elicited less hostility.)

The public reasoning against such marriages was often framed in terms of eugenics, but it was more deeply based, I think, in religion—like its kindred practice of apartheid in South Africa. And, even more fundamentally, it was a purity issue. Whites in Oklahoma (and many other places) were anxious about being “contaminated” by blacks. For that is how purity codes work.

If “contamination” sounds like an outrageous term, that is exactly the point. There is an analogy between purity codes and basic sanitary considerations, but the purity code expands to categorize wide reaches of one’s world as clean or unclean, pure or impure. White business people were not just concerned to avoid “endorsing” interracial marriage. They were afraid that they would be, both in their own estimation and in the public eye, contaminated by it. The same, I think, is true of Evangelical business folk today in relation to same-sex marriage.

Purity codes are pervasive among human beings, though some groups lay more stress on them than others. They also vary a great deal in content from one community to another, but each group holds to its own peculiar code with a fervor undiminished by the fact that their neighbors may subscribe to other and different codes. The whole complex, psycho-social process is superbly illuminated in Rachel Herz’s interesting study, That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion (Norton).

As a way of organizing life, the sense of purity may be indispensable. But, like all things human, it is not innocent. Purity codes can become divisive and destructive when they are used to categorize some persons or communities as dirty or unclean. Such people will inevitably tend to be pushed aside from the common life. Indeed, the accusation that they are unclean is a necessary part of the process of exclusion, for it defines them as a public menace. It wasn’t just interracial marriage that made whites anxious in my childhood. It was the sharing of water fountains, restaurants, swimming pools, schools, churches.

Purity, after all, is always, by definition, vulnerable and under attack. “Dirt” contaminates and must therefore be avoided if it cannot be eradicated. “Dirt” evokes fear and anger and hostility.

A recent article in the New York Times (An Ayatollah’s Daughter Prompts a Debate on Religious Persecution in Iran, by Thomas Erdbrink, 5/18/2016) is relevant. The offense, described by an “official with Iran’s conservative judiciary” as “obscene and despicable,” was a visit by the daughter of a prominent religious official (and former president of Iran) to another woman who is a leader of the much persecuted Bahai religion in Iran. The two had tea together. Physical proximity, the sharing of food—both occasions of contamination. It is easier to persecute people whom one has defined as impure; it becomes harder when some bold person sits down with them and treats them like human beings as Ms. Faezeh Hashemi did with Ms. Farima Kamalabadi. Hence the need the authorities felt to categorize Ms. Hashemi as unclean alongside Ms. Kamalabadi. The Bahai must be kept at a distance from decent folk or decent folk might question why the Bahai are being persecuted.

Evangelicals in the US may believe that their purity is under threat from gay and lesbian and transgendered people; they may even feel that as persecution. But the greater problem may be that Evangelicals, where they enjoy cultural power (as in many parts of the US), may wield their purity as an offensive weapon against those they categorize as unclean.

This is particularly clear in the case of public officials who want the freedom to refuse marriage licenses or other civic rights to those who offend their own religious sensibilities. This would allow them to make the equal protection of law a dead letter for those of whom they disapprove. In short, the real goal of the campaign to “protect” Evangelicals from what they see as persecution is to limit the freedom of others whom they have categorized as unclean. If they feel the need to protect their personal purity, Evangelicals should find other ways to do it. Better yet, they might heed the Apostle Paul’s admonition, uttered precisely in the context of concerns about purity: “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.” (Romans 14:4 NRSV)

More on Paul and the problems of purity in a future post. . . .