Reading Richard Beck's Unclean, I have really been challenged with some ideas of purity, cleanliness and morality in view of hospitality. I highly recommend this great book. Chapter 5 starts with a quote that I have been wrestling with the last couple of days.
St Catherine of Sienna, when she felt revulsion from the wounds she was tending bitterly reproached herself. Sound hygiene was incompatible with charity, so she deliberately drank a bowl of puss.
-Mary Douglas
I should have warned those reading that if they were eating, they may want to read this later. Besides the immediate disgust that I felt when reading this, I also felt a real challenge. "Sound hygiene was incompatible with charity". Beck goes on to discuss the instances in scripture of Jesus being close to those who, for various reasons, were considered "unclean". The prostitutes who were judged by the pharisees, even to the point that Jesus' purity was called into question as a result of his willingness to be close to them. The woman with the issue of blood (Luke 8:43-48) who Jesus healed because of her faith. You can almost feel the tension in this story as Peter says "Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you." The healing of the man with leprosy in Matthew 8 where Jesus reaches out and touches him before he heals him. Jesus sitting and eating with the "publicans and sinners" as the pharisees called them (Matthew 9).
It seems that Jesus made a habit of flipping the purity models of the time on their heads. For the pharisees, that viewed many of these instances, there was a belief that what Jesus touched would make Jesus dirty. To push further, there was a disbelief that what Jesus touched could be made clean. Even Peter calls out to Jesus "the people are crowding and pressing against you". If Peter had an understanding of what a touch from Jesus could do I believe he would have brought more people even closer.
The story that I have been meditating on the most today is the story with the leper. Jesus touched the man before he was healed. That order of events is really speaking to me. Jesus touched the unclean man. Jesus could have healed the man and then comforted him and told him he had been made clean but Jesus touched the man, while a leper. This man probably hadn't experienced the touch of someone for some time. The leper would be expelled from the community and he would be considered spiritually unclean in addition to his physical aspect of being unclean. Here the Son of God, Son of man, The Messiah, Jesus Christ Emmanuel, is touching the leper. The call to me and the call to us all today, is to touch the unclean. The pharisees thought that the filth would make them dirty. It is that thought process that says that our models of purity are greater than charity, that physical or spiritual dirt is greater than mercy. We don't have to drink a bowl of puss but I think we are being called to challenge our thought process on calling something dirty that Jesus has made clean (Acts 10:15) "Master, the crowd is pressing against you." I hear Jesus saying, let them be healed with just a touch of mercy.
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