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“Be Clean”
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
February 15, 2009
Sixth in the Series, “The Seven First Words of Christ”
Mark 1:40-45
There used to be a
billboard along Highway 74 in North Carolina that showed a photograph of a woman
who had been badly beaten, lying in a hospital bed. I can still see it in my
mind’s eye: her eyes were black, her cheeks were bruised, her lips were split
and bleeding. It was part of a campaign to end spouse abuse in that county and
its intent was to provoke an emotional response in those people who passed by.
It worked.
The first time I saw that
billboard two equally strong emotions welled up within me: one was pity for this
horribly abused wife; the other was rage for the husband who had done it to her.
Is it possible to feel
both rage and pity in the same soul, at the same time? And, if so, then is it
possible that Jesus sometimes felt that way, too?
In this episode from Mark
1 Jesus is approached by a leper who says, “If you choose, you can make me
clean.” Most of the ancient manuscripts—most of them—say at this point that
Jesus was “moved with pity,” but a few of them—and only a few—say that he was
“filled with rage.”
Rage? Really?
Is it possible that he
felt both, as I did when I saw that billboard? Did he feel pity for the victim
and rage for the perpetrator? Well, yes, I suppose it is possible. But who
“perpetrates” leprosy? Who’s to blame? Was Jesus angry with God, as we
sometimes are when we don’t know who else to be angry with? Was he angry at the
person who “gave” the leper this contagious disease? Or was he angry with the
whole situation, with the whole infuriating chain of events that could turn a
healthy human being into the pitiful creature now kneeling at his feet? Because
there must have been a time when the leper was not a leper at all.
We can’t really
reconstruct the story of his life, but from the detailed descriptions and
prescriptions in Leviticus 13 we can get an idea of what happened to him. There
it says that, “when a person has on the skin of his body a swelling or an
eruption or a spot, and it turns into a leprous disease on the skin of his body,
he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests”
(13:2).
It could have been that
simple. A boy could have come home from school, or from doing his chores, or
from playing with his friends on the Galilean hillsides. His mother could have
fed him supper and listened to the story of his day. And that night, while she
was washing behind his ears, she could have noticed a spot, or a swelling.
“What’s this?” she would
ask.
“I don’t know.”
“How long have you had
it?”
“I don’t know.”
She would have watched it
for a few days, but when it only seemed to be getting worse she would have
bundled the boy up as you would to visit the doctor, and hauled him off to see
the local priest.
“The priest shall examine
the disease on the skin of his body,” says the book of Leviticus, “and if the
hair in the diseased area has turned white and the disease appears to be deeper
than the skin of the body, it is a leprous disease; after the priest has
examined him he shall pronounce him ceremonially unclean” (13:3).
“Hmmm,” the priest would
say, examining the boy at arm’s length, covering his mouth and nose with his
prayer shawl. “This looks bad. This looks very bad.” And then, straightening
himself, he would drop the shawl and look at the boy’s mother with sad eyes,
knowing what his next words would mean: “This boy has leprosy,” he would say.
“He is unclean.” And then, according to the law, there would be only one thing
left to do.
“The person who has the
leprous disease shall wear torn clothes,” says the book of Leviticus, “and let
the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry
out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease;
he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp”
(13:45-46). And so it would be that this boy, who had been an ordinary boy,
with friends and family and maybe even a dog, would become a leper, living in
the hut his father would make for him outside the village, eating the food his
mother would bring each day, but other than that cut off from the world of the
living, cut off from the life he had enjoyed. A leper.
To be fair to the book of
Leviticus those laws had been given to keep the whole village from becoming a
leper colony. Leprosy was understood to be a highly contagious disease,
requiring the quarantine of those who had it in order to keep it from spreading
to everyone else. The problem is not with the book of Leviticus but with what
happens to human beings when you give them the authority to pronounce some
things clean and other things unclean. They become fascinated with the
difference. They draw finer and finer lines. They make more and more laws.
In a book called
Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time New Testament scholar Marcus Borg
writes that by the time of Jesus the religious leaders of Israel had become
obsessed with the idea of cleanliness.
They had as their guiding principle the words of Leviticus 19:2: “You shall be
holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Holiness, they believed, was God’s
defining attribute, and for them holiness was separation from anything that was
unholy, anything that was unclean. So, while your mother might have said,
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” the religious leaders of Israel would have
said, “Cleanliness is godliness.”
But what is clean? What
is unclean? And who gets to decide? The answer? The religious leaders! And
in centuries of making such distinctions they had come up with an elaborate
“purity code” to distinguish between those who were “in” and those who were
“out” as far as God was concerned. According to Borg those who were “in” were
typically pure, righteous, healthy, rich, Jewish, and male. Those who were
“out” were impure, unrighteous, diseased, poor, Gentile, female, or any
combination of the above.
Not surprisingly, those who were most “pure” were those who were most like the
religious leaders themselves, and those who were least “pure” were those who
were least like them. Do you see how it makes a difference who gets to make the
rules?
But before we start
condemning the religious leaders of ancient Israel we need to recognize how much
we are like them. We have come up with our own purity codes, our own ways of
determining who is clean and who is unclean. For example, until the last
election the race for president of the United States has always come down to a
contest between two white, educated, affluent men. It is a strong statement
about whom we judge to be “clean” and “unclean” in this country. For more than
two hundred years, as Americans cast their votes for such people they cast them
against the non-white, uneducated, poor, and female citizens of our nation.
But before we start
condemning public opinion take a look around you this morning. If we have
gathered in the name of the One who loves the little children, “red and yellow,
black and white,” why are so many of us only white? Why are so many of us
educated? Why are so many of us affluent? There are exceptions to the rule, of
course—people who are brave enough and self-confident enough to go to church
wherever the Spirit leads them—but most of us tend to go where feel most
comfortable, and we tend to be most comfortable with people who are just like
us. Although we are not always conscious of it, we have come up with our own
purity code, and although we may not be able to articulate it, most of us know
the difference between the kind of person who would be a “good prospect” for our
church and the kind of person who would not.
If Jesus did become
“filled with rage,” as a few of the old manuscripts attest, it was because of
this: it was because some in his time who considered themselves righteous had
drawn a circle around themselves and pronounced everyone inside the circle clean
and everyone outside the circle unclean, including the leper who knelt at Jesus’
feet. And if Jesus was moved with pity, as most of the old manuscripts affirm,
it was because the leper said to him, with tears leaking from his eyes, “If you
choose, you can make me clean.” Did you hear that? He didn’t say, “You can
make me well.” He didn’t say, “You can make me whole.” He said, “You can make
me clean,” because in his time and culture the difference between being in and
being out was the difference between being clean and unclean. And Jesus said—in
a voice filled with emotion—“I do choose. Be made clean!” And then, breaking
through the man-made barrier between purity and impurity, Jesus touched the
untouchable, and “immediately,” Mark says, “the leprosy left him, and he was
made clean.”
I believe it was right
there, in that moment, that Jesus came up with his own code—not a code of
purity, but a code of compassion. In Luke 6:36, in language so similar to
Leviticus 19:2 as to be an intentional substitute for it, Jesus says, “Be
compassionate, as God is compassionate.” In that commandment Jesus was saying
that the defining attribute of God is not his holiness, but his compassion—his
ability to “feel with” those who are suffering and do something about it—and
that God’s people should share that attribute above all others.
When I was a pastor in
North Carolina some of us used to go out to a nearby trailer park on Saturday
afternoons to work with the children who lived there. They were the poorest of
the poor in that little town, and I thought it was just the kind of place where
Jesus would spend his time. So, once a week, some of us would go. There was a
woman in our group named Debbie who was short and round, and by the time she had
huffed and puffed her way up the hill to the trailer where we did our ministry
she would have to sit down. In the summer I would just bring a chair outside
for her and she would sit there in the yard as we rounded up the children.
There was one little
girl—“Neecie”—who would always come running to Debbie. Neecie was the dirtiest
child in the trailer park. None of the other kids would play with her and you
wondered if there was anyone at all who cared about her. Her hair was always
wildly out of place. She had stains on her clothes, grape jelly smeared on her
cheeks. She smelled of human sweat and chicken grease and dirty diapers. A
priest would have pronounced her “unclean.”
But Debbie didn’t.
Every Saturday afternoon
Neecie would come running straight to Debbie and beg to be lifted up into her
lap. I would watch as Debbie took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and then bent
down to scoop Neecie up into her arms. But then something beautiful happened.
Neecie would settle onto Debbie’s lap, relax into her embrace, and let out a
sigh of perfect contentment. And then she would always say the same thing: she
would look up at Debbie and say with a smile, “You soft!” (which really is the
highest compliment you can pay to a lap).
Let that image stay in
your mind like a billboard beside the highway. Let it fill you with rage that
such scenes are so rare in our world. Let it fill you with pity for that little
girl and all the others like her. And finally, let your eye fall on the caption
printed at the bottom of the picture and remain there until the words have been
engraved on your heart: “Be compassionate, as God is compassionate.”
—Jim Somerville, © 2009
Lord, teach us to look
outside the circle we have drawn around ourselves, to reach out to those who are
on the other side and draw them in. Help us see that the only thing separating
us is our own notion of what is clean and what is unclean. The whole world
belongs to you, and every person in it is precious to you. Help us see them as
you see them, and love them with your love, for it is in your name that we
pray. Amen.
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