untouchable jesus

From the gospel of Matthew:

When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy. Matthew 8:1-3 NIV.

Cartoon aside, here's what Richard Beck in unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality says about what the true Jesus did:

What is intriguing about this story is the sequence. Jesus touches the leper first. Then the command “Be clean!” is offered. That is, Jesus’ first move is into ritual defilement. By first touching the leper, Jesus intentionally and willfully seeks contamination, standing in solidarity with the unclean. This is striking because the expected sequence would be initial purification followed by contact. Jesus, surprisingly for the onlookers, does the opposite. Contact occurs first. Purification follows solidarity. And one can only wonder how various Christian communities approach this sequence in their own missional endeavors.

Beck, p. 76

Beck then goes on to discuss how the writer of Mark gives us several examples of how Jesus overturns the traditions of his day: when Jesus heals an “unclean” man in the synagogue, and then when he heals a leper after touching him first. Beck then comments,

… in this healing Jesus reverses the directionality and power of pollution (the attribution of negativity dominance). Rather than the unclean polluting the clean, we see, in Jesus’ touch, the clean making the polluted clean. Here, in Jesus, we see a reversal, a positive contamination. Contact cleanses rather than pollutes….
Soon after these events, in a parallel to Matthew 9, Jesus is found admitting “unclean” persons—tax collectors and sinners—to the sociomoral space of table-fellowship.

Beck, p. 81

Contrast Jesus' actions with what you see in church. Are "unclean" persons welcomed? How are those who are different treated? Are we willing to love and accept others where they are at?

go and sin no more

The story of the woman caught in adultery is amazing at many levels, from the trap the teachers of the law and Pharisees were trying to set to Jesus' way of exposing them:

At dawn Jesus appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

John 8:1-11 , NIV

But today, instead of seeing how life-giving this encounter is (literally and spirit-ually for the woman), some Christians have taken the phrase "go and sin no more" as the new golden rule. This is how it works: they identify people as sinners, and they apply the rule.

But Jesus said this once to one person, in a passage which is not found in the earliest manuscripts.  As someone named candeux said in a blog comment, "For one thing, we rarely read of Jesus calling individuals to repentance. In the case of prostitutes, I wonder if he recognized that these women were not choosing to be prostitutes because they were sex-starved but because they were forced into it for economic reasons (probably because they were unsuitable for marriage for one reason or another) and thus were in need of love and care more than they were in need of repentance." (comment source)

He saw, and sees, each person for who they are and where they are at. But many churches seem to have trouble with that, and I wonder if Jesus today might use the phrase one more time, addressing the church and its actions and attitudes toward lgbt people:

May 25th postscript: I also recommend checking out Richard Beck's post with accompanying comments on the topic of "Go and sin no more."

[why would I ever go there?]

grace: visual edition is an amazing book which combines the writings of Philip Yancey in his book What's so Amazing about Grace with great visuals. Here's one story which will give you a taste of the book and which also ties in with the theme of this blog:

"A prostitute came to me in wretched strait, homeless, sick, unable to buy food for her two-year-old daughter. Through sobs and tears, she told me that she had been renting out her daughter—two years old!—to men interested in kinky sex. She made more renting out her daughter for an hour than she could earn on her own in a night. She had to do it, she said, to support her own drug habit.

I could hardly bear hearing her sordid story. For one thing, it made me legally liable—I'm required to report cases of child abuse. I had no idea what to say to this woman. At last I asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help.
I will never forget the look of pure, naive shock that crossed her face.

'Church!' she cried. 'why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse.'"

What struck me about my friend's story is that women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?

Evidently the down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome among his followers. What has happened?

Yancey, p. 21

defining love

Brian, in a comment at Bridging the Gap, says:

I'm reminded of one of my favorite lines from Ellen Degeneres. She was musing about the weird habit some people have of saying something insulting and then saying "just kidding" as if that somehow erases the insult. "You don't know how to kid properly," she quips, "we should both be laughing."

Sometimes I want to yell at the church, "You don't know how to love properly. We should both be feeling the love!"

Brian at conversations-on-generous-spaciousness March 24, 2012 12:03 PM

Who defines love? Just the person claiming to be loving? Or do those who are apparently being loved have a say?

not good

[negativity dominance]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

Finally, consider the attribute of negativity dominance. The judgment of negativity dominance places all the power on the side of the pollutant. If I touch (apologies for the example I’m about to use) some feces to your cheeseburger the cheeseburger gets ruined, permanently (see above). Importantly, the cheeseburger doesn’t make the feces suddenly scrumptious. When the pure and the polluted come into contact the pollutant is the more powerful force. The negative dominates over the positive.

Negativity dominance has important missional implications for the church. For example, notice how negativity dominance is at work in Matthew 9. The Pharisees never once consider the fact that the contact between Jesus and the sinners might have a purifying, redemptive, and cleansing effect upon the sinners. Why not? The logic of contamination simply doesn’t work that way. The logic of contamination has the power of the negative dominating over the positive. Jesus doesn’t purify the sinners. The sinners make Jesus unclean.

Beck, p. 30.

See the naked jesus cartoon in the previous post.

There is an online discussion of the book at uncleantheology.blogspot.com

naked jesus

From the gospel of Mark:

A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”

“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”

But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

Mark 5:24-34 NIV

In Jesus' day, women who were having their period were ritually unclean, and anyone who touched them would also become unclean. This woman had been hemorrhaging for many years, and would have been considered unclean. Yet instead of rejecting her, Jesus rejected the social rules of his day. He blessed her with his response that included her by addressing her as daughter, acknowledging her faith, and then giving her a blessing for her future.

ecclesia

Because this drawing is explicitly violent, I recommend you read the background information to better understand what it is about:

The idea originally came to me in the context of I Corinthians 12:

12 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. 14 Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.
 15 Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. 19 If they were all one part, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, but one body. (NIV)

Here, rather than the foot feeling like it is not part of the body because it is not a hand, the foot is feeling like the hand is not part of the body. The additional influences are the idea that the church is missing out on the gifts which other parts of the body bring to it, and the idea of Christ being the head and the church being the body ("Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior" Ephesians 5:23b).

One day, as I was developing the drawing, I had outlined the body and then it came to me that I needed to add a particular implement. Drawing this implement was a disturbing experience for me due to the additional degree of violence it brought. Later, as I considered the drawing and what it meant, the words which are written below it came to me. While they are shocking at one level, there is also an element of hope and safety in them, tying in to Romans 8:38-39:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (NIV)

Ecclesia, by the way, is from the Greek word for church or congregation.

So we must ask, what parts of the body of Christ is the main part of the church rejecting? Who are these Christians who are being cut off and called "not body"? What is this costing them, and what does it cost the rest of the church?

rob goetze

[love and disgust]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

As the self gets symbolically extended so does disgust psychology, the primal psychology that monitors the boundary of the body. Disgust accompanies the self as it reaches into the world, continuing to provide emotional markers denoting “inside” versus “outside,” the boundary points of the extended symbolic self. With this understanding of the self in hand, we are well positioned to understand human love, intimacy, and relationality. Specifically, as the notion of “one flesh” highlights, love is a form of inclusion. The boundary of the self is extended to include the other. The very word intimacy conjures the sense of a small, shared space. We also describe relationships in terms of proximity and distance. Those we love are “close” to us. When love cools we grow “distant.” We tell “inside” jokes that speak of shared experiences. We have a “circle of friends.” “Outsiders” are told to “stop butting in.” We ask people to “give us space” when we want to “pull back” from a relationship. In sum, love is inherently experienced as a boundary issue. Love is on the inside of the symbolic self.

….

What we discover in all this is that disgust and love are reciprocal processes. Disgust erects boundaries while love dismantles boundaries. This was the conclusion of St. Catherine noted in the quote at the start of the chapter: sound hygiene was incompatible with charity. One also thinks of St. Francis rushing up to kiss the leper. Love is, at root, the suspension of disgust, the psychic fusion of selves.

Beck, pp. 86, 88.

See the jesus febrezus cartoon in the previous post.

jesus febrezus

It happened that as he made his way toward Jerusalem, he crossed over the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten men, all lepers, met him. They kept their distance but raised their voices, calling out, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"

Luke 17:11-13, The Message

While the cartoon is consistent with our western attitudes toward those who are unclean (whatever that means to each of us), this is not how the real Jesus responded. Here's the rest of the passage:

Taking a good look at them, he said, "Go, show yourselves to the priests."

They went, and while still on their way, became clean. One of them, when he realized that he was healed, turned around and came back, shouting his gratitude, glorifying God. He kneeled at Jesus' feet, so grateful. He couldn't thank him enough—and he was a Samaritan.

Luke 17:14-16, The Message

This is the first cartoon in my "unclean" series, inspired by reading Richard Beck's book unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality. I will be pairing these cartoons with related quotes from Beck (usually posted after the cartoon), which I recommend you read.
Edited June 25/2012

business as usual

What should be the church's "business as usual? What have you experienced it to be?

Churches and Christians often act as if their purpose is to focus on right and wrong, even to the point of enforcing this in the lives of others. What's with that?

Was Jesus' life focused on right and wrong, or on loving people and speaking the truth in ways that they could hear it? Granted, he also had this annoying habit (annoying particularly to the very religious people) of upsetting the status quo, overturning power structures, and breaking social mores. He probably wouldn't be welcomed in most churches....

[God's partiality]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

Consider, second, God’s partiality. In the biblical traditions, when God looks at a widow, for instance, God does not see “a free and rational agent,” but a woman with no standing in society. When God looks at a sojourner, God does not see simply a human being, but a stranger, cut off from the network of relations, subject to prejudice and scapegoating. How does the God who “executes justice for the oppressed” act toward widows and strangers? Just as God acts toward any other human being? No. God is partial to them. God “watches over the strangers” and “upholds the orphan and the widow” (Psalm 146:7-9) in a way that God does not watch over and uphold the powerful.

Why is God partial to widows and strangers? In a sense, because God is partial to everyone—including the powerful, whom God resists in order to protect the widow and the stranger. God sees each human being concretely, the powerful no less than the powerless. God notes not only their common humanity, but also their specific histories, their particular psychological, social, and embodied selves with their specific needs. When God executes justice, God does not abstract but judges and acts in accordance with the specific character of each person. Do we not read, however, that God’s Messiah will “not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth” (Isaiah 11:3-4). But should we conclude that his eyes will be closed when executing justice? To the contrary. He will judge truly because he will not judge by appearances and hear-say. God treats different people differently so that all will be treated justly.

Volf, pp. 221-222

ticket to heaven

Fr. Ron Rolheiser, omi, wrote:

"The great Jewish prophets, the forerunners of Jesus, coined a mantra which ran something like this: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land and the quality of justice in the land will be judged by how "widows, orphans and strangers" (biblical code for the three most vulnerable groups in society) fared while you were alive.

Jesus wouldn't disagree. When he describes the last judgment at the end of Matthew's Gospel, he tells us that this judgment will not be, first of all, about right doctrine, good theology, church attendance, or even personal piety and sexual morality, but about how we treated the poor. Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. Jesus and the great biblical prophets make that clear."

Source: WCR, posted Feb 7/2011; retrieved jan 14/2012
Thanks to Laurier for pointing me to this quote from Fr. Rolheiser.

It's pretty obvious who the orphans and widows are in our culture. Who are the strangers? Just people we don't know, or perhaps people we find to be strange (viz., different than us)? Who are the most vulnerable groups in our society?

sermon from the pit

[lady gaga, jesus, and little monsters]

Richard Beck on his blog has an excellent post about Lady Gaga and how she embodies the gospel:

In short, in this song [Bad Kid] Gaga is trying to get on the inside of these "monsters," to speak to their brokenness, sadness, loneliness and alienation. To society these are "bad kids." But Gaga sings to them "You're still good to me."

And I ask you, doesn't that sound a whole lot like Jesus?

Gaga calls out to the little monsters. And Jesus eats with tax collectors, sinners, and prostitutes.

...

This is what I think. I think every Christ-following church should start talking to their youth groups, saying unambiguously: We want you to be a wall of protection for kids like Jamey. Seek out and protect--emotionally and socially--every weird, weak, nerdy, lonely, queer kid at your school. We don't care if they are a goth, or a druggy, or a queer. Doesn't matter. Protect these kids. Churches should train their youth groups to be angels of protection, teaching them to find these kids and say, "Hey, I love you. Jesus loves you. So no one's going to bully you. Not on my watch. Come sit with me at lunch." That's what I think. I think every Christ-following church should start Guardian Angel programs like this, teaching their kids to stick up for kids like Jamey. Not with violence. But with welcome and solidarity. Because it's hard to bully a group. So let's welcome these kids into a halo of protection and friendship.

From The Gospel according to Lady Gaga by Richard Beck. Reading the entire post is recommended!

What a difference it would make for today's youth, if churches encouraged and equipped their young people in this way! What a challenge to be outwardly-focused in a way that is concrete and desperately needed.