Every time I enter our church, a small signboard by the side of the door catches my eye: “Remove the shoes from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” As one who believes in essential etiquette on all occasions, I have always removed my shoes before entering any place of worship, but I wonder about the connection between any ‘burning bush’ experience I might have and footwear. I am also stumped when my daughter asks me why Achen insists that women cover their head in church (once he even admonished them). Or why the Sunday school teacher wants children to wear white on certain occasions. What is our idea of holiness, piety and purity?
The metaphors we use unconsciously in the language to depict ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are either “up” and “down” or “white” and “black”. For instance, happy is denoted with an ‘up’ (lifting spirits up) and sad with ‘down’ (down in the dumps). In Christian parlance, being pure is to be “washed as white as snow”. If so, can sin and evil but be black (Yuvajana Sakhyam skits have Satan wearing black)? Hence the preference for white garments for worship and the symbolism of the “long white robes over yonder”. Remember the Sunday school song, “I wish I had a little white box/To put my Jesus in..../I wish I had a little black box/To put the devil in....?
By substituting black with white and vice-versa in his poem ‘White comedy’, Benjamin Zephaniah, who has Caribbean roots, amply illustrates how the colour ‘white’ has been associated with goodness and cleanliness and ‘black’ with evil and dirt.
“I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic/
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot...
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death....”
In the social world, these good-bad and white-black metaphors get translated into saints and sinners, the righteous and the guilty (and even the upper caste and the lower caste). Aren’t we familiar with such talk in everyday Christian life?
Dr. Richard Beck, professor and experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University in the United States, describes this theme of socio-moral disgust in his book, Unclean. A popular blogger (www.experimentaltheology.
Beck bases his book on the text in Matthew 9 and Matthew 12 where Jesus tells the Pharisees, “I require mercy, not sacrifice.” The Pharisees were visibly upset at Jesus dining with “tax collectors and sinners”. In another instance, Paul says to people in the Corinthian church, “I hear when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you….” The divisions here, scholars say, are about how a certain group of people were treated and how there were different meals set for them.
Beck builds on the work of theologian-scholars Walter Brueggemann and Fernando Belo that within Israel there were two competing visions of uprightness before God—the Levitical or priestly vision and the prophetic or justice vision. One focused on cultic purity (ritual purity) while the other focused on “rehabilitative activity to care for the poor and marginalised”. “The Pharisees attain their purity by excluding ‘tax collectors and sinners’ from their company. Jesus rejects this form of ‘holiness’,” says Beck. Jesus asks the Pharisees to go and learn what it means by the expression in Hosea 6:6 that God desires “mercy, not sacrifice”.
Does the church foster an attitude of ‘sniggering superiority’ over people? I believe to an extent it does. For instance, as Beck says in an interview, “the logic of disgust manifests itself in the feelings of disgust toward people whose perceived sins violate the rules of purity”. This explains, in part, why there is a perceived hierarchy of sin. Our response to some sins like sexual immorality or drunkenness is more rigid than the response to sins like idolatry or greed or theft (even earning money by unfair means). Is not corruption a moral failure?
So, who is clean, who is unclean? Jesus touched a leprosy patient and healed him (Mark 1: 40-42), healed the woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years (Matthew 9:20), and took a dead damsel by the hand and raised her to life (Mark 5: 41), all of which were said to cause defilement in the Old Testament. He touched the untouchable! This when he called teachers of the law and Pharisees ‘whitewashed tombs’.
“Psychologically speaking, mercy and purity pull us in opposite directions. And behaviorally, as we see in Matthew 9, we have to make a choice: follow Jesus as he crosses the purity boundary or stand with the Pharisees who have opted for quarantine,” says Beck.
He speaks about how the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper can be an enactment of Jesus’ practice of welcoming and eating with tax collectors and sinners. “Well, that idea works for faith traditions that practice open communion,” he says. “For communities practising closed communion the exact opposite is going on—the Eucharist is a location of exclusion, a place where a boundary is drawn between insiders and outsiders.”
All of this, I agree, is easier said than done. But we need to begin somewhere. “The will to give ourselves to others and ‘welcome’ them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. This will … transcends the moral mapping of the social world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’” (Miroslav Volf).
The book Unclean, as a reviewer writes, is bound to startle and dismay many church folk, especially those who like their religion "nice".
The metaphors we use unconsciously in the language to depict ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are either “up” and “down” or “white” and “black”. For instance, happy is denoted with an ‘up’ (lifting spirits up) and sad with ‘down’ (down in the dumps). In Christian parlance, being pure is to be “washed as white as snow”. If so, can sin and evil but be black (Yuvajana Sakhyam skits have Satan wearing black)? Hence the preference for white garments for worship and the symbolism of the “long white robes over yonder”. Remember the Sunday school song, “I wish I had a little white box/To put my Jesus in..../I wish I had a little black box/To put the devil in....?
By substituting black with white and vice-versa in his poem ‘White comedy’, Benjamin Zephaniah, who has Caribbean roots, amply illustrates how the colour ‘white’ has been associated with goodness and cleanliness and ‘black’ with evil and dirt.
“I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic/
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot...
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death....”
In the social world, these good-bad and white-black metaphors get translated into saints and sinners, the righteous and the guilty (and even the upper caste and the lower caste). Aren’t we familiar with such talk in everyday Christian life?
Dr. Richard Beck, professor and experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University in the United States, describes this theme of socio-moral disgust in his book, Unclean. A popular blogger (www.experimentaltheology.
Beck bases his book on the text in Matthew 9 and Matthew 12 where Jesus tells the Pharisees, “I require mercy, not sacrifice.” The Pharisees were visibly upset at Jesus dining with “tax collectors and sinners”. In another instance, Paul says to people in the Corinthian church, “I hear when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you….” The divisions here, scholars say, are about how a certain group of people were treated and how there were different meals set for them.
Beck builds on the work of theologian-scholars Walter Brueggemann and Fernando Belo that within Israel there were two competing visions of uprightness before God—the Levitical or priestly vision and the prophetic or justice vision. One focused on cultic purity (ritual purity) while the other focused on “rehabilitative activity to care for the poor and marginalised”. “The Pharisees attain their purity by excluding ‘tax collectors and sinners’ from their company. Jesus rejects this form of ‘holiness’,” says Beck. Jesus asks the Pharisees to go and learn what it means by the expression in Hosea 6:6 that God desires “mercy, not sacrifice”.
Does the church foster an attitude of ‘sniggering superiority’ over people? I believe to an extent it does. For instance, as Beck says in an interview, “the logic of disgust manifests itself in the feelings of disgust toward people whose perceived sins violate the rules of purity”. This explains, in part, why there is a perceived hierarchy of sin. Our response to some sins like sexual immorality or drunkenness is more rigid than the response to sins like idolatry or greed or theft (even earning money by unfair means). Is not corruption a moral failure?
So, who is clean, who is unclean? Jesus touched a leprosy patient and healed him (Mark 1: 40-42), healed the woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years (Matthew 9:20), and took a dead damsel by the hand and raised her to life (Mark 5: 41), all of which were said to cause defilement in the Old Testament. He touched the untouchable! This when he called teachers of the law and Pharisees ‘whitewashed tombs’.
“Psychologically speaking, mercy and purity pull us in opposite directions. And behaviorally, as we see in Matthew 9, we have to make a choice: follow Jesus as he crosses the purity boundary or stand with the Pharisees who have opted for quarantine,” says Beck.
He speaks about how the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper can be an enactment of Jesus’ practice of welcoming and eating with tax collectors and sinners. “Well, that idea works for faith traditions that practice open communion,” he says. “For communities practising closed communion the exact opposite is going on—the Eucharist is a location of exclusion, a place where a boundary is drawn between insiders and outsiders.”
All of this, I agree, is easier said than done. But we need to begin somewhere. “The will to give ourselves to others and ‘welcome’ them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. This will … transcends the moral mapping of the social world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’” (Miroslav Volf).
The book Unclean, as a reviewer writes, is bound to startle and dismay many church folk, especially those who like their religion "nice".
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