The other day, I wrote about Mark 5 and the unifying response being Jesus’ response to uncleanness. Now, most of us don’t live in a society that makes such ceremonial distinctions though some of you will live in communities where halal or kosher laws matter. However, I think that the idea of uncleanness has power still for us. We can get the sense of it.
First of all, we recognise that some things are taboo. There’s a kind of uncleanness to them. It’s fascinating that sex and death still have that kind of association today. It has been said that the Victorians made sex taboo but could easily talk about death whereas we have reversed that. Actually, I think it depends on context. In some contexts people will still more happily talk about death than sex. Sometimes we would rather talk about neither.
Death, in our society, can still hold that kind of power that treats those associated with it to be feared or even embarrassed about. This after all is part of what the assisted dying debate is about, not so much the fear and shame of death but of the dying process. We want death to be clean and controlled, not messy. We want people sent away to clinics and hospices. We have a superstitious fear of them bringing death close to us. This is particularly so with dementia. And of course, there is still a taboo around suicide.
Moreover, sometimes those who are grieving can feel like the unclean, experiencing that sense that people don’t know what to say or how to be around them leading to isolation. A similar taboo extends to mental health with of course the vicious cycle that isolation and what you believe others think of you contributing to the downward cycle.
Coming back to sex and sexuality, this issue highlights like no other our tendency to categorise people by their temptations and struggles. A whole debate about desire and temptation grew around the question about whether someone who experiences same-sex attraction is sinning just through their orientation. By the way, Scripture is clear in James 1:13-15 that whilst we are tempted by our own desires so that desire gives birth to sin, the desire itself is not the sin.
Our national culture treats people as unclean because of their race and immigration status, or how they came into this country. We distinguish between legal and illegal asylum seekers just as the Victorians categorised the deserving and undeserving poor. It is striking that when Jewish communities first settled here, they were often ostracised and pushed out to build their synagogues away from the population, some on actual leper colony sites. We treat asylum seekers like lepers, we allow rumours and stereotypes to grow with the crimes of a few visited on the whole. Instead of leper colonies we have detention centres that nobody wants in their neighbourhood. And let’s be frank, if a hotel is making its rooms available either for asylum seekers or the homeless, it’s because it was no longer profitable to hire them out to holiday makers or businessmen.
One reason why “uncleanness” is such a powerful and holding word is because it describes how we often feel. People will talk about feeling dirty or being made to feel dirty because of what they have done or seen and sadly all too often because of what others have done to them.
In my previous article, I picked up on the fact that whilst most unclean categories are to do with symbolic or ceremonial uncleanness, there can be a reality to it. The unclean spirits or demons are identified as such because they bring real mess, chaos and harm into lives, they are spirits of death. I think that we can consider all illness and death as in a sense materially unclean because they reflect this disordered, messed up world. Uncleanness and death are tied up together.
It is likely then that at some point we will find ourselves falling in some way into the modern category of uncleanness. That’s why the message of Mark 5 is good news for each of us. Jesus the healer is the one who purifies and cleanses. He takes away the stigma or taboo, he takes away fear and shame. He makes us clean.
Faithroots 