"Purity and Hypocrisy"
Knox, 20 June, 2010 © Scott McAndless
Leviticus 18:1-4, 29-19:2, Luke 7:36-43, Luke 10:25-37
TheBananaKing tells me what to preach
If you ask people why they aren’t Christians or why they don’t go to church,
the number one answer you are going to get goes something like this: “I don’t
go to church because there are too many hypocrites in church.” But, unfortunately,
they often don’t go any further than that. They may recount their own experiences
with Christian hypocrisy or talk about stories that they have heard (and it
is, unfortunately, not too hard to come up with such stories) and that is certainly
valid. But, if we’re going to come to grips with this problem, we need to look
a little bit deeper than just experience.
When I put out my request to the world for non-church type people to tell me what I should preach about, I did expect that the issue of Christian hypocrisy would come up – and of course, it is a real issue that’s worth talking about – but I hoped that I would get more than just stories of people’s experiences. I hoped that there would be some real thought about the causes behind it. I wasn’t disappointed.
Very soon after I posted my video on the internet, I got a written response from someone who goes by the name of TheBananaKing in the reddit.com online community. He (I think it’s a he but I do apologize if I’m wrong) brought up the very real issue that Christians do not always live up to the truly high standards that they are called to. But his post, rather than dwelling on the cases of Christian hypocrisy that he has experienced or heard about seeks to delve deeper and look for what he sees as the root causes of such hypocrisy. And I think that it shows a lot of wisdom.
Here is what he says: “Do not seek purity. Dine with whores and tax collectors. Accept them as they are, and be nice to them for the simple reason that they are people.” Now, already, that sounds like pretty good advice for the church because it sounds a whole lot like something that Jesus would have said. It certainly reminds me of the ways in which Jesus interacted with people in his own day.
So why do we not do that? Why do we have a tendency in the church to treat certain people who are in the “out” group – people whom we identify as “sinful” for whatever reason that may particularly bother us at the time – as if they were somehow less than human? Jesus most emphatically did not do that – and he often got in a lot of trouble for it. Why do we fall into doing that so easily?
TheBananaKing’s doesn’t just observe this problem. He tries to explain to us why we make this mistake. Here is his advice: “Do not seek to avoid ‘sin.’ Do not seek to expunge it. Do not fear it. By doing so you divide the world into the ‘sinful’ and the ‘holy,’ and set yourself up for a siege mentality. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to… far worse things than the ‘sin’ you’re so all-fired worried about in the first place.”
The problem, he is suggesting, is in our approach to and attitude toward sin. And I think he has a point. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that we should just forget all about morality or doing the right thing. Obviously, I think, that is important – perhaps even more important than ever given all the things that seem to be going wrong in the world today. Surely we need to ever renew our commitment to doing what is right and kind and good.
But the problem is that when we talk of this in terms of ‘sin,’ it easily becomes something different from just an issue of trying to do what is right. It easily becomes an obsession with purity and that is when it starts causing us trouble.
Now, of course, this idea of creating a people who are pure and cut off from the contamination of sin is a part of our Christian tradition. This attitude is certainly present in the Old Testament. In the Book of Leviticus, God speaks to the Israelites and tells them that they are to be a special people who set themselves apart from the ways of the other nations around them. The Lord says to Moses, “Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: ‘Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.’”
And being holy, according to this long section in Leviticus which is often called the “Holiness Code” or the “Purity Code,” apparently means that they cannot do all of the things that the people around them in other nations do: “‘Everyone who does any of these detestable things—such persons must be cut off from their people. Keep my requirements and do not follow any of the detestable customs that were practiced before you came and do not defile yourselves with them. I am the Lord your God.’”
And, of course, this purity code is not just some sort of abstract idea. It gets very specific. It goes on for pages and pages in Leviticus listing one by one all the various practices of people who lived in the nations around Israel – often calling them disgusting or abominable or unclean.
Now I know that we would probably agree with some of these laws and prohibitions in the Purity Code. For example, the people of Israel are told, “Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another.” (Lev 19:11) That sounds like good and reasonable instruction. But other parts of this law really sound rather strange and unnecessary to us – like the command that makes it illegal to sow two different kinds of seed in the same field, that prohibit the crossbreeding of animals and that make it an infraction to wear a garment woven out of two different kinds of material. (Lev 19:19)
But, you see, the point of this Purity Code in the Bible was not to try and give some kind of moral guidance to the people. There were other sets of laws that tried to do that. This code was all about setting the people of Israel apart from the people in the other nations around them. It was about purity not morality. Basically, if the people of Israel followed all of these rules, it would make them look so very strange that there would be no doubt that these people were just plain weird. This would then reflect back on the God of Israel. The idea being, I guess, that if a people are going to look and behave that strangely, it must be because their God is really something special.
That is the basic assumption behind the Purity Code. It may have had some good, worthwhile moral guidance in it (mixed in here and there among the laws regulating how they could cut their hair) but moral guidance wasn’t the point of it, weirdness was. It was about setting the people of Israel apart from all the other people around them.
And there is a particular problem that comes with that kind of approach to religion. It means that you are dividing the world into “us” and “them” – into “good” and “evil” with you and your friends’ being the definition of good. TheBananaKing sums up the problem with this approach like this: “A person besieged on all sides by the forces of darkness, demons and hell, who is compelled to constantly battle the world and all that is in it, to defend their own little island of piety… is already in hell, I’d say – and making the world a far worse place than the ones merely getting on with their lives.”
And I think that there is no denying that this is exactly the approach to faith that many Christians have today. And that is a problem for lots of reasons. The most important reason is that this was an approach to faith that was completely rejected by Jesus. This is what we often fail to understand. Jesus did have all kinds of respect for the laws of Moses and the teachings of the Old Testament but this whole section of purity laws – all of those laws that had to do with sorting one people apart from the other and calling these ones pure and those ones impure – were the very ones that were always getting him in trouble because he didn’t follow them. He spoke against them in his parables.
In fact he said that the purity laws often got in the way of following what was the foundation of the Law – loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself. That’s what the Parable of the Good Samaritan is about. The priest and the Levite, they were both so concerned that they might break the purity laws and become unclean by coming into contact with someone who might just die from his wounds and so they passed him by on the other side. They valued maintaining the purity of themselves and their people more than they valued the common human decency that demands that you reach out and help someone in desperate need like that.
So Jesus clearly had little or no use for such an approach to faith. And yet we get caught up in it far too easily. And that is where we get into big trouble. People do sometimes call Christians hypocrites – people who do not practice what they preach. And this can certainly keep people away from the church – keep them away in droves.
Now I don’t have a huge problem – and I suspect that TheBananaKing wouldn’t have a huge problem – with Christian hypocrisy if it is merely a matter of us striving to be our best – desiring with all our hearts to love God and to love our neighbours as ourselves – and yet sometimes coming up short of that goal. Such a shortcoming is a part of what it means to be human. We all fall short and fail to be all that we were created to be. Such hypocrisy – if you want to call it hypocrisy – is not ultimately damaging to the church even if it is sometimes disappointing.
No what kills us is when we start to think in terms of us and them and saying that we are the ones who are right and righteous and pure and that they therefore cannot be unless they do what we tell them to do (even if we don’t always do it) – then, yes, just like TheBananaKing says, we start to look at the world as this place where we are constantly surrounded by darkness and sin and we start building our own private hell on earth.
It is when we operate out of that kind of world view that our hypocrisy rears its ugly head – and it always will when you set up such a way of dealing with the world. And when we do that we deserve all the scorn that the non church people of the world will heap upon us for our hypocrisy.
So what do we do? It is not a matter of giving up believing in our fundamental truths. We should certainly continue to strive to live up to the example of Christ and we should do as he told us and live according to the heart of the Law by loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves. But we do have to give up the idea that that somehow makes us qualified to look down on others for whatever reason, to judge them or to tell them what they have to do to suit our own notions of what constitutes purity.
And if we can’t do that, then get used to hearing the accusation of hypocrite – it will be well deserved. We are followers of Jesus. And that means that we are supposed to live with the attitudes that he had. We are not intended to be a people apart from the people of this world. We are supposed to love them and go among them without fear of any sort of contamination or impurity just like Jesus did. I thank TheBananaKing, who identifies himself as an atheist, by the way, for reminding us of this absolutely central component of the Christian gospel.