Against Purity, Towards Doing Your Best
St. William Church
Homily 10 July 2022
Deuteronomy 30:10-14
Colossians 1:15-20
Luke 10:25-37
I once worked for a farmer who was very wise. He taught me one lesson in particular that has stuck with me for years. I don’t remember the context in which he delivered this lesson, but at the time, I was a freshly-minted college graduate with a degree in philosophy, a young idealist with an as-yet-uninterrogated white savior complex who was preparing to embark on a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in South America, and who was perpetually wrestling with all manner of doubt: existential, political, sexual, theological, you name it. So I imagine I had probably just conveyed to him my struggles with the tension of wanting to live in solidarity with marginalized persons while being funded by the Department of State of an imperialist superpower which surely was driven by less lofty motives. The wise farmer said, “Andrew, it’s not about purity, it’s about doing the best you can.”
The moral of the parable of the Good Samaritan is, it’s not about purity, it’s about doing the best you can. The lawyer, in testing Jesus, identifies and joins two Torah commandments: the admonition to “love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind” comes from Deuteronomy, and the one to “love your neighbor as yourself” comes from Leviticus. Now according to the footnotes in my trusty study bible, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho stretches about eighteen miles and involves a descent of about 3,200 feet. The priest and the Levite in the story were probably returning to Jericho from a service at the Temple, which still stood in Jesus’s day but had already been destroyed by the time the author of Luke/Acts was writing. The Romans destroyed the Temple after a series of Jewish revolts; Jesus was just one of many who claimed or was claimed to be the Messiah, the One who would restore the Davidic monarchy by throwing off the yoke of Roman oppression. The Romans, as Jesus’ crucifixion and the razing of the Temple show, were not too keen on this Messiah idea. The destruction of the Temple was among the most significant events in Jewish history, because the Temple was the center of Jewish/Judaic life. Jerusalem was the Holy City because it was the city where the Temple was located; it was a place of pilgrimage, a place of sacrifice, and the religious, organizational, cultural, social and political touchstone for the Jewish people. In addition to leveling the Temple in 70 CE, the Romans expelled Jews from Jerusalem, and the diaspora scattered around the Mediterranean. So, the Jewish faith and people faces at this point an existential crisis. Remember that this is long before planes, trains, and automobiles; there were no smartphones to speak of, nor tablets, except the kind made of stone—what made a people a people, for most of human history, was shared space, occupying the same piece of land, being “neighbors,” drinking from the same rivers and wells, raising animals on common grazing lands, speaking the same languages, singing the same songs, worshiping the same gods. Without the Temple, the Jews faced annihilation. It is truly historically remarkable that they were able to survive. The reason why they did survive was that they were able to shift the center of their peoplehood from a space (the Temple) to a text (the Torah). After the Temple was destroyed, without a geographical center to organize Jewish life, rabbinic Judaism made the Torah the center. Wherever you were located, you could still be a Jew, because you were unified to all Jews across time and space by this text. And even though the gospels place Jesus of Nazareth in opposition to the main rabbinical sect of his time, the Pharisees, his parable of the Good Samaritan stands within the ethical tradition of rabbinic Judaism, which was emerging at the time he lived. Over the next few centuries the rabbis would compose the Mishnah and then the Talmud, codify the Torah, and develop a robust theological and ethical tradition based on careful attention to the divine word and dialogical exploration of what it means for our lives in community.
And so we find Jesus, the rabbi, in this scene, setting up the priest and the Levite for their walk of shame. It is likely that these two Temple functionaries avoided contact with the wounded man for fear of being rendered ritually impure by coming in proximity to a corpse. For them, the essence of religious piety was maintaining rigid standards of purity by performing the correct rituals, praying the correct prayers, eating the correct foods, and the like. The brilliance of this narrative is that Jesus shows the horrific ethical consequences of the persistent human obsession with purity. He follows the theology of the priest and the Levite to its ridiculous conclusion that being good Jews in the sight of God requires them to defy the greatest commandment and turn their backs on their fellow human being in his moment of need. And they end up looking cowardly and hypocritical. Jesus sweetens the pot by making the hero of the story a Samaritan. Now you know that Samaritans were a hated minority in the sight of ancient Judeans. The reason for this is that they were descended from the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which was conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE (more than a century before the Southern Kingdom of Judah was conquered by Babylon). Some of the Israelites in the Northern Kingdom were exiled; others remained along with the Assyrians who resettled in the area. Over time, elements from these two cultural, religious and ethnic traditions gradually blended. Jews in the Southern Kingdom (of Judah/Judea) were later exiled in Babylon (but allowed to return by the edict of King Cyrus of Persia). But in the views of the Judeans, their Northern brethren, who would become the “Samaritans,” having mixed with Assyrian “pagans,” were “half-breeds,” not—here’s that word again—“pure” enough religiously, culturally, or ethnically to be considered equals. By making the Samaritan out to be the hero of the story because he treats the wounded man with mercy, while the supposed holy men allow their fixation on purity to trump their ethical responsibility to love their neighbors, Jesus is teaching a lesson about what it means to be a good Jew. In the words of a wise farmer, “it’s not about purity, it’s about doing the best you can.”
Being a good Jew, Jesus teaches, is not about observing the details of an individualistic ritual-based moral code. It’s not about saying the magic words. It’s not about offering the correct sacrifices or eating the right foods or observing the Sabbath in the proper way (i.e. it’s not about whether the chalice is made of gold or whether the bread is only wheat and water or whether the priest has a penis). Being a good Jew is about giving a damn about other people, even people you don’t know, enduring discomfort and making sacrifices and taking risks to preserve their safety, simply because that is what human beings owe each other. Now I don’t have to tell you that in teaching this, Jesus is not rejecting some law-bound “Jewish religion” in favor of a more ethical and compassionate Christianity. He is instead restating and renewing a Jewish prophetic tradition that stretched back centuries before him.
But damn, Christians have not been paying attention to his message. Instead we have totally ignored Jesus’ insistence that God wants us to care for each other, and we have continued this unholy obsession with purity and followed it to monstrous ends. Think of the Christian-dominated eugenics movement in the United States which in order to protect racial purity encouraged selective breeding between people of “superior” (white) races. Think of the Christian-dominated Nazi movement which in order to preserve Aryan purity made the ludicrous attempt to purge Jesus of his Jewishness, murder all Jews, LGBTQ+ persons, persons with disabilities, Roma, and other undesirables, and then create a master race to rule humanity. Think of the Christian-dominated Florida state legislature which in order to protect children’s sexual purity has passed a law prohibiting public school teachers from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. Think of the Christian-dominated state legislatures around the country including in Kentucky which in order to protect the myth of American purity want to prohibit teachers from telling the truth to children that the history of this country is awash in enslavement, colonialism and genocide. Think of the Christian-dominated Kentucky state legislature which passed a trigger law to protect women’s purity by forcing pregnant people to carry their pregnancies to term, even 12 year-old girls who become pregnant after being raped by their fathers, not to mention many other people who choose to end their pregnancies for reasons that—and I am speaking only for myself—for reasons that are their own damn business.
Oh, the filthy things we humans do in the name of purity.
I dated a girl in high school who wore a promise ring. It was given to her by her father, probably about the time she started puberty, and she was expected to wear it as a sign of her commitment to maintain her Christian purity by remaining a virgin until marriage. What right did her father have to force her to wear this? Her younger sister is now happily married, to another woman, which just goes to show you that the best-laid plans of mice, and MEN, often go awry.
Just imagine, though, the world we could have if we paid attention to the story Jesus tells and learned the lesson he is trying to teach here. It’s not about purity, it’s about doing the best you can.
Like that wise farmer who helped me, Jesus was a good teacher, which is one of the few precious reasons why, in spite of it all, I still dare to call myself a Christian.