Monday, Oct. 28
Leviticus 14:1 – 15:33 Click here to read
There’s an amusing scene in The Chosen when some of the followers of Jesus are in a synagogue when the rabbi is reading rules about ritual cleansing. Some of the congregation is having trouble staying awake…these rules have never been the most exciting reading in scripture.
As uninteresting as the verses can sound, they kick off two episodes titled “Clean” that do a good job of making sense out of them.
There were many things that could make a person ceremonially unclean, which simply meant they were unable to take part in worship (or in some cases had to limit contact with other people). Many of the things weren’t caused by wrongdoing on the person’s part.
A person could be made unclean by contact with an unclean object, even when that contact was necessary, such as preparing a body for burial or disposing of a dead animal.
A person could be made unclean by contact with some kind of contamination, like mildew or human waste. Those might be unpleasant, but aren’t necessarily wrong or sinful.
A person could be made unclean through illness or injury, or even a woman’s normal period. None of those carry an implication of guilt or wrongdoing.
While not addressed in these verses, we see elsewhere that a person can also be made ceremonially unclean through sinful actions, which is why we sometimes assume a necessary connection between uncleanness and shame, when they aren’t always connected.
The practical result of the purification laws is that they provide an entry point for return to ritual purity.
If you look around you, there are a lot of people who feel unclean, and even without the ritual law, this often makes them feel unworthy of fellowship with God and the church.
Sometimes these feelings come from the burden of sin, but often they come from things entirely beyond the control of the person. Abuse victims often suffer as much from unwarranted guilt and shame as they do from physical injuries.
Often feeling “dirty” or “not good enough” is what keeps people away from church and away from God. All too often we in the church, intentionally or unintentionally, reinforce that feeling in the way we react to people.
The ritual law provided a way to be reassured that you are once again “clean” enough to be part of the community and to stand before God. Sometimes the need for cleansing was literal, but most often it was symbolic.
We don’t want to tie it too closely to the idea of repentance and forgiveness, since uncleanness was not always the result of wrongdoing that required repentance, but the emotional benefit was similar: I once was isolated, but now am in a restored relationship.
It’s worth reminding ourselves the repeated phrase, “will be unclean until evening,” had a different connotation to the first people to hear this. In the Jewish reckoning, the new day began at dusk, not dawn.
The idea of being unclean until evening would have been a reminder that separation and isolation lasts for a season, but tomorrow is another day. We would call it the dawn of a new day, but the meaning is the same.