THIS Sunday, the lectionary returns to Mark’s Gospel, to a filleted version of seven.1-23. If left as an entire, it’s a plain-speaking passage. Jesus had little or no to say about homosexuality, nuclear weapons, and other modern issues. Yet, here he alludes to the natural strategy of defecation. Of course, the lectionary has cut that bit (v.19).
Jesus is less complicated to honour as Lord, it seems, when he’s as far removed as possible from the truth of odd, common humanity. We wish to depict him with angelic blue eyes, softly waving hair, flowing robes, infinite patience. God forbid that we should always have a Saviour with bad skin, knock knees, or a brief fuse.
In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, Jorge of Burgos wanted the world to be purged of laughter because he considered it an affront to God’s dignity, a display of the bottom a part of our human nature. Human nature craves concealment of what we truly are (Genesis 3.7). Fig leaves are big: they must be, to cover all that we might moderately conceal from God.
As filleted, the Gospel tackles the Lord’s teaching on “defilement”. Thanks to modern medicine, humankind has gained knowledge about processes of disease transmission. But, for many of our existence, we have now made do with unscientific categories like “dirt”, “germs”, or “humours”. Before the trendy era, people knew little concerning the processes of illness; so it was easy to confuse correlation with causation.
My Cambridge college’s third founder, John Caius, was a Sixteenth-century physician. He built the court that bears his name and has one side open to the weather, to maximise healthy air flow. Tudor Cambridge will need to have been a grimy, reeking place, especially so near the river. But it was vermin, not air, that had spread the Black Death within the time of our first founder, Edmund Gonville.
People often consider Jewish purity rules (kashrut) as a type of proto-hygiene, as if God’s ancient people had someway discovered that dirty hands could transmit infection, or result in ingestion of pathogens. In fact, those rules functioned more as a system of classification, to categorise foodstuffs and forestall contamination through bringing fundamentally different sorts of thing (reminiscent of milk and meat) into contact.
Physical stuff, Jesus says, cannot defile us through our eating of it or, by extension, our touching of it (Luke 8.43-48). What defiles us is what is an element of us, what stays with us even after we attempt to turn our backs on it. We may banish foul speech, foul conduct from our actions through monitoring, and self-control. But we cannot fully govern our instincts and appetites.
One way of understanding this teaching is to attract a contrast between the physical and moral universes. Food belongs to the realm of the physical, which is less necessary than the moral, or — within the case of Christianity — spiritual. Food just isn’t of itself evil. Outside the foundations of kashrut, it will probably corrupt us, or make us impure, only by the need or intention governing our act of eating.
But, after we have a look at the things that come out of an individual — the things that do corrupt — there isn’t a easy contrast between the physical, on the one hand, and the moral or spiritual on the opposite. The first things that Jesus mentions as corrupting definitely are physical: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery” (and slander) are all actions. But he goes on to incorporate inclinations and attitudes: “avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy. . . pride, folly”.
Any mistaken act diminishes us. But so, Jesus says, does an improper attitude on which we never act. Now, if even our uncontrollable thoughts “defile” us, we’re beyond saving, beyond hope. But I don’t think that Jesus is actually making failures of us all. What he means by “defilement” depends upon how we tackle the Greek verb.
Outside of the New Testament (and a single mention within the Apocrypha), this verb, koinoun, means “to make common, odd”. I would like to include this concept, balancing “defile” with the concept things that come out of us make us “odd”. God intended for us to be the alternative of “common/odd”: sacred moderately than profane (1 Corinthians 6.19). Sins of thought, motion, or omission, though, drag us away from the spiritual realm, and leave us floundering, sinking back into the mud and slime from which God made us.
The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
