June 16, 2013

Glynn Cardy

Pentecost 4     Luke 7:36-8:3

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To understand our Gospel reading this morning, the story of the woman washing Jesus' feet at the meal table of Simon the Pharisee [Luke 7:36 - 8:3], it is necessary to know something of Jesus' politics, and the religio-political system he was confronting. This sermon will draw significantly on some work of Marcus Borg's[i].

Jesus said, "Be compassionate as God is compassionate" [Luke 6:36]. For Jesus, compassion was the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centred in God. Compassion was not simply an individual virtue but a way of expressing an alternative socio-political vision. Compassion was, and is, political.

Compassion means feeling the suffering of someone else and being moved by that suffering to do something. In Hebrew to say that God is compassionate is to say God is 'womb-like'. As a mother loves the children of her womb, so God loves us and feels for us. Compassion has nuances of giving life, nourishing, and caring.

Contrary to, and in contra-distinction to, this vision of God as compassion the first century Jewish world extolled holiness. "Be holy as God is holy" [Leviticus 19:2]. 

To understand the role holiness played in that world we need to understand how the purity system operated. Holiness was understood to mean 'separate from everything unclean'. One's purity status depended to some extent on birth. Priest and Levites - both heriditary classes - came first, followed by 'Israelites' followed by converts to the faith. Further down the list were those of illegitimate birth, followed by those men with damaged testicles and those without a penis.

But one's degree of purity or impurity also depended on behaviour. Those observant of the legal codes were 'pure'. The worse of the non-observant were 'outcasts'. They included occupational groups like tax collectors and shepherds. The observant were called 'righteous', and the non-observant 'sinners'. Although the word sinners had a range of meanings it did not include everyone - as it does in much Christian theology today - but rather particular groups of people.

Physical form was associated with purity. People who were considered not 'whole' - the maimed, the chronically ill, lepers and eunuchs - were on the impure side of the spectrum.

Economic status was also associated with purity. Though to be rich did not automatically make one pure, being abjectly poor did. To some extent, this association resulted from popular mythology, still prevalent today, which sees wealth as a blessing from God. And to some extent, it arose because the abjectly poor could not in practice observe the purity laws.

One's gender also was a determinant of purity. Like with wealth, there was nothing about being male that made one automatically pure. However, men were considered to be purer than women. The bodily processes of childbirth and menstruation were considered sources of impurity. Generally, consistent with the status of women in a patriarchal culture, women were seen as second class.

Lastly, the polarity of pure and impure was correlated with whether one was a Jew or Gentile. Again, being Jewish didn't guarantee purity. But being Gentile guaranteed impurity.

These sharp social boundaries were maintained by the institutions of the Jerusalem temple and the priesthood. Priests were bound by more stringent purity rules. Moreover, the income of both temple and priests depended upon 'tithes' - taxes on agricultural produce. Tithing was closely linked to purity; untithed produce being impure and thus not able to be purchased by the observant. So priests, purity, and money were all linked together.

It is in the context of a purity system that created a world with sharp social boundaries between pure and impure, righteous and sinner, health and ill-health, male and female, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, that we can see the sociopolitical significance of compassion. In the message and activity of Jesus we see an alternative vision: a community shaped not by the ethos and politics of holiness, but by the ethos and politics of compassion.

Many of Jesus' sayings criticised the purity system. He criticised a system that emphasised tithing but neglected justice. Tithes on produce amounted to taxes paid to the priests and Temple, and untithed produce was labeled 'impure'. The labeling of goods as 'pure' and 'impure' was therefore a financial rort. Those who couldn't pay tithes were the very poor, who were then themselves labeled 'impure' or sinners. Jesus tried to turn the purity system inside out by speaking of purity being on the inside, in the spiritual heart, and not on the outside, with external observance.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is very clear in its critique of the purity system. The priest and the Levite who walked on past a man they believed to be half-dead. They were to maintain a level of purity that would be violated by contact with death. The Samaritan (who not incidentally, was radically impure due to his race and religion) on the other hand is described as the one who acted compassionately. The parable was criticising the holiness system and advocating the path of compassion.

It was not only in his teachings but in his behaviour that Jesus critiqued the prevailing purity system. Jesus touched lepers and haemorrhaging women. As we will hear next Sunday he entered a graveyard inhabited by a man with unclean spirits who lived in the vicinity of pigs. 

One of Jesus' most characteristic activities was an open and inclusive meal table. Sharing a meal in the Middle Eastern world represented mutual acceptance. Pharisees and others would not eat with someone considered impure, and no decent person would share a meal with a sinner. Thus what Dom Crossan calls Jesus' 'open commensality'[ii] was a direct attack on the holiness system and a way of enacting his vision of compassion.

This of course is the basis of what Christians today call the Eucharist or Holy Communion. This ritualized meal we partake in is not primarily a personal interaction with an invisible God or that God's 'real' or symbolic embodiment in bread and wine. Rather Communion is an invitation to commit oneself to a political vision, centred in Jesus, a vision of mutuality, equality, and compassion, to be supported and empowered by one another in living out that vision, and often to find the Spirit of Jesus inexplicably sustaining us in that commitment.

The inclusiveness of Jesus' movement, embodying a radically alternative political vision, is writ large in the Gospel stories about women. In Jesus' world women had few of the rights of men. They could not be witnesses in court or initiate a divorce. They were not to be taught the Torah (perhaps because the ability to interpret Torah was considered a form of power). They were radically separated from men in public life. Respectable women did not go out of the hose unescorted by a family member. Adult women were to be veiled in public. Meals outside of the family were always male-only affairs (and if women were present at such meals they were perceived as prostitutes). A woman's identity was in her father or husband. Women were the victims of male projections.

In this context, the role of women in the Jesus movement is striking, and the stories of his interactions with women remarkable. Think of his relationship with Mary and Martha, and being hosted by them. Think of him learning from, and being bested in an argument with, the Syro-Phoenician woman. Think of the women who were a part of the itinerant group that followed him, financially supported him, and did not desert him at the cross. As Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza says, Jesus tried to model a 'discipleship of equals'.[iii]

And lastly think again too of our Gospel reading today. Jesus defended a woman who outraged an all-male banquet at Simon the Pharisee's house not only by entering it, not only by being unveiled and her hair unbraided, but by intimately washing his feet and drying them with her hair (thereby making Jesus 'impure'). When questioned Jesus defended her not just with the parable about cancelling debts - which inferred that she was a worse person than Simon - but by radically reversing that inference in declaring the woman a better host than Simon. Jesus concluded with a hugely significant theological and political statement: It is great love that cancels out any wrongdoing, not by observing the letter of the law, not by tithing, not by obeying the priests and Pharisees. It is the way of compassion that reveals the heart and intent of God. And it is the way of compassion that we are encouraged to emulate.

[i] Borg, M. Meeting Jesus Again For The First Time, San Francisco : Harper, 1995 p.46ff

[ii] Crossan, D.J. The Historical Jesus: the life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant

[iii] Schussler Fiorenza, E. In Memory of Her