Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

When asked to eat the “unclean” animals, core disgust is the presenting problem for Peter. That is, issues of food and food-aversions are being discussed. But the issue, Peter eventually discovers, is not about contaminated food, it’s about contaminated people. Core disgust is the surface level problem, but sociomoral disgust is the deeper issue.

Rather than focusing on “unclean” people Jesus focuses on the boundary separating “clean” from “unclean.” As Volf says, “these boundaries themselves were evil.” The inherent difficulty with this reframing was that Jesus’ notion of sin—exclusion—brought him into conflict with the Levitical purity codes (or how those codes were interpreted). Holiness demands boundaries and quarantine. Jesus’ ministry of table fellowship was dismantling these boundaries and breaking the quarantine.

one way of approaching the gospel accounts is to see Jesus formally addressing the unresolved conflict between the purity and justice traditions within the life of Israel.

the symbolic system is organized first and foremost as a defense against the violence of contagion, the impurity of the confused and formless

certain persons, based upon appraisals of contagion, were excluded from these sociomoral spaces: table, house, and sanctuary. These “unclean” people were denied table-fellowship and access to sacred spaces. Into this milieu Jesus enters, preaching a subversive message that undermines the contagion view of sin by allowing the “unclean” entrance into the “family space” of table fellowship.

A stronger formulation of this conclusion is to say that Jesus is privileging the prophetic tradition over the priestly tradition. In the great debate between the two traditions, Jesus resolves the “profound tension” by decisively siding with the prophetic impulse. Jesus explicitly echoes the prophets and declares that God desires “mercy, not sacrifice.”

Jesus doesn’t need to be so radical. He could have simply said: God desires mercy and sacrifice. Instead, Jesus echoes Hosea’s more radical claim: God desires mercy, not sacrifice. Phrased another way, given how Jesus deconstructs sacrifice in the gospels, God demands mercy as sacrifice.

the Pharisees were not making a logical error in Matthew 9. They were living within a coherent moral and social paradigm. Unfortunately, that paradigm was producing noxious social and moral outcomes.

there is a psychological conflict between mercy and sacrifice. What makes the tension so real and acute is that mercy and sacrifice create lived experiences that are fundamentally incompatible.

The self is defined by a boundary. That which is inside this boundary is embraced as a part of the self. That which is outside of this boundary is rejected as alien and other. And this distinction is emotionally marked by the disgust response.

as the notion of “one flesh” highlights, love is a form of inclusion. The boundary of the self is extended to include the other.

Disgust erects boundaries while love dismantles boundaries.

During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination.

Scapegoating has become, for the most part, morally transparent. When named, we consider scapegoating to be a social evil. In contrast, the monstrous tends to obscure the scapegoating mechanism.

the monster is often a symbol of degradation and contamination. In this, the monster is sub-human,

This degradation triggers disgust and activates the expulsive response. The monster must be expelled or eliminated. This means that, once created, the monster often functions as a scapegoat.

purification is accomplished by an act of expulsion. Something vile on the “inside” is forced “out.” Scapegoating is the religious and social analogue of the vomit response in disgust, a violent rejection of a contaminant from the body. This is the same dynamic seen with the expulsion of monsters from the community. Monsters and their ilk, representing degradation and defilement, must be expelled from the community to secure a “cleansing.”

Sacrifice was the cultural innovation that aided humans in managing this violence.

it is also no coincidence in Matthew 9 that Jesus’ acts of table fellowship created an experience of the monstrous, a transgressive union of the sacred and the profane. And, as an experience of the monstrous, Jesus’ actions were perceived as malevolent and dangerous.

We don’t think we are scapegoating when we go after monsters because, well, they are monsters.

for readers of the gospel, the violent mechanism of this “peace” is exposed and discredited. The “peace” of sacrifice is no peace at all. We know the scapegoat was innocent.

Monsters are transgressive hybrids, objects of desecration and degradation. Consequently, sociomoral disgust makes it difficult for us to step back from monster-hunting crusades to expose the scapegoating mechanisms at work within our own hearts and minds.

moral circle.

Once you are admitted into this moral space, affection and warmth flow naturally and instinctively. I don’t have to work at feeling affection for my wife, mother, sons, or best friends. Inside the moral circle affection is like breathing; it’s just a natural part of being human. This is largely due to the mechanisms observed in the last chapter, the psychic fusion and identification of the extended symbolic self.

People on the outside of the moral circle are treated instrumentally, as tools to accomplish our goals in the world. In Kantian language, people inside the moral circle are treated as ends in themselves while people on the outside of the moral circle are treated as means to our ends.

The anthropologist Levi-Strauss once wrote that “Humankind ceases at the border of the tribe.”

The phenomenon of seeing people as less than human is called infrahumanization.5 Historically, infrahumanization occurs when one group of people comes to believe that another group of people does not possess some vital and defining human quality such as intellect or certain moral sensibilities.

Gottman and colleagues have newlywed couples discuss an aspect of their marriage that is a point of conflict. During the interaction the researchers code the emotions of the husband and wife as they discuss the conflict. Gottman’s research has shown that divorce can be successfully predicted for newlywed couples if negative emotions dominate over positive emotions in the exchange.

Given that both contempt and disgust are implicated in hierarchy (feelings of superiority) and infrahumanization (judgments that a person is sub-human), it should be clear how disgust and contempt would signal the severest kind of relational distress.

Peter, the first to cross the sociomoral boundary between Jew and Gentile in Acts 10, struggles to maintain this embrace. According to Paul’s account in Galatians 2, in the face of social pressure Peter is tempted to “separate” from the Gentile believers, refusing to engage with them in table fellowship. In short, despite the example of Jesus the practice of table fellowship was a location of conflict and struggle within the early church

the case of Corinth is illustrative because the emotional dynamics of exclusion—contempt and disgust—are clearly on display. More, because the issues in Corinth were socioeconomic in nature rather than disputes over Levitical purity codes, the troubles in Corinth are more accessible to modern readers.

Given that the Lord’s Supper symbolized and reenacted Jesus’ ministry of table fellowship, entering into his practices of welcome, inclusion, and hospitality, it was outrageous that the Lord’s Supper had became a location of exclusion and social stratification.

The Lord’s Supper universalizes the language of family and kinship. People dislocated by race, blood ties, and socioeconomic class are embraced and included through their participation in the Lord’s Supper. Consequently, this ritual dramatically symbolizes and reenacts (in flesh and blood) the ministry of Jesus in the gospels. More, the practice of the Lord’s Supper prepares the Christian community for mission. After practicing welcoming others (and being welcomed in return) to the “Lord’s Table” Christians leave the ritual to practice embrace at every table.

we observe in all this how the practice of the Lord’s Supper expands the moral circle. By universalizing kinship language the Lord’s Supper is actively pushing against the sociomoral fissures of disgust and contempt.

the Lord’s Supper is a profoundly deep and powerful psychological intervention.

Through imagination and participation, the psychology of disgust, which activates the dynamics of exteriority and exclusion (from simple disdain to genocide), is dismantled and rebuilt into the image of Christ. Participation in the Lord’s Supper, then, is an inherently moral act. In the first century church, and in our own time, people who would never have associated with each other in the larger society sit as equals around the Table of the Lord.

Most poor Christians would not have had regular access to meat. The meat the lower classes did eat was often the meat made available to the public during the pagan religious festivals. Thus, for poor Christians meat was strongly associated with pagan religion, the life they renounced when they joined the Christian community. By contrast, the rich were able to eat meat more regularly, being able to buy and prepare meat in their own homes. Thus, for the rich the meat/temple association was weakened over time.

as a lived expression of Jesus’ inclusive fellowship, the rich and the poor in Corinth were to welcome each other and step into the egalitarian embrace of the Lord’s Table. But something, as we have seen, was amiss in Corinth. The wealthy members were, in various ways, expressing contempt for the poor in the church.

it appears that the Corinthian church was treating its communal meal, eaten prior to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, as a private dinner party followed by a convivium (i.e., drinking party).

Generally, high status guests ate with the host in a separate room where they were served first and were given the best food and drink. Lower status guests were seated elsewhere in the house, were served last, and were served food of lesser quality. It appears that the wealthy patrons of the Corinthian church had imported these social practices into the life of the church.

Although the notion of “wait for” could apply to the order of food service, Witherington notes that the word ekdechomai often has the sense of “welcome” and “hospitality.”

what was bothering Paul was less the issue of who was served first but the separation, segregation, privileging, and hierarchical nature of the gathering. This is clear in Paul’s concern over “differences.” The word for “differences” is haireseis, from which we get our word heresy. The later technical definition of heresy was a difference of belief, but the original and more primitive notion of heresy was sociological division and exclusion. The Corinthian Christians were heretical in how they were erecting divisions between themselves.

Primal heresy was about the practice of exclusion, not differences in belief. Woah.

Paul is arguing that, rather than expelling, hiding, or marginalizing these “less presentable” members, special attention should be given to care for, honor, and include these members in the body. Only then will there be “no divisions in the body.”

We need the contemptible among s in order to be the Church!

It could be argued that hospitality—the welcoming of strangers—is the quintessential Christian practice.

hospitality is a defining, central, and quintessential facet of Christian mission, then we learn something about the shape and character of sin and brokenness in human affairs. Specifically, what is so special about extending welcome? What wound is being attended to in the act of hospitality? What sin is being challenged and redeemed?

sin is often characterized by the forces of dehumanization.

the act of hospitality is fundamentally an act of human recognition and embrace.

Christian hospitality is not the watered down notion we observe in the “hospitality industry.” Hospitality isn’t simply a warm greeting. As we observed in the church at Corinth, the Lord’s Supper and the hospitality associated with it was a deeply countercultural act in the life of the early church.

hospitality also has a remedial function. Where people are abandoned, socially or economically, hospitality seeks to provide human affection and material care. In extreme cases, hospitality provides refuge for the victims of society. During WWII German citizens and entire towns provided sanctuary and refuge for their Jewish neighbors.

This typically only happened when the churches had been regularly practicing hospitality

At the end of the day, disgust is a protective mechanism. Thus, any assault on disgust and the practices of purity needs to face these dangers honestly and candidly.