Unclean! Unclean!
Written by Jim Essian, published March 2021
God has always been willing to get his hands dirty. Take the leper, for instance: “And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, ‘If you will, you can make me clean’” (Mark 1:40).
The leper is not suffering merely from a physical ailment. (Notice the man doesn’t ask for healing but to “make me clean.”) Leprosy in this culture is not just physical, but social and spiritual. He would have been ostracized by family, friends, and community. Stigmatized and scandalized, the leper walked around with a scarlet letter “L”— a man conveniently forgotten by his family and friends, like the uncle or cousin you don’t speak of at the family Christmas party.
Levitical law demanded the leper to announce his presence when approaching or being approached. They had to evangelize the bad news of their holistic and horrific state: “Unclean! Unclean!”
Can you imagine? “Unclean! Unclean!”
They thought if dirty touched clean it made clean dirty.
Read that last sentence again. Consider it. Is that what you believe?
Garbage In, Garbage Out?
Many of us—Christian and non-Christian alike—believe we are generally good people and so good must come out of us. When we are “bad” it is a cultural problem—this is the age-old polemic of nature versus nurture. Most of us think people are generally good and sometimes do bad things because of their upbringing, their current circumstances, or their response to the bad things others do.
Many Christians have a spiritualized perspective similar to this. We eschew “bad” places, people, and things (like bars, sinners, Miley Cyrus, and rated “R” movies), afraid we might “catch” something: “oh no! Fornication, alcoholism, help!” This is theologically incorrect and kind of dumb. This is the mindset of “garbage in, garbage out” that forsakes the noetic effects of Adam’s sin that the garbage is already in. Sin has infected and affected every aspect of who we are.
Hanging out with sinners happens alone.
Jesus hung out with sinners and prostitutes. He went to their homes and partied with them and ate with them—he was a “friend of sinners” (Matt 11:19). The garbage in, garbage out folk of Jesus’s day, the Pharisees, called him a “glutton and a drunkard.”
At one point Jesus is eating with a “garbage in, garbage out dude when a “woman of the city” (a prostitute) comes up to him with an expensive bottle of perfume and washes his feet with her tears, wipes them with her hair, and anoints his feet with the perfume (Luke 7:36– 50). A woman letting her hair down in that culture was almost equivalent to a woman taking her shirt off in our culture—this was a very intimate act, the only way she knew how to relate to men—and Jesus didn’t stop her; he didn’t rebuke her; he wasn’t afraid she would cause him to lust or sin. Rather, he says to her, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace” (Luke 7:50).
So garbage in, garbage out is wrong?
Yes.
“Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person” (Matt 15:10–11).
This was a complete paradox for the people of Jesus’s day who, much like us, thought that if they stayed away from lepers and prostitutes, they would be clean. But Jesus repeatedly condemns teaching like that. He calls the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” and people who clean the outside of a cup but not the inside. on the outside they appear righteous and moral, but on the inside trash piles up in the receptacle of their hearts and grime covers their soul. The inside needs cleaning first.
And do you know why culture after culture teaches some sort of this “garbage in, garbage out” garbage? This trash gives us control. It gives us the upper hand, seemingly. If we can grit our teeth and plug on through, maybe we can come up clean and righteous at the end— enough good deeds to outweigh the bad. It doesn’t work: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person” (Matt 15:18).
Sin is a heart issue, not a cultural issue. Sin is “in here,” not “out there.” We can’t stay away from sin because we can’t escape ourselves. We can’t run from a heart that is bent away from God and toward our own glory—we need a new heart; we need washing on the inside.
To be clear, there is wisdom in being circumspect about what we do, who we hang with, and what we allow to influence us (Ps 1:1–2). But our consideration of outside influences is a futile effort if we neglect the weightier matters of the law encroaching upon our hearts that reveal a more serious problem: We are unclean.
The good news then is not that God gives us instruction on how to keep out the garbage so it doesn’t get “in”; it is that Jesus gives us a new heart—he makes us clean—by taking the garbage that’s in, out. When we don’t grasp this gospel truth, we make outcasts of those whose tombs aren’t as whitewashed on the outside.
We might not have lepers, but we do have those who are stigmatized. And how we talk in our conversations around the table, our subcultured, hyper-religious dialogue in our small group gatherings, or our social media posts, tell the “unclean” to stay away.
What Jesus did next was more scandalous than the leper himself: “Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, ‘I will; be clean.’ And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:41–42). Jesus touches him! This would have made Jesus ceremoniously unclean. Jesus rails against conventional thinking, forsakes the “garbage in, garbage out” garbage theology of his day (as it is in our day), and becomes unclean in his place. Jesus becomes unclean so that the leper would be clean.
Jesus doesn’t just heal this man; he takes his place. He becomes his substitute; he becomes unclean.
Stains
Like the leper, we are also unclean. Afraid of getting dirty, fearful, or just indifferent to the messiness of life, we only play on the surface not realizing sin has stained us also. Like the religious folk before us, we stand under the woes of Jesus unless we fall under the mercy of Jesus: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt 23:27). Sin stains, and we are sinners.
No, you say, not me.
“There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth” (Prov 30:12).
What’s the big deal? No one is perfect. What’s a little sin? What’s one little white lie?
“And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell” (Jas 3:6).
Hell? That seems dramatic.
“But nothing unclean will ever enter [eternal life], nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Rev 21:27).
Ok, so I’ll try to clean myself up, be a better person, you know?
“Though you wash yourself with lye and use much soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me, declares the Lord God” (Jer 2:22).
Well, what should I do then? How should I respond?
“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isa 6:5).
Will God help me? What will he do?
“I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you” (Ezek 36:25).
Hebrews 10:23 says the promise of Ezekiel has been fulfilled: “our hearts have been sprinkled clean of an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” Verse 19 tells us how: by the blood of Jesus. His bloodshed on Roman timber mixed with the caked blood of common thieves and sinners and washed it!
It was disgusting. Jesus was clean, free from sin. Holy. Unblemished. Set apart. But he enters into human suffering and sin, touches the sick, eats with the sinner, hangs out with the prostitute, and lays his bloody back on a blood-soaked cross in our place. Jesus enters the filth of sin so we might be clean!
This is an excerpt from Pastor Jim’s book, Jesus For You.