Mark 1:40-45

The Kingdom Challenges the Priestly Culture – The Purity Code

In the preceding section, Mark had indicated the popular response to Jesus’ actions and message. What follows next is a series of incidents where Jesus encountered opposition. He deliberately engaged with major stakeholders in the oppressive cultural and religious system, namely the local priests, the professional scribes and the Pharisees.

The first incident brought him into conflict with the purity/cleanness code and the priestly caste that administered it.

Mark 1:40-45 – Jesus Cleanses a Leper

Leprosy was a special category of illness in Jewish society. The word referred not simply to leprosy as diagnosed in our modern world, but more generally to any skin disfigurement, many of which eventually healed naturally.

The Book of Leviticus provided the background:

While they lasted, such skin diseases rendered people ritually “unclean” or “impure”. Indeed, people suffering such disfigurements were no longer allowed to live in community, but had to live apart until their blemish disappeared. In practice, such victims were separated from their villages and even their families. They were unable to work; they were unable to support their families. They were rendered powerless and frequently lapsed into inevitable poverty and destitution.

If their defect did not clear up with time, indeed if it were a true case of leprosy, their ostracism was lifelong. Sometimes they chose to live together, away from habitation, for mutual support and company.

In many cases, however, their disfigurement did heal. Before they could be received back into community, their healing had to be verified formally. This was the prerogative of the local priest, who performed a ritual of “declaring (or making) clean”, for which the victim had to bring the appropriate offering.

Ritual Uncleanness

A General Phenomenon. The idea of “impurity (or uncleanness)” lies deep in the human psyche, and is by no means a specific Jewish phenomenon. Most, if not all, peoples have things or behaviours (taboos, etc.) that make them feel “uneasy” or that bring them “bad luck”, rendering them psychologically vulnerable, uncertain, anxious or ashamed. These specific things or behaviours may differ from culture to culture. Many of them are fairly universal. Issues surrounding birth and death are particularly significant. Blood has often been understood as the bearer of life, and so “sacred”.  In the Jewish, and later the Christian, world the body was effectively the person – behaviours directly touching on the body were emotionally sensitive. 

(Among Christians in the West, sexual behaviours have been regarded [at least until recently] not merely as morally acceptable or deviant, but have carried the added psychological labels of “pure” or “impure”. In our modern world, homosexual behaviour often generates strong feelings of discomfort or fear in others, and deviant behaviour can give rise to quite emotionally violent reactions.) 

The Jewish World. In the Jewish world, things that issued from the body, or were taken into the body, deeply affected people’s sense of personal boundaries. Among these were saliva, semen and menstrual blood. These were considered as conveying “impurity”. Certain foods and, by extension, the animals or grains from which they were processed, as well as vessels used for handling and cooking them, could also potentially carry “impurity”. Physical disfigurement also made people “impure”. 

Leprosy fell into this category. The restrictions are not to be understood as necessarily flowing from considerations of hygiene or risk of contagion (such matters were not clearly understood when the customs took shape). They are simply particular instances of psychological “horror”.

The Sense of the “Holy”. In the Jewish mind-set God was different; God was holy; God was sacred. To engage with God one similarly needed to be different, set-apart and holy. The Jewish people as a whole saw themselves as "a holy nation, a people set-apart". Their priests especially had to be different, disengaged from ordinary activity, and holy. Initially holiness was not necessarily connected with moral goodness, but with difference, apartness.

It is not surprising that in the Jewish world “purity and impurity” became allied to issues concerning the holiness of God. Jewish difference, apartness and holiness were expressed through their emphasis on ceremonial or ritual purity. This was felt deeply in their collective psyche, so that any questioning of it led to strong emotional anxiety. It was the role of the priests to police issues concerning purity: violations were labelled sinful and violators sinners.

Spiritual insights develop slowly. The Hebrew people’s sense of the specialness of God was beautiful in its own right. It was good for people to think twice about approaching God and not just to take God for granted. What was unfortunate was their way of stressing their response to God’s sacredness, in this case, by declaring ritually “taboo” a suffering person’s disfiguring ailment. They assumed that what they found distasteful would be especially distasteful to God. They were still a long way from realising that respect for God would be expressed precisely through respect for God’s creatures. Jesus was insistent that the truly sacred is encountered and revered not in the extraordinary but in and through the ordinary.

The “Sinners” of Galilee. The wealthy land-owners, the professional scribal class and the aristocratic priestly families had the luxury and the leisure to avoid impurity. As a group, from their position of privilege, they tended to despise the “sinners” of Galilee.

The leper declared: If you wish, you can cleanse me.

Was he asking Jesus simply to heal him, or was he asking him to take on the role reserved to the priests and officially declare him clean?

Simply to heal him would have asked nothing new of Jesus. It would have meant that the leper could then present himself to the local priest and be received back into family and community.

But if he was asking Jesus to declare him clean officially, this was something altogether unheard of. This was the exclusive role of the priestly caste. To go ahead into such an emotionally charged and sensitive area would be a public affront to establishment interests.

Mark’s subsequent comments are difficult to interpret. Many translations in use say that Jesus was moved with pity. This reaction of Jesus would not surprise, and the rest of the incident in the present translation would flow easily. However, the Greek word used by Mark has in fact a more generic meaning. Literally it means that he was “deeply moved in his gut”. The emotion was not specified. It could just as well have referred to anger as to pity or compassion. A few other ancient (though probably less reliable) texts state explicitly that Jesus was indeed moved with anger.

The problem is compounded by other alternative translations of what follows. Some versions say that Jesus sternly ordered him not to tell anyone. Literally the text says that Jesus “snorted”. The word in question carried strong aggressive overtones and was often used of horses chafing at the bit and about to charge into battle. The issue is complicated by what Jesus then did next, "he immediately cast him out". Though the text is usually translated more benignly, the words used here also figure in stories of Jesus casting out spirits. The tradition may have been unclear whether whether Jesus' intervention was in fact an exorcism or a simple healing. If an exorcism, Jesus' snorting may have been directed at the unclean spirit.

Jesus then told the leper to show himself to the priest, and to bring with him as a witness to them the offering commanded by the Law so that the priest would officially declare him cleansed. Understood this way, Jesus would seem to have aligned himself with the official ritual of cleansing.

However, in the two other incidents later in the narrative, where Mark would use the same expression, the witness in question was a witness against, a gesture of defiance (6:7-13; 13:9).

Seen in this light, the text could just as well be interpreted to mean that the leper asked Jesus to take over the priestly role and to declare him cleansed. Jesus on his part was deeply disturbed by the way that an originally well-intentioned enactment aiming to sensitise people to the sacredness of God had become over time an instrument of heartless exclusion and personal destruction. He saw this as one more instance of the sin of the world that was totally at odds with the Kingdom of God. He was angry, aggressively so, not at the leper but at the whole system that only served to marginalise and to destroy. His snorting may have been directed at the unjust system.

Yet the man needed to be reintegrated into his community and, with loyalties the way they were, he needed the clearance of the priest. So Jesus directed him to go ahead, not as a meek gesture of compliance but as a defiant signal of protest.

In acting thus Jesus began to incur the opposition of the priestly caste.

In curing the leper, Jesus actually stretched out his hand and touched him. It was a typically compassionate gesture by Jesus, but not without its consequences. (He would have felt no hesitation from considerations of contagion, given that such dangers were not clearly understood at that time.) 

By touching the leper, Jesus himself incurred ritual impurity and, like lepers generally, had to remain quarantined from human contact for the set time. He could no longer enter any town, and had to stay out in the country. His disciples may have stayed with him. However, individuals were attracted to him, perhaps even more after the incident with the leper, and flocked out to be with him. Whether he felt ready to go public on his attitude to the constricting cultural ordering of his time, he seemed to have had no choice. He had become a notoriety. 

Jesus’ own conversion led him along a path he may not have clearly understood initially. The possible outrage felt by the leper at what society had done to him (evidenced perhaps in his challenge to Jesus not just to heal but to declare him clean) led Jesus to see more clearly the details of his own mission. The evil of the world was taking clearer shape in his mind, as did the temptations he would have to face.

The leper came to Jesus and fell on his knees before him. The gesture may sound extravagant to modern Western ears, but in the cultural milieu of Jesus it was not at all uncommon.

The Jewish “Honour Code”

There would be other incidents in Jesus’ life where people would kneel at Jesus’ feet. In their need they voluntarily abased themselves before him; and so, in the culture of the time, having been appropriately honoured, Jesus owed them a hearing.

In the Mediterranean world interactions between men, both as individuals and as families, were governed by the strict cultural code of “honour”. (Women did not figure as bearers of honour, though they could bring dishonour to males in their families.)

Personal and family honour was valued even more than life. Life would willingly have been sacrificed to maintain honour. To “lose face” was worse than death.

In Debt to. In order to ask a favour or privilege from another, a man needed to engage favourably with the other’s honour. He had to augment the other’s sense of honour in relation to himself, particularly by flattery and often by abasing himself in some way. The greater the abasement, the better the chance of receiving the favour. If the favour were granted, the recipient was considered to be “in debt” to the other. This sense of “indebtedness” was not necessarily a financial matter, though financial considerations could become involved.

To dishonour another, advertently or inadvertently, was to render oneself in debt to the other. The debt could be forgiven, though that would be considered a favour, and one would have to face the eventual need to reciprocate. In the absence of forgiveness or appropriate payment of “debts”, vendettas could continue in families for generations.

“In Debt” to God. Within this climate it was inevitable that people thought of their relationships to God according to the measure of the code of honour. Instinctively persons abased themselves before God before asking a favour. Offending God’s honour, particularly by the neglect of ceremonial purity or by violations of the covenant, made them indebted to God. Only God could forgive and they would need to “pay the price”.

In common Jewish thought what people called sins were generally matters of ceremonial impurity or of “honour” debts owing to God – sinners were debtors. Forgiveness in turn was often conceived in terms of release from such debts.

Morality. As moral conscience evolved in Israel, the prophets particularly distinguished clearly between issues of worship and morality. They frequently condemned preoccupation with ritual to the neglect of genuine moral concern for justice and mercy. But injustice and lack of mercy did not resonate in the psyche as deeply as did natural and cultural “taboos”, with the consequence that the prophets often fought a losing battle, not simply with vested power interests but with the people in general.

What many in our modern world have come to call sin was more properly seen by Jews as a “missing of the mark (or aim)” of life and of our relationship with God, much as an arrow could miss its target. Yet, until people even today develop a certain human and moral maturity, sinfulness still inevitably seems to focus more on specific infringements of rules and commandments than on loss of direction, of personal integrity and of fundamental option.

Next >> Mark 2:1-12