Holiness Code

Seeing how Jesus heals the Holiness Code

01/17/2020

Mark 1:40-45 A leper came to him and kneeling down begged him and said, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched the leper, and said to him, “I do will it. Be made clean.” The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean. Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once. Then he said to him, “See that you tell no one anything, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed; that will be proof for them.” The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere.

One of the things I am enjoying in preparing for the bible study on Luke is learning about Leviticus, the third book of the bible. What does Leviticus, the third book of the Old Testament, have to do with Luke, the third book of the New Testament? St. Augustine said the New Testament is hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is revealed in the New. One sheds light on the other. The word “Leviticus” comes from “Levi,” one of the twelve tribes of Israel ordained to be the priestly tribe of the Chosen People. Hence, Leviticus contains all the laws for the priests, their duty to minister in the tabernacle, their personal holiness, and how they help the people to be holy. Indeed, the second half of Leviticus, chapters 17-26, is often called the Holiness Code.

What was the Holiness Code? That code outlined those things that made a person –priests as well as people – ritually unclean or impure, and therefore excluded from the community, essentially like a modern day excommunication. There were three main causes of ritual impurity: (1) touching a corpse, (2) touching a leper, and (3) touching a menstruating woman (sorry ladies!). The idea behind the Holiness Code was basically a “quarantine spirituality.” In other words, God was teaching his people how to be holy by avoiding people and places that might tempt them to abandon God’s ways in the Ten Commandments. Don’t many parents teach their children a similar strategy, a quarantine mentality, when they are younger? Don’t play with those boys. You’ll go to a Catholic school. Don’t watch MTV. In effect, these people and places and programs made children unclean, impure, unholy. Leviticus taught the Chosen People a circle-the-wagons spirituality, that many parents wisely teach their children today.

Now, perhaps, we can see why Jesus’ action toward a leper in the gospel today was so shocking and scandalizing to the Jews. We read: “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched the leper, and said to him, ‘I do will it. Be made clean.’ The leprosy left him immediately and he was made clean.” In other words, Jesus is not only healing the leper, in a sense, he is even healing the Holiness Code of Leviticus. How so? Well, Jesus is announcing a new spirituality and a new Holiness Code, not based on quarantining yourself from others who make you impure, but rather, going out into the world and allowing God’s grace to work through you to purify the world.

You might almost say the dawn of the New Testament is the moment when the Old Testament reaches maturity and manhood. Why? Well, because at some point you cannot keep protecting your children from the world – indeed, that’s what ghettos essentially are: segregated spaces to protect you from the impurities of the world. Rather, you must give them wisdom and grace to go out into the world. That is, Christians must touch, transform and heal the world around us, like Jesus reached out and touched the leper in the gospel.

My friends, where are you in this spectrum of spirituality? What Holiness Code do you obey and teach your children? Are you stuck in Leviticus and circling the wagons, pronouncing others as impure and excluding them from the Christian community? The real danger, of course, is excluding problematic people from our hearts. That is, we create a sort of “ghetto mentality” in our interior life, segregating ourselves from sources of impurity. And by the way, there is a proper time and place for segregation and separation, like not sitting in the LSU student section when the Razorbacks play them in basketball.

Perhaps a better spirituality is the Holiness Code of Jesus Christ, the other end of the spectrum, which invites us to reach out and touch the ritually, the socially, the morally, the mentally, the emotionally, the economically, the legally, the politically unclean. That is, we reach out and touch and heal anyone we have shut out of our hearts and take them by the hand and bring them back into our hearts, and love them.

When the leper said to Jesus, “If you wish, you can make me clean,” he was also directing those words in a broader sense to all of us: if we wish, we can make the lepers in our lives clean too. We just have to reach out and touch them with our love. And that is what Leviticus has to do with Luke, and what it has to do with you and with me.

Praised be Jesus Christ!