Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When any man has an unusual bodily discharge, such a discharge is unclean.’ – Leviticus 15:2

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 4, 2018): Leviticus 15

Certain actors seem always to play the role of the bad guy. We see them, and we know that there is something bad hiding in the character. Enter Alan Rickman who played the role of Hans Gruber in “Die Hard.” Rickman desperately wants to shed his bad guy image, yet the bad guy image is persistent. And he has played the role of the bad guy so well. Maybe it is the past roles that these people have played that influence our perception of them as the villain, or sometimes it is a physical characteristic that makes us see evil in them. But, no matter who they are, we seem to prejudge them every time we see them on the screen.

But one of the most radical things Jesus taught was that what defiles us comes from inside of us. There is often no correlation between what we look like on the outside and the evil that lurks within us. Sometimes, the worst evil is found in people who we think look good on the outside. In Jesus days, it was the Pharisees who were seen by the people as the good guys of the society. So Jesus’s comment about the Pharisees was surprising. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean (Matthew 23:25-26). These were not the bad guys of the culture; they were the good guys. They looked like the good guys, not like the Alan Rickman’s of our modern world. And yet, Jesus said that what made us clean was not what we look like on the outside, but what we are like on the inside.

There are a couple of levels to this passage. The most obvious interpretation is that this section of the law is about the transmission of disease. Specifically, this section is about an “unusual discharge from the body.” In the understanding of the society, there was at least an elemental understanding that disease can be transmitted from person to person through an unusual discharge from the body. And so the person and the discharge were to be isolated from the community in an attempt to stop the spread of disease.

But a deeper truth, and one of which we need to be aware, is a confirmation of the words of Jesus. What makes us unclean is what arises from inside of us. We might look good on the outside, and still be a mess on the inside. We can be a choirboy in appearance, and evil on the inside.

Sometimes the worst villain is the one who does not look like they are evil, and yet evil lurks within. And it is this evil that we need to be aware might lurk in the best people that we know – us.  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Leviticus 16