Purity

Matthew 5:8

Purity is a sought-after commodity these days. Political parties demand purity in thinking for their constituents. We want our food pure, so some of us go to great lengths spending exorbitant amounts of money at trendy groceries, or traveling hither and thither to find farm-to-table markets and restaurants. We want our water especially pure so we willing pay for bottled water at prices far above our utility cost for tap water. We want our air pure, so auto manufacturers now install air purification systems in new vehicles. In so many areas of our lives, purity becomes a defining principle. 

So it should come as no surprise that drive for purity enters the religious arena as well.

Our own denomination is caught in a battle over purity and what defines it. Sexual orientation, adherence to a particular approach to scripture, responses to cultural trends, and simple battles over who is welcome effect many congregations and even presbyteries, with great cost—congregations choose to leave the circle when purity tests fail; members depart when pastors fail to be pure enough; litmus tests guide search committees as they try to determine who is pure enough to lead—the result is a rise in Pharisaical reductions of faith to a rulebook, and the even greater cost that Christ’s welcome to any and all who came to him gets muddied or rejected altogether.

In all compassion, I will remind you that such battles are as old as religion itself, and no religion is free from such battles (even Buddhists in Myanmar battle viciously for purity), so we are struggling with something human beings struggle with for literally thousands of years. Things are not worse now. Things are no more hopeless now than they were when Aaron battled with Moses over proper obedience to God. The truly good news in our predicament is that God abides. Like the Waiting Father of Jesus’ famous parable, God practices infinite patience with us, waiting for us to come to our senses. 

But an immediate counter is this question—didn’t Christ command purity be a test for the faithful, especially in instances like the Sixth Beatitude? If Christ saw purity as an essential precondition for finding God, then are we not right to test the purity of the faithful?

You are going to love this answer—yes and no. Typical pastoral wishy-washiness, no?

Yes, Christ was serious when he invoked this blessing on the pure in heart. He really did mean “purity” in its most essential meaning—to have a heart solely focused on the presence of God, a mind clear on understanding who God is, who we are before God, and what we must do to maintain a proper relationship to our God. So, yes, we need to guard heart and mind as we practice the faith. We really do need to take seriously the eternal presence of God with us. We really do need to take seriously God’s mandates to practice love in our interactions with other human beings, following the example of Jesus himself. We really do need to attempt to align our lives in the model of Christ’s other-centered, self-sacrificial love. 

But here is where we need to pause.

The great irony in the praxis of faith (wherein faith simply becomes who we are) is that purity is never, ever to be defined by a rulebook. Moreover, we will discover as we actually delve deeply into the Word that, for Christ, purity was a stridently fluid concept. Yes, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ ratchets up obedience to the commandments of God to impossible standards, but then Christ will willingly dine with sinners, tax collectors, and nightwalkers. Yes, Christ will argue that anyone who loves even family members more greatly than they love God will have no part of his kingdom; yet Christ will allow compassion for a complete stranger with a withered hand to trump obedience to Commandment No. 4 in the Ten Commandments (cf. Mt. 12:9-14), seemingly nullifying his previous dictum that no human relationship is greater than our relationship to God. And so it goes—Christ repeatedly contradicts his own stance on purity.

Or does he?

Which is more pure? Blindly obeying the rules, or acting in whatever expresses the love that is God in any given context?

Christ eternally chooses the latter, hence, revealing that God is looking for love, not purity of thought, word, or action.

I would argue that we know this intrinsically. I would argue further that in actual practice, we apply Christ’s much broader stance routinely rather than we might argue on the floor of Presbytery. When we face actual human beings, we tend to meet them as they are and offer them the grace necessary to care for their needs. For instance, we might make sweeping statements about sexual orientation, but then a family member comes out, and we meet them with the love of family because that love trumps all other responses. The real, actual person determines our real, actual response.

What we find as we delve deeply into the Word is that God is right there with us. God is so rarely about keeping people out of God’s fold. God instead tends to regard humanity with radical hospitality, hence, Jesus has dinner parties with a rather interesting conglomeration of miscreants, malcontents, and mutterers. What we find, then, is that God defines purity by something other than our base definition. God defines purity as alignment with God’s own responses, reactions, and resolutions of conflict. Where there are differences, God meets us with grace. Where there are misdirections, God meets us with reclamation. Where there are flat out wrongs, God meets us with forgiveness. 

To be pure, then, is to do the same.

No wonder the pure in heart see God—they, at last, are fully open to God.

May we be so also.