It has been more than a year of intense societal and spiritual anguish, a time in which it is not yet clear whether the forces of death and darkness are being exposed and exorcised or are simply revealing themselves and exercising their tyranny more openly. Some of us imagined the worst was over, but the summer has ended and we are not yet saved. Death has manifestly reigned over our collective life. And yet our response has not reflected such collectivity. Existing divisions have metastasized and borne the bitter fruit of divided and ineffectual solutions. 

These divided responses have given rise to bitterly policed shibboleths and ideological boundary markers delineating who is pure and impure. Ours is a world in which the response to a deadly virus has become freighted with ideological baggage. Rather than distinguishing the presence of death and defilement from their absence, impurity is mapped onto boundary lines between factions. The symbolic has become more real than the Real for many of us.

Against this backdrop the analysis of ritual purity within first-century Palestinian Judaism offered in Matthew Thiessen’s Jesus and the Forces of Death holds up a mirror to our present. 

Pandemic and pandemonium, though distinct in their concrete effects, arise out of the disorder of our cosmos. Chaos reaches up from the processes of the universe’s operation to the stage of human life, threatening the order we achieve and seek to preserve. This is analogous, in creaturely time and being, of God’s own separation of light and darkness at the beginning and his conjoining of creatures with realms. But God’s work established things as themselves; in our efforts we aim to keep chaos and death at bay, to preserve life against the death that encroaches everywhere.

Chaos is an invasive agent, one which threatens not only our projects, but our very existence. But what a naturalist might call the universe’s indifference to our efforts to survive and thrive is, in fact, a hostility. For only an agent can be indifferent: to call the universe indifferent is to ascribe to it, however unintentionally, a will. Scripture, likewise, names Death as a power, not only a force or an effect present in our universe, but an entity with volition and aims. The presence of death is an incursion of an alien Other, but an incursion so familiar to us we tend to become desensitized to its effects.

When death strikes, something within us clamors that this is not how it should be, and this intuition is correct. Life is the correlate of holiness. This is why Sin and Death are paired together. Life, in its truest sense, is life lived with and towards God; death is that which corrupts and severs this possibility.

Israel’s purity system, then, was “foremost about life with God and was therefore a matter of life and death” (18). The Law given to Israel cleared a space within the world for this God to dwell with the people with whom he entered into covenant. Its prescriptions protected people in their fallenness from the consuming power of God’s holiness, a power antithetical to the the Death which infiltrated and corrupted their embodiment and intentions. Through the Law, access to God was safeguarded, not discouraged. Far from a draconian edict stifling people’s efforts to commune with God, the Law prescribed ritual actions by which sinful humans could be purified so as to approach God once more.

But for a church predominantly made up of Gentiles, Israel and her Law has routinely been understood as impediments to be superseded. We have cast Israel as impure and accordingly rejected and ourselves as the true bounty for whom God came seeking. And so by now it is a common presumption that Jesus came to overturn the Law, one “that transcends internal Christian divisions between liberals and conservatives, between Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants” (4). 

But what Thiessen demonstrates in his readings of the Synoptic Gospels is not a laxity in Jesus’s adherence to or an opposition to the Law but instead a careful regard for that against which the Law, in its God-givenness, stood in total opposition. The Law and the Temple were defensive structures to protect human beings in their covenant with God; Jesus, however, came to take the field against the forces of Death. In him, “Israel’s God has unleashed a force of holiness in the world that goes on the offense against impurity — Jesus is the holy one of God” (180). If the Law was a safeguard for the people, protecting them from the holiness of God and the forces of Death, then Jesus did not abolish the law out of hand, but instead rendered it unnecessary through the holiness he shares with believers. 

There is nothing arbitrary about the Law, then. That its regulations are no longer in effect is not a judgment upon their effectiveness or a verdict that they belong to the mythological taboos of a primitive time. It is the consequence of Jesus’s having changed the conditions of the world in which creatures approach God. The world in which the Law’s regulations has been crucified with the One who, by incorporating believers into his holiness, by putting his Spirit within them, dissolves the necessity of ritual action to mitigate the impurities of the world.

Jesus is the one “divinely equipped to deal with the actual sources of impurity,” the one “who embodies a contagious power or force that is opposed to and ultimately destroys the powers that create impurity and death” (20). He does not rescue us from a demonic Law seeking our degradation and destruction: he comes to confront and defeat the sources of impurity themselves. Like other priests, he protects the passageways by which fallen human beings meet with the holy God, but unlike them he does more than treat individual symptoms of impurity. Jesus undoes death’s power from within by allowing his undiluted holiness to enter within its nothingness and thereby overwhelming it with its uncreated opposite. His life is the antithesis of the forces which seek our unraveling and the unraveling of God’s determination to be our God.

How is Jesus confronting the forces of death in our moment? What lines of continuity tether where and when we are to the healings and exorcisms of Jesus’s mission? It is the same Jesus who cast out impure spirits and cleansed men and women of death’s markings who presently dispatches us to the Corneliuses of the world, to bear witness that the contagious holiness of Jesus Christ overcomes the divisive power of impurity. It is he who, by his Spirit, guides our hands to approach the unclean and to restore them. It is he who calls us to a love that is stronger than death — to take up our cross for the sake of others. 

We look to Jesus because no one else is so equipped to fight the forces of death on our behalf. Alternative Christs fail to adequately confront and deal with these forces. But they do more than fail: they perpetuate and spread that impurity further and deeper into the fabric of our shared lives, poisoning trust, fracturing our bonds, and sewing death. Placebo saviors thrive on our fears of these forces and promise higher walls and stronger defenses to stave off impurity, but the fortifications of which they rhetorically paint pictures and the ones they actually build all disappoint and erode over time. They cannot deliver on their promises to deliver us from evil.

Death no longer reigns, though it remains ever active. Only the one who overcomes our fear of death and its defilement, who raises the dead and rises from death himself, can liberate us from its tyranny. To him, there is no Jew and Greek, slave and free, male or female; in him, death is defeated and made the vehicle of our salvation. 

COMMENTS

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