Back in the days when we still had a poultry house at the Jesuit novitiate, it was my task to gather the chicken manure in a wheelbarrow and mix it with the soil to fertilize our vegetable plots. It still amazes me to think that something green and edible could grow out of chicken dung.
Think about it. Plants and colorful flowers do grow out of dirt. Black gold (or oil) is called fossil fuel because it is resurrected from dead organic muck. At the novitiate we also had a piggery from which pig sh*t was channeled to a tank that produced the methane (or biogas) we needed to cook our meals.
Eew.
This is not to glorify waste or justify the unclean. This is just to make us think twice about the things that repel us, those we think to be unclean. Which is what the readings today seem to be doing to us.
In the first reading, we are given an account of what to do with lepers who are “in fact unclean.” The meticulous attention to detail suggests an obsession with clinical cleanliness and a mortal fear of contamination. The second reading is about a controversy in the Corinthian church about eating meat sacrificed to idols. St Paul’s resolution is pragmatic and pastoral: eat the meat but avoid offending the sensibilities of others who think and believe otherwise. The third and Gospel reading is about Jesus healing a leper and ending up outside the walls (las periferias, to use a favorite phrase of Pope Francis), an outcast to his own people.
Think twice then before you cast out the unclean, before you go about placing others in quarantine or waging a war of ethnic cleansing. Pray twice then when you are tempted to distinguish yourself from the unwell and unkempt, the publican and the leprous one.
Today the Lord dares us to disabuse ourselves of our facile notions of purity and of our tendency to define the boundaries of our religion in terms of clean and unclean. Jesus has only harsh words for those who would rather dwell on artificial sheen. In Matthew, he rebukes the self-proclaimed rightness of those who think themselves clean:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” (Mt 23:25-28)
What does it mean to be in fact unclean?
The more lethal leprosy is the one that does not waste or wither your skin. The more fatal disease is the one that puffs you up, makes you so full of yourself you can in a twisted way proclaim, thank God I am not like that self-cleansing, self-justifying Pharisee.
To be clean, in God’s eyes, is to be in fact empty. Empty of those inordinate weights you mistake for anchors in your life. To be clean is to be emptied of the noise and static, to be so silenced and hollowed out you finally hear the still, small voice of God speaking to you from outside the walls.
And so we come to church because church happens when it becomes first of all a place that gathers wounded people. Every celebration of the Eucharist begins with a confession that we are broken inside, that our hearts are divided, our motives mixed, our desires more dysfunctional than clean. We confess our callousness and numbness, our indifference and anger. We acknowledge our sins and infirmities and the many ways these have only compounded our loneliness and separation.
We are received in this church not because we are clean. In church, we find solace in God and in each other, drawing strength from the one Sacrifice that cleanses and empties our hearts, gaining courage from our communion in the Body of Christ.
In faith and over time, with “eyes that have been cleansed with tears”, it still amazes us to see how lovely things could grow out of our soiled and messy lives.
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Fr. Jose Ramon T Villarin SJ is President of the Ateneo de Manila University. For feedback on this column, email tinigloyola@yahoo.com