Richard Beck has been posting an interesting series on Purity and Defilement for the past few weeks. He began the conversation with Matthew 9:9-13:

As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ’sinners’?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.‘ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

The emphasis of this story is the tension between mercy and sacrifice. The Pharisees note that Jesus is in contact with sinners – something unclean. But Jesus contrasts this with mercy – that is, bypassing boundaries between clean and unclean.  Again we see this in James 1:27 which contrasts purity and hospitality:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Living Christianity is a tension between these two forces:

…between mercy and sacrifice. Between welcome and purity. Between hospitality and contamination. Between love and holiness. It is the tension between the Greatest Commandment and the command “like unto the first”: Loving God versus loving your neighbor. In the end, urgent Christian conversations tend to boil down to this fundamental tension: Mercy or sacrifice?

But why is it that we have so much trouble with mercy, and find purity so appealing? Dr Beck has written a lot on the subject, but I think what he says can be well summarised: ‘Dirtiness’ is a magical property, in that it is easy to become dirty, and hard to become clean. An example is this:

Imagine I take out of my closet an old cardboard box. I want to show you something inside the box. I open the box and pull out a sweater. The sweater is old and somewhat ratty. It hasn’t been washed. I tell you that I was given this sweater by my grandfather who had an interest in World War 2 memorabilia. As a part of his collection my grandfather acquired this sweater. This sweater was owned and worn by Hitler. It’s from his actual wardrobe. After Hitler’s death many former Nazis took mementos from Hitler’s life. Apparently, there is thriving black market for authentic artifacts or articles once owned, used or worn by Hitler. The sweater I’m showing you was worn by Hitler the week before his suicide. It hasn’t been washed. It still bears the marks of dirt and his sweat. Would you, I ask, like to try it on?

People tend to think of evil, sin, dirt, as contagious. If you try on Hitler’s sweater, you might become more like Hitler. So don’t try it on. And studies have shown that people will even avoid the sweater if it’s been freshly laundered. Evil is magic dirty that cannot be cleansed. Or can it?

Apparently (as Dr Beck says in his 7th instalment), physical cleansing can replace moral righteousness: “…if the physical cleansing causes moral cleansing then, it stands to reason, moral purity can be achieved through physical washing.” This goes right the wayback to Matthew 9: When Jesus says he desires mercy and not sacrifice, he’s saying that you cannot let sacrifice replace mercy. Because (if you read Dr Becks’ posts in detail) studies have shown that simple hand cleaning can make people less guilty, and reduce their willingness to be altrustic. Physical cleansing replaces moral responsibility.

My first thought was one of horror: Because Christianity is built around these cleansing rituals. Baptism is overtly a cleansing ritual and confession is a cleansing ritual with an express purpose opposite to this (Eucharist is a different story – Dr Beck wrote an entire post devoted entirely to it). That is, confession is supposed to increase the awareness of moral responsibility. But if this research is correct, there’s an interesting mismatch there: It’s likely that confession, and baptism, both cause Christians to be less morally responsible. Subconsciously, the purity is enough – they don’t need to be merciful.

Dr Beck hasn’t finished his series, and I’ll continue reading with fascination. But my problem with psychology (whilst I find it fascinating), is that it simply observes, and doesn’t give me much of a way to adapt to its findings: How can I increase my desire to be morally responsible, when the traditions I treasure so much seem to tug me psychologically in the wrong direction? Should I abandon church tradition? Or does simple consciousness of these effects answer the problem at hand?