According to the story, the Israelites were transporting the Ark of the Covenant, the divinely-ordained chest that contained the tablets of the 10 Commandments (a replica of which was the central feature in the original Indiana Jones movie). By command, no mere human was allowed to touch the Ark. But in the sectarian wars that characterized (and continue to characterize) the Middle East, the Ark was captured by The Philistines, and then recaptured by David and the Israelites. Uzzah and his brother had the Ark placed on a cart driven by oxen to transport it back home.
This past summer I took the kids apple-picking at a large local orchard. We rode in the back of a cart pulled by horses out to the fruit trees. It was not smooth. Each hole and bump and uneven patch of ground was magnified by the cart as we bounced around up top. I have no doubt that an oxen-drawn cart through the Palestinian wilderness saw its share of bumps. And in fact, one such bump so jolted the cart that Uzzah, walking and watching behind, reached out his hand to steady the Ark from falling or being damaged.
And instantly, we are told, God struck him dead.
The books of the Torah give us ample examples of the mind of ancient peoples concerning the chasm-like division between God and Humankind, between Clean and Unclean, between Holy and Profane. The Levitical purity laws carefully divide much of life: Sheep, Deer, Locusts, and Fish are clean; rabbits, dogs, oysters and ostriches are not. All dead animals and all diseased people, and everything they touch, are unclean. Women are unclean during their period and after childbirth; men and everything they touch is unclean for any day in which they emit semen.
The extension of the these purity laws is two-fold:
First, anytime something “unclean” touched someone or something “clean,” that which was clean became defiled and unclean.
Second, God was so pure that when the impure came into contact with His purity – they were destroyed (as in Uzzah’s case).
It is for these reasons that, unlike many Christians, I see Christmas – not Easter – as the theological touchstone of faith.
At the Incarnation, as the Nicene Creed states, “He [Jesus] was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary…”
Uzzah touched the Holiness of God and was killed for it; Mary came into direct contact with the Spirit of God, and henceforth, “all generations will call me Blessed!”
The Gospels tell the story of Jesus’ earthly ministry, in which he touched leprous body parts, prostitutes, half-breed Samaritans, women with “issues of blood,” dead children, the epileptic, the deranged, and unclean men and women of all varieties.
At no point does the touch of God strike any of these people down.
At no point does Jesus send anyone away as “unclean,” nor does he fear becoming unclean by their presence or touch.
If anything, the unclean are made clean. The fear that those who are “different” will infect and affect the “pure” is reversed: now, the different and the ‘unclean’ are brought into wholeness and community with the rest of society.
For me, the message of Christmas is not found in the familiar, heart-warming oohs and aahhs of a poor little newborn baby… but in the world-shaking change in attitude towards divisions in society, especially attitudes towards those who are ‘different.’
Many who claim to follow Christ – both politicians and harsh religious leaders – continue to operate in a world of clean vs. unclean, and under the fear that what is ‘different’ will infect everyone else. From telling the poor to “take a bath and get a job,” to dismissing immigrants as illegal law-breakers, to denying the poor who are seeking society’s crumbs to have food on the table and oil in their heater, to the irrational fear that some people’s love will ‘destroy traditional marriage and the foundations of society,’ to the fear-based refusal to permit an HIV-positive student to attend school, to blaming those who have lost their homes for their own foolishness, to refusing an interracial couple the right to marry….there is a blindness to the true Christmas message.
The Old Testament prophets that ‘set the stage’ for this theological change were strident in their condemnation of a divided society:
Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.' – Zechariah 7:10
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?"
- Isaiah 58:6-7
Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds! At morning's light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud a man of his home, a fellowman of his inheritance. – Micah 2:1-2
Christmas and the Gospels show us that the artificial division between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ is to come to an end: that holiness and godliness extends to all of humanity. And so, on this Christmas, my hope and prayer is that our tendency to see ‘an enemy, ‘ or ‘a danger,’ or ‘an evil’ in others based on any of the innumerable differences we have, will be swallowed by an intentional effort to recognize our common humanity instead.
Merry Christmas! I'm now going to enjoy some good, unclean shrimp...
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