Canter Bridge

Sanctity is tricky matter.

On the one hand, the summons to ‘be holy as YHWH is holy’ resounds from the earliest pages of Torah or ‘the five books of Moses’. Holiness is among the most condensed and potent ways of abbreviating the nature of the people whom YHWH has called into his confidence.

On the other hand, holiness morphs into pretense and hubris with astounding dexterity. It is not uncommon to discern in this or that person’s cynical glance backward upon the religion he once practiced the sunburnt assumption that it is indeed impossible to be holy. It is a ruse, a caricature, a manipulative tool that hangs from the hands of those who display the ghastliest absence of self-awareness.

Jesus might not have disagreed so strenuously with such a cynical outlook, though he would in time have nudged the conversation in the direction of true holiness. He might join the skeptic in his renunciation of off-putting sanctity while demonstrating through attentive eyes, a merciful touch, and a persistent and love-fueled loyalty that there is, after all, such a thing.

The attraction so many felt for Jesus seems to have rested in part on his rejection of what they too had come to scorn in the behavior of their most holy peers.

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 pendulum swings violently when self-interest is in the wind, and that quality is certainly present when any of us who cares about sanctity engages the matter. We are viscerally keen to universalize and canonize whatever hard-won progress we have made to date. Or, we are just as eager to let ourselves off the hook by concluding that the whole things is a pious farce, niceness or authenticity standing in quite well as the absolute virtue.

Jesus will have none of such defensiveness. Still, his recorded words and actions do lean strongly against those who treat sanctity with prickly defensiveness, employing their claim to have got this far as the self-affirming border between them and all others.

A man does not refer to a doctor or to a summoning, as Jesus has, unless he expects his subjects to recover, to move, to progress. When Jesus mixes with ‘sinners and tax collectors’ and self-evidently enjoys them, he is not anointing stasis as the desired state. He has not renounced his penchant for challenging them to become persons who they have not yet been.

Yet he habitually sought out the company of sinners. He liked them, enjoyed their company, laughed viscerally at their jokes, preferred their friendship. They were, in a manner of speaking that possesses more than just cheap rhetorical value, his kind of people.

They were not yet, it seems assured, as holy as he would have them to be. Yet they were closer than others thought, closer than they themselves thought. They stood nearer than we imagine.

Jesus sent the pious away to learn important new ways before they could sustain a worthwhile conversation with him. Meanwhile, the sinners—wine-drenched, undisciplined, and rough-spoken—remained. They, in that imitably spare biblical turn of phrase, were with Jesus.