Whatever you think of the response to COVID, it thrust us all into a 21st century version of Leviticus. Sick folks crying out “Unclean” in the streets like medieval lepers would be very 2020. Every analogy breaks down but this one travels a good distance first. Values always manifest as identity. Identity always coalesces into community and community always sets borders that define belonging and exclusion. It’s no surprise, then, that COVID devolved into a big fight.
Eventually everything is spiritual, or at the very least philosophical, even science. People want to be clean because people want to be included. Chesterton famously said that not believing in God doesn’t mean one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything. It’s the same for sin and shame. Not believing in sin doesn’t mean one will never feel shame. They’ll always feel it. That’s why Brene’ Brown is a best-selling author.
Brown’s work has helped me. I am also for science. Go science. That said, regardless of your position on masks and shutdowns, fights over COVID created a Neo-Leviticus and exposed a fundamental human condition. Every age has the clean and the unclean, the in and the out, those who get it and those who don’t. Every age excludes and embraces.
As promised, however, the analogy eventually fails. The Levitical laws orbited the radiant star that was the temple altar where sinners were forgiven, the unclean made clean and the excluded embraced. Science is important, but there is no grace for the its laws. There is no atonement in the lab. So be wise; wear your mask, keep your distance, obey the authorities instituted by God. But don’t expect genuine inclusion without atonement.
In April NPR reported that Dr. Fauci wondered if Americans should never shake hands again. He is very smart and, I am sure he is a good man with the best intentions. Still, law without grace eventually isolate everyone. If we ever meet, I’ll honor his wish, but looking ahead to the “after this” that is truly after all of this, I am reminded of an image Miroslav Volf evokes from Irenaeus
“When the Trinity turns toward the world, the Son and the Spirit become, in Irenaeus’s beautiful image, the two arms of God by which humanity was made and taken into God’s embrace.” Volf, Exclusion and Embrace
