Main news for 7 February 2017

As is well known, one of the central questions both of Yahwism and of Judaism was ritual purity. This is not surprising: ritual purity determined the possibility, or impossibility, for a person to approach the altar and be sanctified. Yet with the passage of time the true meaning of the norms and rules of ritual purity was, if not completely, then quite thoroughly forgotten. In Paul's day, for many people they had already become something valuable in themselves, requiring strict fulfillment simply because observance of these norms and rules had become a religious duty. Violating them came to be viewed almost as a crime, not because the attitude toward the sacred had become more reverent, but because religiosity itself, at least in some Pharisaic circles, had become noticeably more rigorist. Meanwhile in the Kingdom the traditional concepts of clean and unclean become irrelevant, for the Kingdom is wholly sanctified, sanctified by the divine breath that permeates it to its farthest limits. And for the inhabitants of the Kingdom the division into clean and unclean is no longer current, for in the Kingdom there can by definition be nothing unclean, that is, nothing not subject to sanctification. Yet religious inertia also entered church communities made up of both Jews and recent pagans. It was difficult for deeply religious Jews, as a rule, to accept that the norms and rules of ritual purity, which formed the core of their religious tradition, suddenly turned out to be no longer current. And they continued to insist on observing rules that had lost all meaning in the new context. They continued to demand observance of them from every member of the Church, insisting that without such observance one could not enter the Kingdom. And they could not reconcile themselves to the fact that, for the Church, their religiosity was their strictly personal affair. Paul, of course, understands perfectly that this is how it is, and that for the Kingdom the question of purity and impurity is resolved exclusively at the level of the human heart: if it is pure, then there can be no impurity in such a person's life; and if it is impure, then there is no need to fear any other impurity, for the worst has already happened. This is how the apostle resolves the question of purity and impurity in relation to the Kingdom, and therefore in relation to the Church.