Bad Skin As Sin

Leviticus takes skin very seriously. Get a big zit and not only do you get banished from God’s presence but you get run out of town. For two whole chapters God goes on and on about bad skin—everything from a rash to a pus-spewing sore. Get an infectious skin disease and God commanded that you tear your clothes, tussle your hair, cover your mouth and scream “unclean” as you made your way to the city limits. Nowhere does the Bible ever say “cleanliness is next to godliness,” but that’s only because cleanliness is godliness. Even in our hygienically-hyped culture, staying clean for a month proved to be harder than anticipated. Even with the treasure trove of health and beauty aids at our disposal. Of course none of this guarantees a clean heart, which for most of the Bible is what cleanliness is essentially all about. So why the obsession with skin? In a beauty-obsessed culture like ours that can’t be so hard to answer. We gave it a shot.

Some of the women in the group headed over to a local skin care center and were astonished to find that a whole line of products on the shelf sold under the labels of such theological virtues as Grace and Hope  and Purity—who knew you could get all of that in a bottle? We fought the Levitical notion that holiness is only skin deep, but were struck by the possibility that God does care about those things. Some folks began to wonder whether we ever should have opened this book. At group dinners (kosher, of course), people with rashes and other related infections separated themselves from the rest of us as we ate. The healthy among us were really uncomfortable with that. Was this what God intended? Does not God love us just as we are? Admittedly, this walk through Leviticus was making us more uncomfortable about our faith than I thought it was supposed to. Should we be doing this?