The Bible Binge: Christmas for Filthy Souls (Leviticus 12:1-8)

Angels with Filthy Souls

One of the all time great Christmas classics is the story of a boy who gets left Home Alone for Christmas. Home Alone is the adventure of Kevin McCallister who gets his wish for his family to disappear at Christmas, only to find himself alone with a couple of bad guys. Along the way, Kevin enjoys doing all the things he’s not allowed to do… including watching a mafia movie entitled “Angels with Filthy Souls”. It is a fictional movie within the movie, a tribute to 1930s gangster movies, based on one entitled “Angels with Dirty Faces” starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. Angels with Filthy Souls becomes a running gag in the movie… and ultimately has taken on a life of its own as a pop culture reference.

Christopher Columbus, who wrote that scene into Home Alone chose the word “Filthy” instead of “Dirty”. Kevin is watching something that is really “bad”. We get it. We all know the difference. If mom says “your hands are dirty,” then you better go wash your hands. If she says “you look filthy”, it’s not just the hands we need washed, we need to get in the shower and stay there for a really long time. Dirty is on the surface. Filthy saturates the entire person.

Leviticus for Christmas!

We’ve got that today in our reading for the Bible Binge today. How many of you on this Christmas morning pulled out your bookmark and read the December 25th entry? We’re in the exciting book of Leviticus! The book of Leviticus doesn’t exactly read like a warm, fuzzy Christmas story, does it? In fact, we get to Leviticus in our Bible reading, and we’re scanning. How can we get through this to get to the good stuff in Numbers? All these regulations.

Here’s the deal with Leviticus. If Exodus is about God’s rescue and coming to live with his people, Leviticus is how that relationship will be maintained. Over and over in the book Israel is being reminded that God is a holy God, and sin is bad and must be dealt with through rituals and deaths of animals. In fact, the apex of the book, the climax is the Day of Atonement, where an entire chapter is given to one of the most important days on Israel’s calendar, the day when the sin problem takes center stage and is spectacularly dealt with.

Unclean mothers for Christmas

And it’s in that context we find in our reading for today a story that screams “Christmas”. Christmas has a stake in our reading of Leviticus this morning. The opening paragraph of Leviticus 12 orbits around the regulations and ritual for mothers who give birth. And it’s not pretty. And in fact, we are not going to get into the details this morning because, well, we’re just not. Here’s the summary in Leviticus 12:2. God is speaking to Moses and he says this:

Leviticus 12:2 “Tell the Israelites: When a woman becomes pregnant and gives birth to a male child, she will be unclean seven days…she must not touch any holy thing or go into the sanctuary until completing her days of purification.”

The mother who gives birth is considered unclean for seven days, but those days of purification add up to more than two months of life not being normal. Now some of this seems odd to us, but we have to remember that there are a lot of practical reasons sitting underneath a lot of these regulations in the book of Leviticus. After all, Israel did not have our modern medicine. This idea of the new mom staying out of the public life for a couple of months was one way to protect the health of mothers and babies in a very unsanitary environment. Think of the thousands and thousands of babies born in the middle of the desert during Israel’s 40 year journey to the Promised Land.

But there is something else in play. And the more we read, the more this becomes very uncomfortable for us, and it has nothing to do with the uncleanness of new moms and all the physical stuff happening there. Three things just make all of us just very squeamish to the point where we want to look away, explain away, and simply move on from all of this unpleasantness.

The mother is considered impure.

The mother is cut off from God’s presence.

The mother needs atonement.

First, the mother is considered impure. She’s not simply dirty. She is impure. And the moment this word gets used is the moment our internal objections start to rise. This isn’t simply a physical uncleanness. The use of purity language elevates this into the realm of morality. The mother isn’t simply dirty. The mother is filthy.

Second, and worse… because the mother is impure, she’s not cut off from the public, she’s cut off from God’s presence. “She must not go into the sanctuary.” She’s not allowed to worship. She’s not allowed to be near God’s presence in the Holy of Holies… she’s filthy… she has no access to God. And for an Israelite, this is the ultimate condemnation. In Exodus, Moses went to the mat with God because God openly flirted with the idea that he would not be present with Israel any longer after they worshiped the golden calf. Hundreds of years later, Ezekiel watches in horror as God’s presence in his glory cloud lifts up from the temple and leaves the temple and goes out of the city, never to return. His visible presence is a matter of life and death to the Israelite and here we have mothers cut off from that very presence. They are filthy.

And third, the only fix for the mother is downright appalling to our sense of justice and morality. Here’s what God says in verse 6:

Leviticus 12:6–7 “When her days of purification are complete, she is to bring to the priest..a young pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering. He will present them before the Lord and make atonement on her behalf;”

A sin offering? Atonement? She’s already being treated as a filthy sinner by being cut off from Israel’s worship, and now we’re confronted with the very real fact that God himself is treating her as if she has sinned in childbirth. The only way back into the presence of God is through an atonement sacrifice. Payment for sin. That can’t be. How unfair. How has this woman sinned by having a child?

It’s kind of fascinating to read the theologians and commentators tripping over themselves to explain this. This is very, very uncomfortable for us. What kind of God is going to treat childbirth as if it is a sin? More is in play in the birth of a child here, than simply regulations for mothers who give birth.

Back to the Garden of Eden

The tip-off is kind of masked in our modern translations. The entire paragraph starts with “When a mother gives birth to a male child”. But the real, word there is “offspring”. When a mother gives birth to a male offspring.. and when we hear this, we immediately find ourselves immersed in another scene at the beginning of time when our parents stood before the Creator with the serpent, and they are hearing their consequences for disobeying God. Eve is promised an offspring who will take care of the sin problem, the First Great Promise of redemption. But Eve is also promised pain in childbirth.

It makes you wonder, what would it have been like, before the Great Disobedience, for Eve to give birth without all the pain and physical stuff that went with it? I heard recently one husband describing his ordeal with a kidney stone. You know where I’m going with this… I’m sitting there thinking this guy should stop while he’s ahead. Mothers, you have my respect! There is no comparison between a kidney stone and childbirth.

But this is the point of Leviticus 12. No, the mother is not sinning in giving birth to a child. But make no mistake, that birth is marked by sin. A sinner gives birth to a sinner. Adam and Eve’s posterity will always carry the sin problem. Every child born in the history of the world is born a sinner. And that reality is absolutely baked into the regulations and ritual for mothers giving birth. Every time a mother gives birth, she is to remember that she is a filthy sinner and has given birth to a filthy sinner and both mother and child must have atonement in order to be clean and have access to God’s presence. It is through the death of an animal that God gives mothers grace… in the death of the animal, the filthy sinner is made clean and restored to God’s presence. Grace for filthy sinners.

The last of the unclean mothers

Hundreds of years later, on a dark night, and in absolutely unsanitary conditions, the ultimate fix for impurity and filth and original sin is born into a feeding trough for animals in Bethlehem. There is a very real sense in which Mary is the last of the unclean mothers. What lies in front of her in that manger that first Christmas morning is going to deal definitively with her impurity, her filth as a sinner. And every other filthy sinner.

Luke’s account of the Christmas story includes this:

Luke 2:22–24 When the days of their purification according to the law of Moses were finished, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord..and to offer a sacrifice (according to what is stated in Leviticus 12, a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons).

Our text today for the Bible Binge has its landing point here. This is the day we know as Candlemas, February 2nd, the day when Jesus was presented to Simeon and Anna. We tend to think of Christ’s presentation in this episode, but do not miss the fact that Mary has a vested interest. The mother of the savior of the world is coming to do her duty according to the law of Moses. She is in need of purification and restoration. She is in need of atonement. And the One she holds, the baby Jesus, is the very One who will grow up and then die to purify her from her sins once and for all. Just like the rest of us. There will be no more of these atonement sacrifices. Mothers will no longer be cut off from the sanctuary. Mothers will always have access to God’s presence. All because of the one born into a manger that first Christmas morning.

Christmas for Filthy Sinners

It’s easy to read Leviticus 12 and think this is just too dark, especially for Christmas. But that’s the point. It is dark. Sin is dark. It's into that darkness… the darkness of a world plunged in hopelessness and despair… a baby is born into the dirt and gloom of a manger. Jesus did not come into a world where everything was right. Jesus didn’t enter into a world where “all was calm, and all was bright”, despite the best efforts of that famous Christmas Carol. That's not reality. Rather, the Good News is that Jesus entered into the real world. Your world. My world. A world of darkness. He made His dwelling place among us, not running away from the darkness, but by bringing His light into the darkest of places.

Simeon said it that morning.. this baby is a “light for revelation and glory to God’s people”. The baby Jesus is a light, our light for our darkness. This is our hope on this Christmas morning. Jesus did not come for those “have their life together.” Jesus, our Atonement Sacrifice, comes to us, those who know, who feel, who experience the darkness. He comes for us, all of us, all of us filthy sinners. He comes to us when we are broken, when we are in grief, when we are enslaved to sin. He brings us comfort. He gives us rest. He comes to dwell with us, walk with us, and give us life, salvation, and forgiveness. That’s Christmas for filthy sinners.

Let’s pray.