Disgust and Discipleship

What moral psychologists can help us understand about the dinner at Levi's house.

Let me ask you a question. 

When you imagine the scene at the home of Levi the tax collector, where Jesus reclined at the table with an unsavory crowd—where are the scribes when they ask, Why does [your teacher] eat with tax collectors and sinners? (Mark 2:16) Are they at the table? Are they standing far off, against the wall? Are they outside the house, leaning in through the window?

And where are Jesus’ disciples? Watching Jesus from a distance? Or are they with him at the table?

Where would you be if you were part of the scene?

(I guess that was several questions.)

The Calling of Saint Matthew, Jan Sanders van Hemessen (1548)

Last time we considered how this sort of transgressive fellowship was a feature of Jesus’ discipleship regimen, not an exception. This time I want to speculate about one thing (not everything) Jesus accomplished in those dinners that made them essential.

For the last decade or so, psychologists have researched the role disgust plays in how people make decisions and moral judgments. Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, which the author lays out in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), leverages the metaphor of tastes buds to describe the several “receptors” that make up the human moral palette. One of them is the Sanctity/Degradation receptor which entails “the sense that some things are elevated and pure and must be kept protected from the degradation and profanity of everyday life.”

Religious days and utensils obviously fall in to this category. Ancient Israelites and many modern Jews keep the Sabbath Day holy by refraining from work on that one day every week (Exodus 20:8-10). The ordinary bread and wine of Communion can be set apart from their daily use with a prayer and a blessing. Once it’s been sanctified, many of us would feel funny carrying that same bottle and loaf on a picnic.

But the sanctity category is broader than religion and includes the right use (and misuse) of any number of things. “Right use” varies, of course, from one society to the next. In North America, certain animals are set apart for right use under the category of “pet” (dogs, cats, horses) or “pest” (roaches, ants), either of which means they are protected from the misuse of being food. In some parts of the world the right hand is set apart for eating, shaking hands, and so on, while the left hand is preserved for everyday dirty jobs, like cleaning oneself after using the bathroom.

According to Haidt, our sanctity receptor is activated when something is used in a way that degrades or profanes the object itself, or makes us feel degraded or profaned by its misuse. Someone creates an art piece made up of a crucifix submerged in urine or pokes fun at the prophet Muhammad. Someone hands you an item with the hand reserved for wiping bottoms. Someone serves you a platter of roasted puppies or fried insects. The feeling that lets you know your sense of sanctity has been violated—you might feel it faintly even now—is disgust. 

And notice where you feel it. Disgust is a not a reasoned response. It’s not a conclusion you draw from available data. It’s barely a thought at all. Instead, it’s something that happens in your body. To your body. Something roils behind your ribs. You gag. Your face twists into a grimace. Often involuntarily, you move yourself away from the contaminant. 

Dirty Things and Dirty People

Disgust is a universal sensation. What causes disgust might change from one society to another, and within the same society, some populations have more sensitive sanctity receptors than others. But the physiological reaction to unclean or profane things is common to humans everywhere.  

And as Cornell University psychology professor David Pizarro explains in his TEDx talk, “The Strange Politics of Disgust,” the disgust reaction is not limited to objects. It can apply to people, too:

One of the features ... of disgust is not just its universality and its strength, but the way that it works through association. So when one disgusting thing touches a clean thing, that clean thing becomes disgusting, not the other way around. This makes it very useful as a strategy if you want to convince somebody that an object or an individual or an entire social group is disgusting and should be avoided.

In other words, it’s a short journey in our subconscious moral reasoning from eating certain animals is revolting to the kinds of people who eat certain animals are revolting. Consciously or unconsciously, concern for sanctity compels us to avoid things and people we consider impure, unclean, defiled—whether physically or morally. When the sanctity receptor is activated, we feel disgust. Our bodies react before our minds reflect.  

That’s why I suspect both the religious leaders and Jesus’s disciples alike were sitting as far from that dinner table as possible. Just about everything on the table and in that room was disgusting.

Everyone in that room that day was socialized in a culture concerned about purity and cleanliness. All of them, I’d bet, were familiar with the extensive lists of unclean foods in Leviticus 11. They’d have known how physical ailments render a person unclean (Leviticus 13), as do saliva, menstrual blood, and semen, which contaminate not only the person who discharges them but also renders unclean every article of clothing or bed linen or napkin or neighbor they touch (Leviticus 15-16). Looking around that room, without the slightest exercise of imagination, the disciples and the scribes of the Pharisees would’ve been sure in their bones that everyone and everything in the room had been profaned by something from those Levitical lists. They’d have felt it in their bodies—in their throat, through their shoulders, in their bowels.  

Their disgust alarm would’ve been blaring at volume level eleven.

Modern Americans don’t worry about clean or unclean things and people like first-century Jews did. At least not in the same ways. We may speak instead in terms of “safe” and “unsafe.” About good neighborhoods and bad ones. About normal people on the one hand and creeps and weirdos on the other. Which is to say that American society doesn’t socialize us in exactly the same ways as Jewish rituals did in the first century, but our society conditions us nonetheless, conditions our bodies to react in certain ways to the presence of other bodies. That’s why you’ll find a wide radius of empty space on a crowded subway car around a homeless rider with open sores. It’s why someone will cringe upon taking her credit card back from a transgender woman at a grocery store register. It’s why someone might feel tightness in his solar plexus when he finds himself alone on an elevator with black men he doesn’t know.

Let me be very clear: I’m not equating homeless, transgender, or black people with tax collectors and prostitutes. I’m not lumping them together with “sinners.” I’m making at a more fundamental level—at the level of gut reaction. Like Jesus’s first disciples and all the other religious folks in Jesus’s life, your body and mine have been socialized to be repulsed or, at the very least, to be wary in the presence of certain kinds of people.

That only way to change that gut reaction is through exposure.

Discipleship and the Gut

In recent years I’ve realized how much I stand to learn from people whom my faith tradition encouraged me to avoid. Looking back over the last decade of my own discipleship, I see that another crucial change took place first. Through new relationships with an increasingly diverse range of people, my body has been reconditioned, slowly but surely, to react differently in their presence. My sanctity receptor, to use Haidt’s term, has been adjusted. I think it’s accurate to say that this physiological change was a prerequisite for any future change of opinion. Before I could think differently about these people, I had to feel differently around them. Which is to say that adjusting my disgust reaction has been an important part of my discipleship.

Listen, I admit I’m speculating here. But I find it very easy to conclude that one thing Jesus accomplished by forcing his disciples to eat with sinners was gradually reconditioning their bodies to tone down their revulsion reaction to these outcasts. He didn’t only change the way they thought about the Kingdom of God. He changed the way they felt in their bodies about the sinners who were getting into the kingdom ahead of them (Matthew 21:31). He was showing them that while it may be true in the kingdoms of this world that “when one disgusting thing touches a clean thing, that clean thing becomes disgusting,” in the Kingdom of God the dynamics run the other way around. When Jesus touches unclean (“disgusting”) people, he makes them clean: lepers, bleeding women, the dead. His disciples will do the same things and more, in his name, after his resurrection. But before they could be healing agents in Jesus’s name, and before they could learn the mystery of the kingdom from sinners, his disciples had to be able to sit in the same room with them.

Jesus heals 10 lepers. Probably by Grisopolo from 13. cent.

It took Peter ten years, or thereabouts, of this sort of exposure before he comprehended the significance of it. His discipleship began with the question at Levi’s house—“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?—and matured at the house of a Roman Centurion named Cornelius. There Peter was finally able to say, “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism” (Acts 10:34). What did it take for him to realize the extent of God’s love for people of “every nation?” It took lots and lots of uncomfortable dinners with unsavory characters.  

The dinner at Levi’s house was a baby step. The unclean people there were fellow Jews. They were countrymen and co-religionists. In the book of Acts Jesus will send those same disciples to hop up in chariots with Ethiopian eunuchs, to lay hands on Samaritans, to socialize with Roman soldiers. Forcing them to associate with Jewish “sinners” prepared them for the monumentally more difficult task of eating with “Gentile sinners” (Galatians 2:15).

It may well be that a crucial part of our discipleship is learning to listen to our bodies so we can reinterpret what it’s trying to tell us. It may be that when we feel our jaw tighten or our stomach turn, when our body screams out, Get away! that we should listen for the Holy Spirit saying, No! Get closer!