TATTOOS, THE BIBLE, AND THE WHY

I don’t know if this is controversial or not but I’m increasingly veering away from blindly following the Ten Commandments.

It’s tricky isn’t it? If your driving instructor tells you to slow down, that’s a command you should probably follow. If a notice on a country walk says ‘Danger Ahead’ you can certainly trust it, rather than just hurdling the fence and teetering off the clifftop.

I think that’s how a lot of people see the Bible too - a set of impersonal commands shouting at us in capitals from the depths of Leviticus. You choose how to respond. Some go along with the signposts, trusting in that implicit authority; rebellious pagans (and unfortunately a lot of Christians think that that means entirely everybody else) are quite happy to jump the fence and stick two fingers up at their driving instructors… and crash or fall to their untimely deaths, presumably. Or, have a jolly fun time on the way down.

Here’s where I’m at then, I think. I trust the Authority, but I’m also keen to find the heart behind the why. In other words, following isn’t a problem, but blindly following might be.

Let’s take tattoos. In Leviticus, God tells Moses to forbid the Israelites from marking their bodies. A lot of us (me included) stopped right there. It specifically says ‘Don’t get tattoos’ so I wasn’t ever going to get tattoos. But I never really paused to ask why. What’s the heart of God?

Well. It turns out that in Egypt, tattoos were a permanent mark of slavery. And in Canaan, the land the Israelites were headed for, the native Canaanites would print on and slash their bodies in commemoration of the dead. No wonder God didn’t want the Israelites to do that! He was calling them to be different, to stand out from the culture they’d been rescued from, and to be pure in the culture they were called to. That was how they would be known as his own. In addition to the historical context, I also found out that the actual word ‘tattoo’ was only added in the 1700s. The context adds a lot of light to the question of how this verse applies to us.

And that’s the point, I think: finding the context. In the same chapter (Leviticus 19) the people are instructed to: leave the edges of fields unharvested so that there is always food for the poor; respect the elderly by standing up in their presence; leave good healthy margin in life; keep clothing simple, and not to eat meat that’s more than three days old, among other commandments.

For each of these, there’s a really obvious why:

1. Looking after the poor is the right thing to do. After all, it could so easily be you. Don’t be greedy.
2. Older people need to sit down more than younger people do. It will be you someday.
3. If you physically burn out you’ll have nothing to give anyone, and poverty will find you.
4. Dressing simply is sensible in the hot sun and dusty wind.
5. Fridges haven’t been invented yet, and meat goes bad really quickly.

So, the question is: is it okay to search for the why, or, if God just says it, that’s enough? And it matters what you think about this because there are bigger issues than tattoos and feeding the poor out there.

Personally, I think God is longing for relationship, for dialogue, for us to both seek his heart and to trust him when he sends us those warning signposts. But both approaches start with a good relationship. I don’t want to blindly follow - this isn’t Nineteen-Eighty-Four and God is not Big Brother. I think trust and relationship go hand in hand.

I still won’t get tattoos though. But if I did, I would absolutely be weighing it up in prayer, choosing wisely, considering what I truly believe about why God wants me to honour my body, and what that says to the world about him.

In the end it’s always got to be about that hasn’t it? Honouring your parents, keeping the sabbath, not having idols, respecting people and their property, not being resentful or jealous, showing kindness to strangers and foreigners and being generous to the poor - it all tells a story about how much we honour and glorify the God of hope and love, in a world of darkness and despair. And the more I think about it, the more I think that that might be the why.