According to family legend, my great grandfather was the first one to drive the twenty-mule team out of Death Valley loaded with borax. I have no idea whether this is actually true or not. Like most family legends, I suspect that it is a work of fiction. But I liked to recount this story to my friends when I was growing up since the twenty-mule team was featured in commercials on the popular television show Death Valley Days. It made me feel just short of famous.
Borax is a “detergent booster.” Apparently, it is used in a lot of other things too. Fertilizer, rocket fuel, and automobile windshields, just to name a few. But I always thought of it as soap. The same people who made Borax also made Boraxo, the hand detergent that promised to make hands “soft, smooth, and really clean.”
Looking back on it, cleanliness seemed to be the driving concern of most of the commercials we watched in those days. They fretted about clean clothes, clean floors, and clear complexions. What did this say about us as a culture? Were we especially dirty? Maybe we were just fastidious. Perhaps it was a little of both.
At points, the Bible seems similarly obsessed. The Old Testament, in particular, appears to be especially concerned about matters of cleanness and uncleanness with its detailed regulations about food, clothing, and its peculiar stipulations regarding spots and blemishes. When we read through these laws we do not get the impression that what is at issue is primarily a matter of hygiene. Indeed, some of the measures prescribed do not seem hygienic at all, especially when the “cleansing” agent is blood. Something else is going on.
The New Testament writer of Hebrews admits as much by calling such measures a “shadow” that can never perfect those who repeat them year after year. Instead of being a remedy, they were a reminder of sin (Hebrews 10:1-3). In a way, so is Jesus’ sixth beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). The Greek word that is translated “pure” means clean. No other assertion shatters our illusion that these beatitudes are some kind of moral yardstick quite like this one.
What Jesus describes is a cleanness that originates on the inside and works its way out. Every other kind of cleansing with which we are familiar works the other way around. Jesus is not talking about getting clean but being clean. When we read his statement, we know instinctively that this is not what we are. If we do not know this, it can only be because we do not really know ourselves. We cannot hear Jesus’ assertion without wondering how it is possible for anyone to see God.
Like the others that precede it, we must take this beatitude as a promise. What Jesus gives us here is not a rod by which to measure our lives but a final portrait of what those lives will look like when Christ is finished with them. Purity of heart is not the condition we must meet in order to gain access into the Kingdom of God. Instead, it is the final destination for those who enter that kingdom through the gate of Christ. He is the only hope we have of being pure in heart. “You can start trying to clean your heart, but at the end of your life it will be as black as it was at the beginning, perhaps blacker” Martyn Lloyd-Jones warns. “No! It is God alone who can do it, and, thank God, He has promised to do it.” Only the blessed can be pure in heart. They will see God.