My childhood next-door neighbor was named April. She never had mud on her face or skinned her knees-she was the icon opposite the tomboy imperfections of the rest of us. April was not only the goody-two-shoes who smugly reveled in the downfalls of the rest of us neighborhood-sinners...she also managed to be the first in line for everything at school, as well as the first to shun the new fat kid who moved into the neighborhood.  She was like the dark side of a cosmic Martha Stewart, making sure we all knew that the standards that really mattered in life were hers, and that virtually none of us would measure up. Even at the age of 7, April's heart seemed packed in ice. In retrospect, she seems to have been destined to grow up to be the one lying behind the shadows of every dark secret of the household, corporate office, and church, waiting with bated breath for someone to break the rules, which of course she saw herself to have been born to enforce with righteous indignation. 

April however, was a minor-league player as a self-serving moralist, compared to the hallmark of Puritan self-righteousness.  Jesus himself struggled with those who railed against the specks in their neighbors' eyes, while remaining oblivious to the logs in their own.

The Gospel stories repeatedly portray Jesus running headlong into the purification rites or kosher food restrictions of an Israelite society held hostage by the hyper-religious, the Pharisees, whose failing wasn't believing that there're rules for moral behavior, but that these applied to everyone else, and seldom to themselves.  Dietary rules, the right to determine who's clean and unclean, who one could talk to or marry, were important ways Israel could recall its faith in God as the true creator, ruler and judge of the world, and describe the distinctiveness of its faith from that of worshipers of idols.  The problem, Jesus again and again tried to show them, wasn't in recognizing a boundary between morality and immorality, but in letting it become so hardened that mercy, forgiveness and compassion were sealed outside the bounds of religious propriety.

Jesus' annoying way of teaching the religious authorities around him was simply to love-outside-the-lines, to refuse to place love of the law above love of one's neighbor, and the rules of religion above the mercy of God.  Among the most flagrant examples of Jesus' own way of marching-to-a-different-drummer were his repeated acts of healing and compassion offered precisely to those that the laws of religion and society didn't recognize.  No group personified this more than those suffering from the horrible disease of leprosy, which ate away at their skin, and ultimately their fingers, noses, ears, and toes, leaving them horribly scarred, and abandoned as outcasts by ‘clean' society.  Lepers were banned to colonies and permitted to come into town for food and water only during the hottest time of the day, when the rest of the community was at home, safe from contamination.  And wherever they went, they had to ring a bell before them, crying out for all to hear the words of shame- Beware!  Unclean!