Reading through Leviticus can be a slog. Many of us, in fact, are experiencing this right now. One friend sent me this classic scene from Parks & Rec this morning with the caption: “The Book of Leviticus Be Like…”
I’ve had lots of deep questions come my way in the last couple of weeks about the readings, and I’ve been so encouraged to see people really faithfully wrestling with the text. Keep it up!
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Are We The People of Leviticus?
So I’ll be lecturing the VB Fellows this week on Leviticus 16-19, and the title of my lecture is: “Are We The People Of Leviticus?” What do I mean?
Well, one main way that we interpret the Scriptures is by putting ourselves in them. We read them particapatorily, as though we are part of the story. Of course, we understand that Paul’s letters to the Corinthians were not technically written to us; they were written to the believers in Corinth. But once we begin to see the sorts of things Paul was addressing to the Corinthians, it’s not a huge leap for us to apply those same teachings to ourselves. We are Corinth too, in a way. We are also Ephesus and Galatia and Philippi and Colossae. Likewise, we are Joseph and Mary and Peter and Thomas and Judas and the rich young ruler and the Canaanite woman. We are Pilate and the High Priest, Rome and Israel, etc. Even going back to the Old Testament, it’s not a stretch to see how the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses relate to our story now.
However, one of the difficulties of reading Leviticus is that it’s much harder to see ourselves in that story. As Fred Armisen’s character in Parks & Rec perfectly illustrates, Leviticus seems to us like a collection of obscure legal codes from some foreign land and people who, at times, seem to be worshipping a foreign God. Even when we understand, in theory, what is being asked of the people then, we’re not sure what it is has to do with us.
Set Apart From Outsiders?
Let’s take Leviticus 19 (yesterday’s reading) as an example. I’m going to jump around a bit. Some parts of the chapter seem relatively straightforward, like verses 11-13:
Do not steal.
Do not lie.
Do not deceive one another.
Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.
Do not defraud or rob your neighbor.
Right. These are commands which comport with our own moral understanding. We can see how they also obviously apply to us. But let’s go a couple of verses prior (vv. 5-8):
When you sacrifice a fellowship offering to the Lord, sacrifice it in such a way that it will be accepted on your behalf. It shall be eaten on the day you sacrifice it or on the next day; anything left over until the third day must be burned up. If any of it is eaten on the third day, it is impure and will not be accepted. Whoever eats it will be held responsible because they have desecrated what is holy to the Lord; they must be cut off from their people.
This seems a bit more foreign. Not only does our religion no longer offer these kinds of sacrifices, most of us don’t even know what a “fellowship offering” is. But apparently it’s the sort of thing where if you carry it out improperly (by eating of it on the third day) you are to be “cut off” from the people! This is very hard for us to relate to, because it seems rather technical, impersonal, and of course…harsh. Imagine if someone came into your church and took communion improperly and was then cast out of your community. That would seem not only strange, but perhaps even un-Christian to us.1 Now let’s jump down a few verses later for something even stranger (v. 19):
Keep my decrees.
Do not mate different kinds of animals.
Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed.
Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.
Now, these are the types of decrees—neither strictly moral nor strictly related to worship—which tend to baffle us moderns the most. I’ve spoken of these ritual commands in more detail elsewhere, but a brief explanation here will suffice for my present purpose. In short, they’re about holiness. Notice that all three of these commands are about keeping things separated. As the Lord makes clear in the previous chapter (18:1-5), his people are not to be like the Egyptians (whence they came), nor like the Canaanites (where they’re going). Contra The Bangles, thou shalt not “walk like an Egyptian.” Rather, like the very seeds and animals of their fields, like the very materials in their clothing, there is to be no casual mixture within the people of God. They are to be set apart. Holiness is about separation. Thus, these ritual commands give the people of God a way of embodying holiness in their ordinary everyday lives, in their fields, in their homes, and even on their bodies.
Only people who grew up in the 90’s will get this one. Sorry.
Once we understand this, we can see that, actually, all three types of commands we’ve mentioned so far in Leviticus (moral, worship, and ritual)2 tend to serve the greater purpose of holiness: setting the people of God apart from false gods for him.This is why we find them seemingly indiscriminately mixed in one passage. Because, in a sense, they’re three different ways of accomplishing one goal. Much of the Book of Leviticus is about this theme of holiness. But it wouldn’t be quite right to say that it’s all about holiness. If Leviticus were all about holiness, it would indeed appear foreign to Christianity, which seems to have a whole lot to do with—well, not just holiness, but—love and inclusion. If all that mattered were that the people of God be separated from Egypt as the donkey from the ox and the wool from the linen, then, at the very least, there would be no hope for Egypt (nor indeed for any of us). But this is not how our story goes.
Welcoming Outsiders?
It turns out there’s more going on, not just in the Bible, but even specifically in Leviticus 19. Almost every story in Scripture is a microcosm of the whole story, if we have eyes to see it. Leviticus 19 is no different.
Right smack in the middle of the above quoted commands we find this (vv. 9-10):
When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.
And the same theme continues later on in the chapter (vv. 33-34):
When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.
What in the world? I thought this chapter—this whole book—was about holiness! I thought the whole point was to separate from the foreigner, never to mix with them, to keep them out at all cost!
But no.
It turns out, part of the very pattern of holiness is to set aside (to consecrate) some small space on the margin or the edge for God. And this space, apparently, becomes the gateway through which the outsider can be brought in. Symbolically, the command about leaving the edge of the fields has a very similar shape to the Sabbath command. The Sabbath is the seventh day, that is, the margin or the edge of the week. And it is to be kept holy, set aside, unworked. Likewise, the unharvested crops on the edge of their fields. See also: the uncut sideburns on the edge of men’s faces (Leviticus 19:27). But in the above verses, the Lord is letting us in on a kind of secret: that holiness is not just holiness all the way down. It is love.3
Holiness, if truly followed, turns inside out at the margin and becomes a gateway to true inclusion.4 In effect, God is saying “When you properly set things apart for me, I have designed it so that you make room for the inclusion of those on the outside.” It’s counter-intuitive, but of course, we should not be surprised by this. When God first calls Abraham, when he first begins to set apart a people for himself, the very promise he gives to Abraham is what? “I will bless only your people and no one else?” No. He says that through Abraham’s family, all the nations on earth will be blessed. You can see this most clearly after Abraham offers up his son in Genesis 22:
I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.
So what are we to make of these seemingly competing commands in Leviticus to “set yourselves apart” and to “welcome the foreigner as one of you?” How exactly are these ideas reconciled?
Two Streams: Holiness & Inclusion
Two central streams run throughout the Bible in seemingly opposite directions. I do not say these are the only two streams, nor the only important streams. But they are central and unavoidable. The first is holiness; the second, inclusion. Ultimately, these two opposite-flowing streams run together in Christ and in his church. But it is not immediately clear how this works. Because holiness means “set apart” and inclusion means “bringing in,” the two can easily be pitted against each other. Very often they are. For instance, the whole modern debate between “liberal” and “conservative” Christians regarding sexual ethics, heaven and hell, how to read the Bible, etc, tends toward a “holiness versus inclusion” paradigm, where conservatives argue for some form of holiness and liberals for some form of inclusion.
The basic problem with this paradigm is that if your God is all about inclusion, what are people being included into if not holiness? Likewise, if your God is all about holiness, who then can enter in? Thankfully, as we have seen, the Scriptures do not force us to choose one way or the other. On the contrary, the Bible is the story of the patient reconciliation of opposites. In the very first scene, in Genesis 1, God creates the heavens and the earth. The heavens and the earth. Separation, or set-apartness—light from darkness, waters above from waters below, “each according to its kind,” etc—is perhaps the central theme of the creation account. The language of separation reminds one of the ritual commands of Leviticus. Fast forward to the final scene of the Bible and what do we find? The heavens and the earth, which seemed insurmountably estranged…are now being wed. The Holy (Set Apart) City comes down from heaven to be the place of ultimate inclusion, where God and man may dwell together for eternity.
To express this same notion of cooperation between God’s holiness and inclusion, the Church Fathers often used the image of God’s left and right hand. With his left hand, it was said, he judges, separates, casts out. With his right hand, he brings in and has mercy. You see this in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, for instance. The “two hands” of God is a helpful analogy, because it proves that opposite purposes, like opposite hands, are not always ultimately opposed. Our own bodies depend on the integration of left and right. Having or being able to use only one hand is a major handicap. Sadly, the body of Christ in the world has often suffered from this handicap. The church has tended to swing the pendulum from holiness to inclusion and back again, each time tying one of its hands behind its back.
What This Might Mean For Us Now
At the risk of bringing this a bit too close to home, I wonder if our Evangelical churches, in Virginia Beach and elsewhere, may now be in danger of this very thing: leaving one hand tied behind our backs. I thank God for the Evangelical movement which has led us to this place, but our current methods—where our churches seem better equipped to advertise inclusion to the outsider than to shepherd the insider to holiness—may soon reach an impasse.
At the end of Genesis, when Joseph found himself exiled to Egypt, his holy relationship with God set him apart in such a way that he single-handedly blessed all of Egypt and his own family, the people of God, who eventually lived blessed lives among the Egyptians. That is holiness leading to inclusion. And yet, by the beginning of Exodus, that blessing had reached its saturation point. The people of God had found themselves slaves in that same foreign land. The Joseph Movement had ended, and a new movement was desperately needed: one from slavish inter-mixture to holiness. A Moses Movement.
That kind of Moses Movement, I believe, is what we need right now.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about some monkish descent into the wilderness, away from the world entirely. As we have seen, holiness involves inclusion just as inclusion depends on holiness. I am not arguing that we should retreat entirely from evangelism, and toward our own insular Christian bubbles. Rather, I am saying that holiness is its own means of evangelism, and perhaps a more powerful one than we realize. Especially in this turbulent time of internet addictions, mental health crises, consumeristic nihilism, disintegrated families, and social despair, I can’t think of an more attractive offering to the world than a holy people, committed to love of God and neighbor, set apart from the patterns of the world. There was perhaps a time when church members and leaders could advertise to heathen passers-by, “Come as you are. We’re sinners just like you.” But in a moment like this, I’d bet on a different motto: “Come as you are, but come at your own risk. We’ve sworn allegiance to a different kingdom, a different master. And he will not leave you as you are.” I believe people are currently desperate for this. Desperate for holiness, not just for inclusion. Inclusion into a holy people. Everyone, in the age of the internet, can find “inclusion” in one hell or another. Not everyone can find a home that restores their souls. We, the body of Christ, should be that home. But we must first set our own souls apart for him.
Conclusion
Much of the book of Leviticus is about “setting ourselves apart.” The people of God are not to be like the foreigners with their foreign gods, etc. They are to be holy. But this holiness is not AGAINST outsiders; it is FOR them. It is holiness for the sake of inclusion. If we, the people of God, choose to be casually mixed with the world, then everyone loses. But if we remain holy and include the outsider at the margin, then they are included into our holy renewal. Without holiness, we have nothing to offer, nothing into which they might be included.
This is a subtle truth, I know. So subtle that even Peter and the other apostles couldn’t quite understand or accept the mystery of Gentile inclusion at first. After all, even Jesus had told the Canaanite woman he couldn’t help her because he “came only for the lost sheep of Israel.” But of course, in the end, he did help her. Thanks to the holy love of our Lord, she got the crumbs under the table (read: inclusion at the margin), and that was enough to crack open the door to the whole kingdom of heaven. Of course, this secret door to Gentile salvation was not new. It was hinted at long before the Canaanite woman. In fact, it was the plan all along, built into the promises and prophecies of God from Genesis on through, and, as we’ve just seen, built into the very laws of Leviticus 19.
Anyway, I hope this little journey through one chapter of Leviticus helps you to see a little more light than before. If this was helpful to you, please share with others. God bless you all!
At this point, we must note that Paul in the New Testament is actually very concerned about people taking communion improperly and even notes (in seemingly Old Testament fashion) that, as a consequence, people are getting sick and dying:
So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we were more discerning with regard to ourselves, we would not come under such judgment. Nevertheless, when we are judged in this way by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be finally condemned with the world. (1 Corinthians 11:27-32)
So either this seemingly foreign type of “Levitical holiness” in worship is more present in our own Christian traditions than we might think or else our own Christian traditions have departed further from those spelled out in the New Testament than we might like to admit.
Don’t hold me to these categories. There are some who have categorized OT laws in a similar fashion (or more popularly, “moral, ceremonial, & civil”). But I don’t actually hold to any of these categorizations myself, as I hope to show.
Yet, notice, it is not “love” the way we often think of love. We often think of love as pure inclusion, forgetting about the separation that is first necessary before loving inclusion can be possible. For instance, progressive Christians today like to quote these passages from Leviticus as a way of insisting on certain political views, that Christians should be for open borders or even open to other kinds of beliefs about sexuality, identity, etc. But this does not follow. Separation is a necessary part of inclusion. In order to include anyone into anything, you must first have something to include them in, and this necessarily involves exclusion of everything that is not that thing.
This is amazing. Thank you!
This was fantastic. Thanks for sharing!