Be Holy!

Sunday Lectionary: Levticus and Love of Neighbour

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This week’s Old Testament reading from the related lectionary is Leviticus 19.1–2 and 15–18. It’s not very long, so let’s look at it in full;

2 Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

15 You shall not render an unjust judgement; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbour. ¹⁶You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbour: I am the Lord.

17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbour, or you will incur guilt yourself. ¹⁸You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.

Church of the Immaculate Conception (Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, IN) wikimediacommons.org

I’m going to share with you two useful things that this passage gives us the opportunity to share with our church communities this Sunday. The first is as follows…

The Old Testament is Not Mean/Bad

I do some teaching for a regional theological college and every year I mark a lot of essays with the following title: ‘If someone in your congregation said to you, ‘I’ve always thought The God of the Old Testament is more a God of judgment than of love’, how would you respond?’. This is a good assessment question for ordinands and lay ministers for several reasons, but one is that it has many parallels with real life. Just this week I was involved in a conversation about the Bible where someone said something almost identical to the essay question.

This is something that lots of Christians think, often without even realising. It means that we can operate in a way which is functionally ‘Marcion’, which means engaging with the heresey of saying that the God of the Old Testament is different to the God of the New Testament.

This passage in Leviticus offers us a good opportunity to emphasise the continuity between the two Testaments. As is shown in the gospel reading for Sunday (Matthew 22:34–46) where Jesus talks about the greatest commandment, ideas of love of neighbour begin in the Old Testament.

Other things we need to remember when thinking about how to read the Old Testament include; remembering that it has a greater range of genres of text than the new which require different interpretations, the importance of historical context, and that these were the scriptures that Jesus knew and loved.

Lest we forget, the New Testament also has its spicey moments! Acts recalls how Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead after lying to Paul, so it isn’t just texts in the Hebrew Bible that make for uncomfortable reading…

Love of Neighbour

This passage from Leviticus also unpacks some of what it means to love our neighbours, which is bound up with the idea of holiness. It begins by saying ‘you shall be holy because I the Lord your God am holy’. Holiness in the Old Testament is a profound and wide-reaching concept that deserves a brief discussion.

Leviticus 19 comes in the middle of what scholars call the ‘holiness code’ (Lev 17-26), one of the four law codes found in the Pentateuch. Whereas the other chapters in the Holiness Code each have a distinct theme, ch 19 is a collection of miscellaneous laws, which is part of the reason the lectionary leaves a chunk of it out this week. Jacob Milgrom suggests that 'this chapter opens with a command to Israel to be holy and then specifies how holiness is to be achieved’ via a variety of laws.¹ If you read the first half of ch 19, you’ll notice that it sounds quite a lot like the decalogue, and some scholars see a relationship between the two.

Instructions about holiness include everything from ritual purity to social norms. It shows that holiness is a whole-life endeavor rather than something that is limited to laws about what is clean/unclean. This is something that coheres well with what Jesus tells us about living a life devoted to God.

Jesus talks about the way in which those trained to interpret the scriptures ‘bring out treasures old and new’ (Matt 13:52) and this Sunday is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of the treasures to be found in the Hebrew scriptures.

1. Milgrom, J.,. Leviticus 17-22. New York: Doubleday, 2000., p 1596