“The Lord called Moses, and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying,
Speak to the people of Israel.”
Along with “self-examination and repentance, … prayer, fasting, and self-denial,” the Church bids us to the observance of a holy Lent “by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 612). Tonight we begin a little series of meditations on the Book of Leviticus. But why Leviticus? Not only is it one of the least read books of the Bible, I suspect, and certainly in the liturgical life of the Church but perhaps one of the most formidable books of the Bible. Nonetheless it belongs to Holy Scripture, which, as our Articles of Religion note, “containeth all things necessary to salvation,” apart from which nothing is required to “be believed as an article of the Faith” (Art. VI, p. 700). Leviticus belongs to the Torah, the Law, which has pride of place in the Jewish understanding even as the Gospels do for Christians.
It is certainly the least read book in the Church’s lectionaries. The Hebrew Scriptures are too extensive to be read through in their entirety in the course of the year in terms of the Daily Offices and the Sunday Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer and in the Eucharistic readings, unlike the New Testament which is more or less read through twice in the course of the year. The endeavour with the first lessons at Morning and Evening Prayer is to read substantial sections of all the canonical texts of the Old Testament, as well as passages at certain times from the Deuterocanonical books. But while there are great chunks of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy that are read both in the Sunday Offices and in the Daily Offices, Leviticus gets exceptionally short shift even though it is part of the Torah.
Passages from Leviticus are read only at Evening Prayer on Friday of the Week of Lent 4, and at Morning Prayer and at Evening Prayer on the Saturday of that week, and then on the Wednesday of Holy Week at Evening Prayer; a total of four readings. As minimal as this may seem, the choice of readings and the time of their appointment are significant. The Friday evening and Saturday first lessons usher us into Passiontide, to deep Lent; in short to a more intense reflection on the sacrifice of Christ. It is not by accident that the New Testament counterpart to Leviticus, perhaps, is the Letter to the Hebrews from which the Epistle for Passion Sunday is taken (Heb. 9.11ff), a passage which builds upon the imagery and meaning of ritual and sacrifice found in the Torah and especially in Leviticus. In this sense, reading and meditating upon Leviticus belongs to our contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice in the Christian understanding. “By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us,” marking at once a connection and a difference between the two covenants. “For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling those who are unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh” (distinct references to Leviticus); “how much more shall the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Christ is, as Hebrews insists, “the mediator of the new covenant.”
The great Patristic commentator and theologian, Origen, sees Christ as the hermeneutical key who unlocks the mysteries of God with the cross as the axis of interpretation for the events of the Old and New Testament. Later this will be captured by Abbot Suger of St. Denys in the 12th century: “Quod Moyses velat, Christi doctrina revelat” – what Moses veiled, the doctrine of Christ unveils or reveals. Moreover, “They who uncover Moses reveal the meaning of the Law.” As we will have opportunity to see, Origen’s homilies on Leviticus argue for a spiritual interpretation that is grounded in the historical and cultural significance of the events presented in the Scriptures.
There is another reason for considering the Book of Leviticus. It concerns the Summary of the Law. “Hear O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength,” it begins, as Mark presents it (Mk. 12. 29,30) quoting Deuteronomy 6. 4,5. This, we are told, “is the first and great commandment” (BCP, p. 69). But then we are told that “the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” which is taken directly from Leviticus 19.18. “You shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.”
Critical to the Torah, the so-called five books of Moses, sometimes known as the Pentateuch, meaning five scrolls, is God’s Revelation to Moses in the Burning Bush as “I am Who I am” understood not as a human invention but as divine revelation. No part of the Torah or Pentateuch refers to this concept “I am the Lord” more than Leviticus, especially in what is called the Holiness Code, Leviticus 17-26 where it appears more than thirty times in slightly various ways. “I am the Lord,”“ I am the Lord thy God,” “I am the Lord who sanctify you,”“I am the Lord your God, who have separated you from the peoples” – these all emphasise the idea of God as the principle of all reality and freedom. “I am the Lord who sanctify you, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt to be your God: I am the Lord” (Lev. 22.32,33). Thus with Leviticus we see the necessary connection between God in himself, “I am who I am”, and the idea of holiness. Moses is commanded to proclaim to Israel “You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy”( Lev. 19.2).
The phrase “I am the Lord” punctuates repeatedly the various directives and laws in Leviticus and so too here in Leviticus 19.18 with the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. Thus this important ethical teaching is grounded in God and God’s relation to our humanity. The ethical and the holy are united. Leviticus can help us to think about the meaning of holiness and to see its relation to our lives ethically.
What makes Leviticus then so formidable? It is simply a collection of rules and regulations that may seem arbitrary and obscure in their detail and proscription. And yet is that really very much different from the technocratic world which we inhabit? A world of dictates and rules, of the endlessness of bureaucracy that seems to serve only itself? Unlike our world, we may find in reading and meditating upon Leviticus a wisdom in the details which speaks to us in our relation to God and to our life in Christ.
“The Lord called Moses, and spoke to him from the tent of meeting”. So begins the book which we call Leviticus. The title is actually derived from the Greek Septuagint and carried over into the Latin Vulgate and from there to the various translations in the vernacular. For the Hebrews, the Torah is really one work written on five scrolls where the opening words of each scroll becomes the name for each part. Thus Leviticus in the Hebrew is simply, “And he summoned” or called (wayyiqrã’). Leviticus picks up from Exodus and carries over into Numbers by way of a series of directions about various kinds of sacrifices and rules about the Levitical priesthood. As such it presents a certain working out of a logic about creation in relation to the complete otherness of God as Creator, to the Exodus theme of the people of God as defined by the “I am Who I am” whose will is disclosed for our humanity in the Ten Commandments, and to the Exodus journey of learning to live by the Word and Will of God revealed. God journeys with his people.
The tent of meeting is crucial to the Exodus theme and carries over into the Temple traditions of Israel post-exile which is the thrust of Leviticus even though it reflects a number of earlier or pre-exilic themes reaching back to the period of the Kings. A number of features about the tent of meeting, the tabernacle, and the ark of the Covenant which inform the architecture of the Temple of Jerusalem may be projected back to the periods of exile and wandering in the wilderness. The strong idea, though, is about God’s presence with his people and in an intentional form indicated by the divisions belonging to the tent of meeting with its threefold divisions of the courtyard, the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies.
The symbolic significance of the tent of meeting should not be missed, for in the Christian understanding, Christ’s Incarnation, the Word made flesh, is spoken about in similar terms. In John’s Prologue, “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” Literally, “dwelt among us” is tented among us, recalling the nomadic journeys of the people of God and the forms of their learning about what it means to be God’s people. Thus from the outset, Leviticus calls us into the tent of meeting, to the idea of the holy and sacred places where we attend to the holy Word of God.
Thus all the rituals and rules really speak to that sense of intentionality that belongs to the truth of our humanity as found in God, the one whom Isaiah, picking up on the themes of the Torah signalled most compellingly in Leviticus, calls “the Holy One of Israel.” Attending to Leviticus may teach us about the meaning of the holiness of God and about our sanctification.
“The Lord called Moses, and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying,
Speak to the people of Israel.”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Meditation I on Leviticus
March 15th, 2022