This is the second of four Lenten meditations on Leviticus. The first is posted here.
“Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee”
This year the Annunciation falls near mid-Lent. In other years it may fall later in Lent or early in Eastertide. The conjunction between this Feast and the cycle of Lent and Easter, of the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ, however, is most significant. All of the Marian festivals are tagged to the Feasts of Christ; there is an inescapable and profound connection between Mary and Jesus. Her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of Christ’s Incarnation; the Angel’s announcement and her ‘yes’ to God mark the moment of Christ’s conception in her womb; the union of God and Man accomplished through her comes to fruition nine months hence, at Christmas in the Christian imaginary.
The story is intriguing. The Angel’s words, at once wonderful, are also troubling. The communication between God and our humanity is not one of equals. There is the profound sense of the difference, of the incomparable otherness of God, yet, at the same time as an awareness of utter dependence, there is an amazing reciprocity. Mary turns both into the highest expression of human dignity. There is a reasoning engagement, a form of holy questioning, that arises from her immediate response to Gabriel’s words. “She was troubled at this saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.” This leads to an angelic interpretation. “Fear not, Mary;” Gabriel says, “for thou hast found favour with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a Son, and shalt call his name JESUS” (the capitalization is crucial), and, in an allusion to Isaiah 9.6 and other prophetic passages that hint at the reign of a Messiah, “he shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest … and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
Mary’s response is to ask Gabriel, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” He explains that this is not simply a human matter but of God’s doings through her. “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and power of the Highest shall overshadow thee,” images that recall the opening verses about creation in Genesis, and thus to the theme of redemption, a new creation, and a renewed relation to God. “Therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” The words are suggestive; “that holy thing” is Jesus, born of Mary, who has “found favour with God,” literally, grace. The neuter gender term – holy thing (αγιον) – belongs to the sense of difference, the idea of an action which cannot be simply reduced to human processes, further explicated by the example of Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, conceiving a son in her old age when she was already considered barren, hence, beyond the age of child-bearing. The account echoes the story of the promised son, Isaac, born to Abraham and Sarah in her old age; “for,” as Gabriel says “with God nothing shall be impossible.”
This back and forth between Mary and Gabriel highlights the idea of an active engagement between God and our humanity wonderfully expressed in Mary’s fiat mihi: “behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy Word,” words which define Christian faith precisely in terms of an active openness to God. Mary embodies the truth of our humanity considered in and of itself as pure and whole. Why? How?
Why? Because of the logic of salvation. Christ cannot be the redeemer of humanity, wounded and broken as a result of sin, if he himself is a sinner. He becomes sin for us only by becoming fully human through the body he assumes from Mary. He does so to free us from all sin and all death. He is “like us in all respects save sin” but in his incarnation subjects himself to the consequences of human sin and death.
How? By grace. She who “conceives” Christ is in turn “conceived” in the mind of God who is her Son and brother; “ere by the spheres time was created, thou was in his mind,” as John Donne puts it in his extravagant and intense poem, Annunciation (La Corona). It provides a strong meditation on the necessity of Mary’s purity for the reason of Christ’s purity. The logic is wonderfully captured by Ireneus. Christ is “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” Thus the Annunciation emphasizes the interrelated themes of purity and activity as critical to human wholeness. The focus is on conception.
The Annunciation is the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary for the sake of human redemption which is equally about our wholeness. Conception, as Lancelot Andrewes notes, is neither reception nor deception. For Mary, “to conceive is more than to receive. It is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also. A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? Because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The Blessed Virgin … [gave] of her own substance.” Nor is it a kind of docetic deception, some sort of theatrical illusion, a magical trick. This is the point of the Proper Preface for Christmas and the Annunciation. Christ, “was made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin, to make us clean from all sin.” The words “substance” and “without spot of sin” are powerful signifiers of theological meaning and understanding.
17th century Anglican Marian theology celebrates the purity of Mary because of the purity of Christ. It is perhaps at this point that we begin to see how the Annunciation in mid-Lent connects to our Lenten project of meditating on the text of Leviticus. The point of connection is entirely with respect to the concept of purity, of holiness. Passages from Leviticus inform the narratives of Mary and Jesus both in terms of his Circumcision, eight days after his birth, and in terms of Candlemas, Christ’s Presentation and Mary’s Purification, forty days after his birth. Both are informed or shaped by the logic of the Annunciation, the logic of the Incarnation, to be more precise.
Leviticus, chapters 11 through 15, focus on questions about purity and the rituals of purity. They are among the most daunting passages in Leviticus and belong to cultic rituals and practices that have emerged over many centuries, the origins of which are obscure. Initially they seem entirely arbitrary but actually there is a logic at work in the distinction between clean and unclean, or pure and impure. Following the work of Mary Douglas, holiness and purity are closely associated but holiness means more than simply that which is set apart from common usage. It also relates to wholeness, to the integrity of being as pure. As she puts it: “To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual and the kind and thus in the food laws of Leviticus ‘the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully to their class’”. As such, the distinctions in Leviticus may be seen as a further working out of the Genesis logic of creation as order through the distinguishing of things from one another. Reality is divided ”into distinct spheres such as sky/earth/sea, clean/unclean, life/death, Israel/other nations, holy/profane”.
At issue is the crossing of boundaries, on the one hand, and the idea of bodily integrity which corresponds to the holiness of God, on the other hand. Thus the eating of animals with split-hooves and who chew their cud – clearly preferencing pastoral life – is permitted. But not those who fail to meet this standard in some way or another: the camel, the rock-badger, the hare, and swine, for instance, because while they chew the cud, they do not part the hoof (Lev. 11. 4-7). Perhaps, too, the use of swine in the rituals of other nations contributes to its being proscribed in Israel. The argument is not a modern one about medical materialism and our fear of pathogens. There is a sense of a moral order to creation, to the idea of things being in their proper place over and against things which fudge or cross the boundaries of sky, earth, and sea such as shellfish which live in the sea but crawl on the land or winged insects which both fly in the air and crawl on the land. It is a way of distinguishing and classifying creatures in terms of categories. Those which cross categories are proscribed; this reflects perhaps the idea of the fallen nature of creation because of sin that results in disorder.
Also it is worth noting with respect to the animals which chew the cud and are split-hoofed that they are herbivores. The proscription against certain birds seems to be in terms of predators and/or eaters of carrion, dead meat. Blood as the principle of life is the property of God and that sensibility guides what also become the Kosher laws for observant Jews (and later Halal in Islam), which insists on the complete draining of the blood of animals before consumption.
In terms of sacrificial requirements, what is wanted is not an animal with blemishes or some defect but a pure and perfect sacrifice as reflecting the purity and perfection of God, not the left-overs but the first-fruits of our labours; in short, what is worthy of God the all-worthy. Such things concern our God-awareness and a sense of integrity.
The logic of bodily integrity recognises blood as the life of the creature but that life is from God, the author and sustaining principle of all reality. Thus the emissions of blood or bodily fluids whether voluntary or involuntary require rituals of purification. This is the sense which underlies the Purification of Mary. The rituals signal the restoration of wholeness. Contact with dead things is also a form of impurity with various rituals which require the priests to negotiate between the dead and the living in terms of the care of the dead, which like procreation, is an action necessary and proper to the social order. It is an important sensibility that goes beyond our medicalization of both pregnancy and now death itself.
But another form of impurity has to do with contact with the sacred itself which has to be approached and negotiated in certain ways precisely because God is beyond human knowing, manipulation, and control. The underlying logic is that the power of life and death belongs not to us but to God. Once again, it is a question of the boundary lines.
In the ancient cultures, monsters are really about the confusion of categories, too, a confusion of animality and rationality, for instance. Hence the minotaur is about a category confusion. King Minos’ wife Pasiphae mates with a bull; a form of bestiality condemned in Leviticus. For the Greeks, the outcome is the minotaur: the body of a man with the head of a bull. The combination is intriguing; it suggests an inversion. Centaurs, on the other hand, are a mixture of horse and human but the other way around; the head of a man and the body of a horse.
These are different ways of thinking about the relation between humans, nature and the divine. In the case of the Annunciation, what is theologically at stake is the purity of Mary in the sense of her full integrity as human in all of its wholeness and truth, unblemished, “without spot of sin” as our liturgy puts it but only in relation to the purity of the humanity of Christ, true God and true Man.
The distinction between clean and unclean foods will be done away in the New Testament even as it was undergoing a change in the world of late Judaism. Peter’s vision sees the whole of creation in a new light and as all good, a way of pushing the Genesis idea further. But what remains is the idea of holiness as wholeness through our openness to grace. As we shall see, there is a strong ethical demand that provides not simply for the rich but also the poor. That is why at the Presentation and Purification, Joseph and Mary offer a sacrifice of “a pair of turtle-doves, or two your pigeons” rather than a lamb in accord with Leviticus 12. 6-8. The long section on skin diseases (generally lumped under the rather loose category of leprosy) is also about the rituals that reintegrate individuals to the life of the community and thus display a sensibility about social order and justice.
Chapter 11 of Leviticus ends with what is the leitmotif of the entire work. Grounded in the Exodus, it is moved by the concept of the holiness of God and the forms in which the human community participates by grace in God’s holiness. The various proscriptions about pure and impure are grounded in God. “For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God; you shall therefore be holy, for I am holy”. To say “I am the Lord” – a greatly repeated phrase especially in the Holiness Code of Leviticus (Ch. 17-26) – means “I am the I am who I am.” The holiness of God is the condition of our holiness wonderfully expressed in Mary’s Magnificat which follows her Annunciation. “For behold, from henceforth/ all generations shall call me blessed./For he that is mighty hath magnified me; / and holy is his Name./And his mercy is on them that fear him/throughout all generations.”
“Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee”
Fr. David Curry
Meditation II on Leviticus
Eve of the Annunciation, March 24th, 2022