KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 27 October
Love God … Love one another
Love and law go together, as strange as that may seem. The Summary of the Law captures the Jewish and Christian sensibility brought to a kind of completion in the figure of Jesus Christ. What is the Summary of the Law? “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”, in short with the whole of our being, and “thou shalt love the neighbour as thyself” (Mk. 12. 29-31). Powerful words which bring out the spirituality of Jewish and Christian thought quite wonderfully. It concentrates for us the essential content and meaning of the Ten Commandments. Love of God and love of one another go together.
The Summary of the Law is taken from passages in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus: the one about the love of God, the other about the love of one another; in short, the other as neighbour – not as stranger, not as enemy. The Book of Leviticus is the most formidable and least read of the five Books of Moses which comprise the Torah in the Jewish understanding. I don’t think there has ever been a reading in Chapel from Leviticus.
It is a rather forbidding and challenging book seemingly dominated by a great collection of rules and regulations about human behaviour in relation to God and to one another that seem, at first glance, perplexing and strange. Yet it has been modern forms of study, such as sociology, along with the wisdom of the commentary traditions, that have helped to reclaim something of Leviticus’s radical teaching. It is in part a kind of extended commentary on the Genesis story of Creation. One thing is different from another but within an order of relation. Clarity rather than the confusion of boundaries between one thing and another is the paramount concern. The proscriptions and demands of The Book of Leviticus are really about that fundamental idea. Thus it is not a collection of arbitrary regulations but instead a profound reflection on Creation and on the Holiness of the Law. No book of the Hebrew Scriptures speaks more frequently of God as ‘I Am Who I Am’, for instance. Here in this remarkable work we have the further extension of the idea of our human vocation to the service of God in prayer and praise. “Be ye holy as the Lord your God as holy.”
But what does that mean? Simply put it is about our wholeness, about the integrity of our being and life as a gift of God and as the gift which defines our relationships with one another just as we have seen in the Ten Commandments.