by CCW | 27 October 2022 16:00
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.
Leviticus has been frequently misunderstood and maligned. It has been accused of all manner of evils in terms of contemporary identity politics without the slightest realization that our contemporary categories are really about ourselves with little reference or meaning to the concerns in Leviticus. It is a classic case of how the assumptions of the present misconstrue the past; by no means a uniquely contemporary strategy. What this misses, paradoxically, is the way in which Leviticus actually speaks to some of our concerns particularly about the stewardship of the natural world and about exploitation and even economic injustice within the human community.
Embedded in the Book of Leviticus is the Holiness Code (Lev. 17-16). “Be ye holy even as I am holy”. This is not about how we think we are better than one another in our daily lives nor about how we see ourselves; it is rather about how God sees us and what that means in terms of social justice and ethics.
That would be wonderful enough were it not for the fact that, mirabile dictu, the Book of Leviticus is the source for the commandment to love one another, a love which is grounded in the divine love. It is from Leviticus that we have the wonderful and profound command that “you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Why? Because “I am the Lord” (Lev. 19.18). To see ourselves in one another, albeit in a glass darkly, is part and parcel of the radical meaning of the spirituality of the Chapel experience. It places us with God and with one another.
Rather than catering to the advocacy cultures of our world and day, it opens us out to a more transcendent and larger view of our humanity. The Levitical conception of the love of neighbour is married to the commandment of the love of God, a love revealed and written on stone tablets but ultimately written on our hearts. The two belong together, the love of God and love of neighbour. We learn this, too, from Jesus in the Parable of the Good Samaritan and in the words of the Summary of the Law in the New Testament. It teaches us the inescapable nature of the Good and our relation to it. The love of God and the love of neighbour are inseparable; they inform each other and co-inhere in each other. They belong to an ethical wisdom that is universal.
It is wonderful that Leviticus should call us to the love of one another precisely in the context of calling us to holiness. We are in this perspective more though not less than how we portray ourselves. The love of God and the love of neighbour go together in the dialectic of law and love. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God … and thy neighbour as thyself.” The radical extension of that love is captured in an epigram by the great desert father, St. Anthony (251-356): “Your life and death are with your brother,” he says, but only because “Another lives in me”, as the martyr, Felicitas (c. 182-203) had memorably said. Such is the dynamic interplay of the love of God and the love of one another.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2022/10/27/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-27-october/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.