KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 21 November
You shall love your neighbour as yourself
The juxtaposition of Isaiah’s prophecy about the coming of a Messianic kingdom, imaged in terms of Paradise Restored, with a passage from the Holiness Code of Leviticus is quite striking. Leviticus, perhaps the most forbidding and most misunderstood (though least read) of the Books of the Torah, the Law, provides scriptural ground for a most significant feature of the Law as the ethical or moral code for our humanity, namely, the love of neighbour.
The love of God commanded in Deuteronomy and elsewhere is complemented by the love of neighbour. They go together and in the Christian liturgies are known as the ‘Summary of the Law’ upon which two commandments hang everything else in both the Law and the Prophets, ethically and spiritually. What is striking and not a little intriguing is how both Isaiah and Leviticus essentially provide a commentary on the stories of Creation and the Fall in Genesis. They both highlight the important biblical and theological question about how we read and what we read and in what way.
Leviticus, at first glance, seems to be a random collection of rules and regulations governing human behaviour; in short, our actions towards one another and, importantly, our use of creation. With respect to the latter, it builds upon the clear sense of creation as the distinguishing of one thing from another within the unity of the whole order of things. It adds to this by distinguishing between things clean and things unclean and forbidding the consumption of the latter. What makes certain creatures unclean? As the sociologist Mary Douglas noted, it has entirely to do with clarity or lack of clarity about the distinctive features of each created thing. Creatures that cross the boundaries represent a kind of confusion of categories in relation to what belongs to land or sea, to insects or animals, and so forth. This simply illustrates the logic behind the dietary laws of the Mosaic covenant.
In other words, there is a logic at work about how one thinks about different creatures and about their distinguishing features or their confusion of features. Some parts of Leviticus are controversial, for instance, for those who identify as LGBTQ+. Later, the idea of things being unclean will be challenged by emphasising how all things in creation are clean and therefore embraced within the essential goodness of creation as a whole. But the logic of distinguishing one thing from another is not negated. In what is known as the Holiness Code in Leviticus the strong ethical claim is that Israel is to be holy as God is holy. That leads to a whole way of acting in the world that equally concerns our relationship with one another and our use of nature.