KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 21 November

admin | 21 November 2024

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.

In the Chapel reading from Leviticus there is a strong argument about not stripping the vineyards bare at harvest and not gathering the gleanings from the wheat harvest. Why? To leave them for the poor and for the sojourner. The logic is that the harvest is itself a gift and as such is to be shared by all. This extends to matters of justice – not stealing, not taking the name of God in vain, not oppressing your neighbour, not mistreating the deaf and the blind, not doing injustice in judgement, not slandering one another, not hating your brother in your heart, and not taking vengeance or bearing a grudge. Instead, “you shall love your neighbour as yourself. I am the Lord”. This can only mean that the love of neighbour belongs to God’s love for our humanity.

Neighbour can seem restrictive if not exclusive but the passage makes it clear that the neighbour is equally the stranger or the sojourner whom we are charged to love. Why? Because of the profound sense that “we were all strangers in the land of Egypt”, thus tying the commandment to the Exodus principle of liberation. It is a liberation to God and so, too, to one another in dignity and respect.

Isaiah builds on these same themes. He envisions a messianic king, one anointed and sent by God, imaged as a rod or shoot coming forth from the stem or stump of Jesse. The reference is to the grandfather of King David. The passage highlights the gifts of the Spirit that belong to God and are bestowed upon our humanity. They are the qualities of spirit that shape our thinking and our acting ethically: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And drawing upon the Vulgate (Latin) translation of the Septuagint (Greek) rather than the Hebrew, there is the addition of devotion or piety; thus “the seven gifts of the Spirit”.

They speak profoundly to us as rational and spiritual creatures and to the commitment to justice. That justice, as with Leviticus, extends to the created order as restored to righteousness and harmony. In contrast to our dog-eat-dog world and to nature as “red in tooth and claw”, to quote Tennyson (and as building upon Darwin and Nietzsche), we are offered a vision of the harmony and the interdependence of creation and thus to our place in it as well. Wolf and lamb dwell together, leopard and kid (goat) lie down together, lion and calf are together; “a little child shall lead them”. What we experience as conflict is overcome in a vision of the harmony of the whole order in which each part finds its place.

“They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain”, Isaiah says. In a way both Leviticus and Isaiah recall us to the holiness of God as the true measure and guide for our humanity in all our dealings with one another, with the created order, and with one another. Such images have their ancient counterparts in Arcadia and in Paradise as a garden of peace and delight. The reading from Isaiah is one of the nine lessons in the Great Advent Carol service designed just after the First World War in the effort to speak peace and hope, life and joy to a world so savagely devastated by war. They remind us of the deeper principles that are given to shape our lives, an alternative to war and destruction.