Holiness in Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18
By Garwood Anderson, Ph.D.
It makes a certain kind of sense that we make only a few excursions into the book of Leviticus. This book offers virtually nothing to move along the Old Testament story, and its highly specific and often arcane statutes do not often lead to any obvious application for modern Christian hearers. Not many of us complain that we do not hear enough from Leviticus.
The unfortunate result of this unfamiliarity, however, is the functional loss of Leviticus to the Christian canon. Or perhaps it is even worse than that: not infrequently, the arcane laws of the text are used as leverage against perceived morally offensive statutes. How can you take a text seriously which forbids shellfish and says not to mix fabrics? Not just lost to the canon, the book is thus weaponized as anti-canon for the cause of antinomianism.
That we should hear this kind of thing from dilettantes on media platforms should not surprise us. That Seminary-trained – seminary trained!—priests and bishops brandish these arguments as though they were hermeneutically sophisticated show-stoppers is more embarrassing, but not at all uncommon.
But the medicine which killed off the offensive bits has put the whole patient in a coma. Having found workarounds enabling our libertinism, we have eroded the foundations for a just social order and a properly Christian impulse for the common good.
This is because Leviticus calls us above all to “Love our neighbors as ourselves,” and in doing so it gives us a series of vivid illustrations of the “good” as the God of Israel envisions it for his people. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” indeed:
by making sure that laborers are paid fairly and promptly and are not exploited (19:13)
by treating aliens with hospitality and justice, indeed, loving them as ourselves (19:33-34; 23:22)
by showing deference to the vulnerable, especially the physically disabled (19:14)
by conducting our commerce in a righteous and non-exploitative manner, with just weights and measures (19:35-36)
by honoring the elderly among us with respect and care for their well being (19:32)
by providing the means for the poor to be well provided for (19:9; 23:22)
by restraining unbridled wealth with an eye toward the dispossessed and the common good (19:9; 25)
Some, I suppose, would call these sorts of concerns—individually and collectively—a “social justice agenda.” But in these politically divisive times, as long as we consign the imperatives of our holy God to “a social justice agenda,” we will either pride ourselves for our woke advocacy of it, or we will disparage it as the cause of a secular political philosophy.
Leviticus, however, calls this set of concerns by another name: “holiness.” “‘You shall be holy; for I the LORD your God am holy’ says the Lord God” (Lev 19:2). If we had thought that holiness consisted in religious piety alone, we must re-read yet once more the strong words of Isaiah 58, the fast of which the Lord approves and the prayers which the Lord hears. (1)
But if we thought that holiness had nothing to do with religious piety and personal morality, we must read again Leviticus, the account of a Holy God forming a holy people.
May the Lord show us all what it means to be “holy”during this--and every--season, until the convenience of our picking and choosing surrenders itself to but a single devotion.
____
(1) Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a man to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a rush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. (Isa 58:5-8)
____
Garwood P. Anderson, Ph.D., is Dean, Provost, and professor of New Testament and Greek at Nashotah House. Dr. Anderson formerly taught at Asbury Theological Seminary, and was area and division director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Bethel Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Reformed Theological Seminary, and the West African Theological Seminary in Lagos, Nigeria.