Last week we looked at Leviticus from the perspective of Israel’s community life and their national development. This week I want to explore what some of these laws and rituals meant to the Israelites and how it expressed some of their beliefs about God and about their relationship to him.

One of the common misconceptions about the sacrifices described in Leviticus is that they were to do with the removal of moral guilt, i.e. sins, from the people. This is understandable as many of the laws are expressed in terms of what is right and what is wrong and much of the sacrificial system is construed in terms of ‘atonement’ for ‘sin’. The easy mistake, however, is to assume the meaning we give ‘atonement’ and ‘sin, in this context,’ is the same as the meaning the Israelites would have understood.

In actual fact, as we find in reading Leviticus carefully, the sacrifices prescribed there are for a whole raft of occasions. So there is a fellowship offering to consummate reconciliation between two parties. There are offerings for spontaneous thanks to God e.g. for the safe arrival of a child or a good harvest and there are offerings made in supplication for safe passage or physical healing. Then there are the sin and guilt offerings, which, we must note, are specifically for unintentional offences (the sin offering for the unintentional breaking of one of the Lord’s commands, 4:2, and the guilt offering for any unintentional offence in regard to any of the Lord’s holy things, 5:15). Indeed some of the offences requiring a sin or guilt offering are very clearly amoral (i.e. they have no particular morality one way or the other). For example, you must offer some lambs, flour and oil as a sacrifice once cleansed of an infectious skin disease; offer a lamb and a pigeon after childbirth; bring a couple of doves after each monthly period; offer a couple of pigeons for a bodily discharge.

The simple fact is that for intentional sins, there is no sacrifice! So we have to understand the ‘sin’ that the ‘sin offerings’ and ‘guilt offering’ dealt with as only part of the whole Israelite understanding of ‘sin’ and certainly as something very different from how we understand ‘sin’ today.

The removal and forgiveness of ‘sin’ that the sin offering made for the Israelites was connected to their ritual ‘status’ before God. This does not trivialise it; ritual sin was a very important issue for the Israelites. But it is not primarily an issue of morality; it is an issue of worship.

Of course, morality was a central feature of Israel’s relationship to God. In fact, the whole of their cultic life was defined by the need for them to be different from the surrounding peoples and their morality was a defining feature of this difference. Yet it wasn’t the defining difference. What undergirded the Israelite’s Law and Cultus was their very ‘different’ God.

This is how we must understand the elaborate system of the Israelites. It was designed to preserve this difference. Their God was different (or ‘Holy’) and they had to be different too. Thus every Israelite has a choice to make. Who were they going to follow? Yahweh or Molech (or Baal, or Osiris, or their goat idols)? It was an issue of worship and everything was arranged around ensuring that Israel would remain a Yahweh-worshipping community.

So the sacrifices made for sin and guilt were for ritual cleansing. Any offence made against a fellow human was moral – and would either require restitution or punishment of some kind (see the judicial system introduced in Exodus 18) – but the offence against God was that of defiling oneself in regard to proper worship of Yahweh. It was the direction and allegiance of one’s life that needed affirming before God, not the individual cleansing of a particular moral misdemeanour. In other words, from the perspective of the sacrificial system, Israel’s relationship to God was the primary concern and this was more than just the sum of the moral parts.

So what was left for the person who did sin intentionally? Well, any person doing the ‘detestable things’ listed in Chapter 18 ‘must be cut of from their people’. And in Chapter 20, many offenders – including those who curse their mother or father (v.9), adulterers (v.10), those who practice incest (vv.11-12), homosexuals (v.13), those who have sex with animals (vv.15-16), mediums or spiritists (v.27) – ‘must all be put to death. Blasphemers must be stoned (24:14-16) and if a priest’s daughter becomes a prostitute she must be burned with fire (21:9). However, there were several commandments given where the due penalty is not death or excommunication. This is where the Day of Atonement would come in.

On the Day of Atonement, there are three parts to the ritual described in detail. a) a sacrifice for the Priest; b) a sacrifice for the cleansing of the people and c) a scapegoat to be sent out into the desert to die. The two sacrifices made were sin offerings, i.e. offerings which provided ceremonial cleansing. The scapegoat was for the removal of moral sin from the community. Its leaving the camp, never to return, was symbolic of the Israelite’s rebellion being taken far away, leaving them a clean slate with which to try again.

It is often said that God’s holiness is unable to bear anything immoral and so the sacrificial system was in place to offer life for life as a payment for sin. But the ritual systems of Leviticus are not designed to make Israel morally acceptable; that’s what the commandments are for! What Leviticus describes, I believe, is a God who wants sacrifice to enforce the point that being different is costly. Even good women would have periods or have mildew in their home and need to engage with God. Even good men could get a skin disease, or touch a dead animal and then need to be reminded of the holiness of his presence with them. The sacrifices of Leviticus are for unintentional ‘sinners’ who need to be made ‘holy’, i.e. different, again. There is a glimpse here of something quite profound. What this elaborate system did for the Israelites was to make their worship part and parcel of the whole of life. They were designed to imbed in the Israelite psyche their identity as a ‘different’ – and obviously in the context of the God they are following, morally pure – people.

For us, elaborate systems of ritualised piety aren’t really an issue. The early Jewish Christians were clear that Jesus, as the great High Priest, has fulfilled this whole Levitical system in his death and resurrection. Having offered a perfect sacrifice to atone for humankind ‘once and for all’ he has made all who come to God, ‘in him’, ritually clean. And having suffered the Levitical death penalty for serious moral sin on behalf of humankind, he bore the wrath of God, intended for instances of rebellion – designed to preserve the community’s integrity as the people of God (see last week’s post) – yet because he was innocent of these crimes, this ‘substitution’ is ongoing; the punishment never sticks.

But the Levitical system is still, I believe, relevant for today’s world, despite being in and of itself, entirely obsolete. As a source of inspiration for our spirituality, Leviticus inspires us to imagine life lived in a genuine worshipping community. Rather than reserving ‘worship’ for an hour on Sunday, how can our lives become oriented around God in such a way as we take seriously our worship of him in every aspect of life? How do we acknowledge God when we want to make up with a former enemy? What can we bring to God as a gift of thanks? What do we do to bring an awareness of God into our work, school, home etc? Where is God in our Tesco trip, or the school run? What makes us remember him in the business meeting or the classroom? Now under grace, we’re free to come up with these answers ourselves, rather than have them imposed on us from above.

Questions for reflection:

1. What am I willing to sacrifice to be inspiringly ‘different’?

2. How can I create ‘moments’ of worship in the everyday humdrum that allow me to affirm my direction and allegiance?