When we read the Old Testament and reflect on its beliefs, it becomes
clear that its authors were wrestling with the concept of God. What kind of
person is he? What does he consider important? How can we please him and obtain
his blessings? What are the things he considers priorities? It is interesting
to observe that from the beginning we find opposing, even contradictary
opinions, about God's true nature.
In one such concept God was seen first and foremost as the source and origin of all holiness. God is totally different from us. His world is far removed from ours. God is at the center of everything that is sacred and divine, whereas we are part of this ordinary and profane universe. In order to approach God and be acceptable to him, we must somehow or other penetrate into his realm of holiness. Since the ordinary realities of our daily life are so removed from that sacred reality, our only hope lies in making use of those objects, times, places and persons which in one way or another partake of God’s holiness.
We are not far wrong if we explicate this concept through the following parable:
Once upon a time there was a king who ruled in great splendor and majesty. He was of impeccable royal descent. He always dressed in the finest linen and damask. The food he ate was the choicest and purest obtainable. His furniture was entirely of silver and gold. The king had a high regard for cleanliness and good order. No one could be his courtier who did not have these same qualities to a high degree. One day the king extended his rule to a people who were living in squalor, in huts and slums. The king consented to look after them on condition that they, too, would order their lives according to his principles of cleanliness and discipline. On certain occasions he would come to visit them. For this purpose a palace was constructed. A few chosen individuals from the people were allowed to approach the king there after they had been meticulously cleaned. Only the members of a particular family, who had washed themselves and wore the prescribed clothes, could see the king on such occasions. The ordinary subjects had to keep at a distance. They were given their own rules of cleanliness and good order. The king refused to give privileges or favors to those who showed any irregularity in their lives. Happiness for everyone depended on conforming as much as possible to the cleanliness and good order manifested in the life of the king himself.
Such a sketch of God’s place among his people may seem exaggerated. But listen to the following text from Ezekiel. In it, the prophet sketches how the priests in God’s temple are to serve his divine majesty. Ritual purity is the highest condition.
“Those priests belonging to the tribe of Levi who are descended from Zadok...are the ones who are to serve me and come into my presence to offer me the fat and the blood of the sacrifices. They alone will enter my Temple serve at my altar, and conduct the Temple worship. When they enter the gateway to the inner courtyard of the Temple, they are to put on linen clothing....
“Priests must not drink any wine before going into the inner courtyard....
“The priests are to teach my people the difference between what is holy and what is not, and between what is ritually clean and what is not.... “A priest is not to become ritually unclean by touching a corpse...” (Ez 44:15-16,21,23,25).
More prescriptions are given in the book of Leviticus. A priest must also be physically healthy and without any defect.
“None of your descendant who has any physical defect may present the food offering to me. This applies for all time to come. No man with any physical defect may make the offering: no one who is blind, lame, disfigured, or deformed; no one with a crippled hand or foot; no one who is a hunch back or a dwarf; no one with any eye or skin disease; and no eunuch. No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any physical defects may present the food offering to me” (Lv 21:17-21).
The reason for this commandment is also clearly stated. A person with a handicap would disturb the sacred order of God’s temple. “Because he has a physical defect, he shall not come near the sacred curtain or approach the altar. He must not profane these holy things, because I am the LORD and I make them holy” (Lv 21:23). In other words, only those who possess the special prerequisites of ritual purity, belong to priestly family, have no physical defect, wear the prescribed clothes, and have not become ritually unclean by touching a corpse or by any other defiling activity can approach the sacred place of God. For God himself is pure holiness and sacrality. He can only be approached by those who partake to some extent in his cleanliness and order.
The stress on God’s holiness and on ritual purity is understandable. We should remember that these laws of the Holiness Code were formulated during the time of exile. They flow from Israel’s need to realize the majesty of God and to make up for the negligence in worshipping him shown in previous centuries. They reflect an attempt to bring the people back to God by imposing a system of order and discipline. At the same time, the concepts contained in these laws manifest grave shortcomings. They were bound to present an image of God that would have far-reaching consequences on the way people considered themselves and the world around them. Fortunately, this image is not the original or most prominent concept of God proclaimed in the Old Testament.
It is not difficult to see this when we contrast the previous picture with Elijah’s sacrifice on Mount Carmel. It will be remembered how Elijah had challenged the prophets of Baal to an ordeal by fire. First, these prophets had prepared a victim and asked their God to light the sacrificial fire. When they did not succeed, Elijah himself erected an altar in honor of Yahweh, laid firewood on top of the altar and placed a sacrificial victim on it. He then prayed and God responded by sending a bolt of lightning that kindled the sacrifice and consumed it in one mighty flame. It proved a great triumph for the prophet. On that day people turned away from serving B
aal and recommitted themselves to Yahweh (1 Kgs 18:1-40). The question is: How would the authors of the Holiness Code have looked on the sacrifice of Elijah? I think it would have caused them great embarrassment.
First of all, the sacrifice was offered on Mount Carmel. According to levitical conviction, sacrifice could only be brought to one place - the Temple at Jerusalem.
The LORD will choose a single place where he is to be worshiped, and there you must bring to him everything that I have commanded: your sacrifices that are to be burned and your other sacrifices, your tithes and your offerings, and those special gifts that you have promised to the LORD (Dt 12:11).
Further, only priests were allowed to bring the sacrifice. But Elijah was just an ordinary Israelite from the village of Tishbe. He did not wear the prescribed clothes demanded of priests. He was helped by ordinary people, not by Levites as the Law expected. He did not use sacred vessels. He did not follow the procedure described in the Holiness Code. From the point of view of the later lawgivers, Elijah’s sacrifice was highly irregular and out of place.
The truth of the matter is that the God presupposed in the Elijah story is a different sort of person. He is a God interested in relationships, in people. He is the god of the field and the forest, of the earthquake and the thunder. He is the unpredictable, passionate and wild lover who has given so much to his people and expects a lot in return. He is the God who speaks personally to Elijah in an intimate encounter, but who can also punish his people by sending a severe three-years’ drought. In other words, he is not a God who prizes order and ritual cleanliness as the highest priorities. He is a God who wants to possess people’s hearts.
This is wonderfully brought out in the Elijah story itself. In order to make the spectacle more dramatic, Elijah had dug a trench around the altar and had ordered his helpers to pour four jars of water on the offering and the wood. They did this three times so that the whole altar was drenched and even the trench filled with water. When Elijah called out to God in great anguish, hoping that God would not let him down, the response was as wild and unexpected as could be.
The LORD sent fire down, and it burned the sacrifice, the wood, and the stones, scorched the earth and dried up the water in the trench (1 Kgs 18:38).
This is not the answer of a God who is interested in small ritual prescriptions. It is the mighty deed of someone who gives generously and abundantly. It is a God whose heart is made of fire, the fire of love.
Remember how the LORD your God led you on this long journey through the desert these past forty years, sending hardships to test you, so that he might know what you intended to do and whether you would obey his commands. He made you go hungry, and then he gave you manna to eat, food that you and your ancestors had never eaten before. He did this to teach you that man must not depend on bread alone to sustain him, but on everything that the LORD says. During these forty years your clothes have not worn out, nor have your feet swollen up. Remember that the LORD your God corrects and punishes you just as a father disciplines his children (Dt 8:2-5).
Notice how everything is translated in terms of personal relationship. The ideal picture of being with God was when he walked with Israel in the desert. He tested them as a father tests and educates his children. He gave them food to eat when they were hungry. He saw to it that they had clothes to wear and that their feet did not get swollen up. It was a relationship of mutual trust, of give and take, of responding to loyalty and affection. It was a covenant in which the personal bond between God and his people stood first and foremost.
The greatest weakness of the holiness concept of God lay in its creating a distance between God and his subjects. Moreover, it enshrined discrimination. Just as animals were carefully distinguished into clean ones that could be eaten, and unclean ones, so people too were divided into those who were clean and those who were unclean. The norms for the distinction were clearly physical and external.
In some way, everyone who was not a priest was unclean and unholy. Ordinary people who touched the sacred objects in the Temple had to be put to death. Non-Israelites were impure by birth. Ammonnites and Moabites were excluded from belonging to God’s people even in the 10th generation. “No uncircumcised foreigner...will enter my Temple, not even a foreigner who lives among the people of Israel” (Ez 44:9). To laypeople, to women, to all non-Jews, God was distant and unapproachable because in their very persons they were profane. Not so for the God of Elijah.
When Elijah was told by God to live outside Israel, he was sustained for some days by ravens which “brought him bread and meat every morning and every evening” (1 Kgs 17:6). It was an unbelievable ritual mistake on God’s part! For ravens were unclean creatures. They are very clearly listed among the birds that are not clean: “Every raven after its kind is unclean” (Dt 14:14; LV 11:15). The food they brought too, the bread and meat, were unclean by their very touch! Moreover, God provided for Elijah in the house of a pagan, namely the widow of Zarephath. This is, indeed, a totally different way of looking at things. Here, not only was Elijah kept alive during the famine, but the widow too was preserved and converted to the true faith. When her son was restored to life by Elijah, she confessed: “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the LORD really speaks through you!” (1 Kgs 17:24). By this confession, she proved to be a better believer than most people in Israel at the time. And all this, even though she was a woman and did not belong to God’s people!
It does not need a long discussion to determine which concept of God was accepted as the correct one by Jesus. In his very person Jesus manifested God’s will to be close to his people. He broke through all the ancient concepts of sacrality and divine distance. By living among us as a true human being, Jesus once and for all brought us into a direct and immediate contact with his Father.
It is also well-known that Jesus clashed with the scribes and Pharisees precisely on the question of ritual cleanliness. During a discussion on eating food with hands that are ritually unclean Jesus declared a different norm for cleanliness and uncleanliness: Only what comes out of a person makes a person unclean. Jesus thus declared all goods fit to be eaten. What a contrast between the preoccupation with ritual purity displayed by the scribes and Pharisees. and Jesus’ concern for faith and love.
The question of cleanliness and uncleanliness again played an important role in the early church when the decision had to be taken that non-Jews also could become members of Jesus’ kingdom. It is instructive to read that the vision Peter had before going to the house of Cornelius links the eating of all food with accepting all people as equals. After Peter has been shown “all kinds of animals, reptiles and wild birds,” he is commanded: “Get up,...kill and eat!” When he replies, “I have never eaten anything ritually unclean or defiled,” he is told, “Do not consider anything unclean that God has declared clean” (Acts 10:12-15). The God of the New Testament does not accept the ancient distinctions of the God of holiness!
Looking at conditions and opinions prevailing in some parts of the church, I cannot help wondering whether there has not been some lapse into the old system of ritual cleanliness and order. How else explain the unbelievable distance created between the laity on the one side, and priests, bishops and religious on the other? Why this stress on all features that would make priests and religious seem different, “more sacred,” more unworldly than ordinary people? Why this fear of allowing women to enter the sanctuary or of their taking a greater share in the ministry? Why this excessive stress on a distinctive dress for priests and a mode of living removed from that of the people? Surely, there may be some practical reasons for marking priests and religious so that they can be recognized, but, at the same time, may there not be the unspoken conviction that within God’s people there are some who are more privileged, more sacred, more accessible to God by their very status? Could it be that the theology of the priestly charism, imprinted forever at ordination, has deteriorated in ascribing to priests an intrinsically higher status than that accorded to them by the New Testament?
It all depends on what kind of person we imagine God to be, where we think he is first and foremost. If we believe that he is a God to be found in whatever is sacred, more in the church than in village life, more in the liturgy than in everyday events, more at the altar than in the hearts of the people, then we will be inclined to stress physical closeness to this God. If, on the other hand, we believe that God is in the first place a God of relationships, that he is present mostly in the hearts of people and wherever people form a community around his Son, if we worship in him the generous and unexpected giving of his love which is also shown in day-to-day experiences, if we believe that God does not make any distinction between people, then our priorities will lie with the pulse of the human heart. Then we may feel called upon to do quite unexpected things in response to the unpredictable and ever-abounding love that we experience from his hand. We will also be inclined then to value the basic sameness and equal status of priests, religious and ordinary believers. Priests will see their ministry more in terms of uniting God and people than in notions of sacrificial worship and maintaining sacred services. The difference will be one of stress rather than of fundamental disagreement, but the implications will be all-embracing and the consequences far-reaching. A living community of faith, actively responding to a God of generous love, will be quite different from a well-organized congregation worshipping a God of holiness and order.
Holiness and order are also required, you will say. No doubt. But holiness and order should come in second place. They should be no more than aids in our service. The overriding motivation for serving God should be our eagerness to give a response to his unprecedented and completely unnecessary act of love. He is a God who made us by giving us whatever we have and whatever we are. What he seeks is not external conformity to rules and prescriptions, but the gift of our heart.
Our response, therefore, can only be one of true love, a love that is not calculating, not seeking security in observing a fixed routine, but anxious to express itself in a life of self-giving and devotion. In reply to God’s unlimited love, only total love will do. It will be only natural to love him “with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength” (Dt 6:5). In this all-embracing love, we will also find the right attitude toward people around us. Since God loved us so much, how can we refuse to give a similar, uncalculated and generous love to everyone else? Precise rules and prescriptions would be out of place here. What determines our behavior will be a deep conviction that comes from the bottom of our heart, because it has been given to us by God’s Spirit himself.
In the final analysis, the difference may lie in whether we accept a magical view of God and the universe, or one of personal bonds. When everything depends on conformity with a sacred order, it is that order and not God which stands in the central place. Our happiness or unhappiness will then be determined by external factors, by whether we succeed in falling in line with the sacred discipline or not. The sacraments will be seen as means to integrate us into that order, or to restore our integration in it if we have disturbed it through some irregularity. Even God, to some extent, is then subject to this order because he has to act through it and according to its rules. Did the Romans not say that even their main god, Jupiter, was subject to fate?
But if we believe in a personal God who strikes a living and individual relationship with us, then God is truly central and everything else instrumental. Sacred Scripture rejects the magical notion and points out the personal concept of God as the correct one. Even Isaiah spoke of this, condemning the Jews for replacing a personal loyalty to God by a set of human rules and traditions. Through him, the Lord says:
“These people claim to worship me, but their words are meaningless, and their hearts are somewhere else. Their religion is nothing but human rules and traditions, which they have simply memorized”(Is 29:13).
Jesus quotes this to refute the Pharisees’ attitude to ritual cleanliness and indicate where the root mistake in that system lay:
“These people, says God, honor me with their words, but their heart is really far away from me” (Mk 7:6).
Jesus came to bring the new covenant in which, according to Jeremiah’s prophecy, there would no longer be external laws, but in which God’s law would be written on every person’s heart.
“I will be their God, and they will be my people. None of them will have to teach his fellow countrymen to know the LORD because all will know me, from the least to the greatest” (Jer 31:33-34).
It is the option of a religion of sacred order or a religion of the heart.