You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them. – Leviticus 15:31

Today’s Scripture Reading (July 13, 2012): Leviticus 15

We live in the middle of a paradox. Through our struggles with modernity I think that we have forgotten that. We have tried to make the gospel make sense – we almost take pride in the logic of the message. But in depending on the logic of the gospel message, we also lose the mystery. And the loss of the mystery is dangerous. In the darkest moments of our lives, it is not the logic of the gospel that we need; we need the mystery. What we need is for God to miraculously step into our situation, an action that is filled with mystery.

And the law of God is written the same way. Some of the laws do have a logical bent to them. Some of the food laws are important because there is a health benefit – or a health danger – that could be involved in the food we eat. And in our health conscious society we understand that. Some of the sexual laws are clearly based on health issues. We think that the sexual bias of the Bible somehow limits our freedom, but in the back of our minds I think we also realize that there are a lot of sexually transmitted diseases that could be wiped off the face of the earth if we would just follow the sexual laws that are found in the writings of Moses – even just for one generation. Sabbath Day laws (laws that say that we should take a day off in honor of God) are not curtailing our freedom, but rather responding to our very real need of a day off to remain physically healthy. One of the radical elements of the Sabbath regulations inside of the Mosaic Law is that they extended even to the slave. The idea was that everyone needs that day away from work.

But some of the laws were a bit of a mystery. The cleanliness laws did not see cleanliness as a freedom from germs the way that we might view it. They were a bit of a mystery. And the idea seemed to be that a mysterious God had chosen to live among them – that he was a holy God (holy really simply means ‘set apart’) and that because a holy God was living in their midst, they would need to be a holy people. And one of the ways that the nations would recognize that they were Holy was by being set apart in their practices – in being ceremonially clean.

It is maybe something that we need to recover in our circumstances. Again, as a response to modernity we find it easy to follow the logic of God, but maybe by following the logic we demote the rituals and actions that are filled with the mystery that we need. A mystery that we will require in the dark moments when logic no longer makes any sense.

    

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Leviticus 16