How a Church Can (and Should) Come to Love Leviticus
The great early church theologian Origen speaks for most of us today when he says: “If you read people passages from the divine books that are good and clear, they will hear them with great joy . . . But provide someone a reading from Leviticus, and at once the listener will gag and push it away as if it were some bizarre food. He came, after all, to learn how to honor God, to take in the teachings that concern justice and piety. But instead he is now hearing about the ritual of burnt sacrifices!” [1] Love Leviticus? Perish the thought! It’s in the Bible but most of us offer it only scorn or more or less benign neglect. Love it? We don’t even like it. All that holiness and purity stuff. Clean and unclean – who can make sense of all that? Who wants to? What difference does it make? No, we don’t love Leviticus. And we really don’t want to. It’s about a nation we don’t understand (biblically and theologically), in a time and place foreign and distant to us, full of...
