Leviticus 19 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
2 Speak to all the congregation of the
people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
15 You shall not render an unjust judgment;
you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you
shall judge your neighbor. 16 You shall not go around as a slanderer[a] among your people, and you shall not
profit by the blood[b] of your neighbor: I am the Lord.
17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of
your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. 18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a
grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as
yourself: I am the Lord.
The name Leviticus derives
from the Greek Levitikon,
"things pertaining to the Levites." This name reflects that this book
is for a specific group of people. The
content also reflects that it has to do with a specific group of people, as
much of Leviticus deals with the laws of worship and purification, for which
the priests in ancient Israel, who were of the tribe of Levi, were responsible.
The Hebrew equivalent, torat kohanim
which means "instruction of (or 'for') priests," also conveys that
this book is for specific people.
We often have a hard time
with Leviticus.
Society today is struggling
with the issue of homosexuality, and it is in Leviticus that we find the
strongest admonition against homosexuality.
It is in Leviticus that we
are told we cannot eat shrimp or lobster.
Wearing clothing made of
mixed fibers is forbidden.
In this very chapter of 19,
we are told that it is forbidden to wear tattoos, and that mean are not
supposed to shave – two laws, by the way, that I have kept religiously!
Paul tells Timothy in the
Bible, “All Scripture is God inspired, and useful for teaching…” But it is sometimes it is hard to know how literal
to take this book.
This section, however, is
easy – because the words found here are found in so many places of
Scripture. It is, in fact, examples of
what it means to put love into action in our day to day lives.
2 Speak to all the congregation of the
people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
We often speak of being holy as being set apart from common
use. It is that, but it is also a sense
here of being owned by God. We are God’s
personal property. Holiness is a matter
of BELONGING to God. Our lives, our
actions, our words, are to reflect God’s existence, God’s actions, and God’s
words.
At this point, the lectionary skips to verse 15. Sometimes this is for emphasis. Verses 15 and following must be tied to verse
2, “You are holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”
What is skipped are matters related to not making idols, to food
that has been sacrificed to God, how to farm the land so that some produce is
left for the poor, a prohibition against stealing or telling lies, and having
respect for the blind and the deaf. Noting is omitted that we should be concerned
about, as these themes appear elsewhere in the Lectionary.
So we come to verse 15.
The verses that begin with verse 15 share a common theme - decency
and honesty in interpersonal relationships and activities. God is concerned with how we relate to one another.
More to the point, these are laws that one might violate in
secret, in which the individual committing the crime might think they could be
undetected.
These are crimes difficult to prove and whose victims have no
remedy.
These are crimes in which the punishment is in God’s hand alone.
15 You shall not render an unjust judgment;
you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you
shall judge your neighbor.
How easy is it to render judgment or to
make decisions that favor one person over the other. Facts can be complex and one might always
say, “I made my decision on the basis of the facts” while in truth a decision
might be made on the basis of how important or unimportant a person is to you
and your life.
I have a lot of admiration for President
Truman, and had the opportunity last week to go to his Presidential Library
while I was in Independence, Missouri. He
made a lot of important decisions based on what he perceived to be the good of
the country. After we visited the
Library, we drove by his home. It was
closed for renovation, but we wanted to drive by just to see it. When we did we were told that right across
the street was the home of his brother-in-law, and that he was a
contractor. I don’t know if this is true
or not, but our guide, who was a native of Independence, said that President
Truman only awarded contracts to the lowest bidder, and that he always made
sure that his brother in law submitted the lowest bid.
Well, right or wrong about Truman, we know
these things happen. We are to treat all
people equally.
In our society today, it is a challenge to
do this with the poor, the homeless, people of a certain culture, race or
educational level.
16 You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not
profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord.
The Ten Commandments do not tell us not to
tell lies. That is found elsewhere in Scripture, including in this chapter 19
of Leviticus. The Ten Commandments tell
us not to “bear false witness against our neighbor.” It is wrong to tell lies, but to lie about
someone, to bear false witness against someone, is a major lapse in loving
actions.
To slander someone is to damage a
relationship. The victim has a hard time
fighting it. The victim has a hard time
restoring his or her reputation.
We complain about how bad politicians are
in this country – and rightfully so.
Politics has gotten bad. But we
are also guilty in that we lie about politicians. We spread misinformation and slander
them.
Almost every day I see something on
Facebook or in an email about something a politician has done. I sometimes fact check it, and many times,
there is no truth to the story at all.
It is just made up – it is slander.
We also slander people who have hurt us,
and all we can do to get back at them is to slander them. We are too civilized to throw a tomato or a
brick at them, but we can throw some misinformation around.
And sometimes when we slander we are
simply passing on what we hear, but we have a responsibility to test the words
we hear before we pass them on.
17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of
your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.
The verse here, because it is in a
collection of laws, may sound like two different and unrelated laws. Law one, do not hate in your heart, law two
reprove your neighbor.
But these go hand in hand.
We are not to hate in our heart, but
instead we are to rebuke our neighbor.
We are to say to them, “you hurt me,” or we should say, “you done me
wrong kiddo!”
We often harbor bad feelings toward those
who have done us wrong. We need to speak
up, and to speak privately and one on one with those who have done us
harm.
Matthew 18:
15 “If
another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when
the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that
one. 16 But if you are not listened to,
take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by
the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If
the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the
offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a
Gentile and a tax collector.
The next verse starts easy, ends hard.
18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a
grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as
yourself: I am the Lord.
Really? I can resist taking vengeance, but it is hard
not to bear a grudge against someone who has deeply hurt me.
Forgiveness sometimes comes
with great difficulty and takes lots of practice.
It is interesting that this
command to love your neighbor as yourself comes in the verse in which we are
talking about someone who is, from our point of view, unloveable.
Matthew 22:34-46New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
The Greatest Commandment
34 When the Pharisees heard that he had
silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a
question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is
the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first
commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love
your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law
and the prophets.”
What Jesus does here is to
lay down the definition of true religion, true faith, true spirituality.
First, religion is not so
much a list of rules, dos and don’ts.
True religion consists in loving God.
The verse which Jesus quotes
is Deuteronomy 6:5.
5 You
shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
That verse was part of the
Shema.
Do you know what that is?
It is the basic and essential
creed of Judaism. It is dear to the
Jews, much like the Apostles’ Creed is dear to us in the Presbyterian Church.
I am told that this Shema, or
this sentence of Scripture, is the sentence with which every Jewish service
worship still opens.
It is the first text which
every Jewish child commits to memory.
For many years I was able to
recite this verse in Hebrew, but now all I can do is the first few words,
Shema Yishrael, Adonai elo-hey-nu,
Adonai echa®d.
It is in the mezuzah. Mezuzah is Hebrew for doorpost, and on the
doorpost of virtually all Jewish homes and on many Christian homes, is a small
box called the Mezuzah. Inside there is
a parchment with these words of the Shema, which in English, are from
Deuteronomy 6:4 to 9:
We are to love God
totally. Our love for God is to permeate
out conversation and our actions. We
should not reach for something without that message of love being on our
hands. We are not to look at something without
seeing in the corner of our peripheral vision the box on our foreheads
containing this admonition of love.
All religion starts with the
love which is total commitment of life to God.
(2) The second commandment
which Jesus quotes comes from Leviticus 19:18 – hey, that’s our Old Testament
lesson for this week!
We should pay attention to
the order in which Jesus gives these commands.
It is the love of God first,
and the love of others second. Why? Not only because God comes first, but because
it is only when we love God that others become loveable.
Others do not become loveable
because they change. Others do not
become loveable because they say they are sorry for hurting us.
Others become loveable simply
because we learn to learn to love God.
Again - It is only when we
love God that other people become lovable.
In Scripture, we discover
that a human being is not collections of chemical elements. We are more than that.
We are men and women made in
the image of God, and for that reason, others are loveable.
Take away the love of God,
and lose the reason to love, as well as the ability to love the most difficult
people to love. We can look at others
and say, “that person is worthless” --- but we can’t do that, because no person
is worthless. Every person is made by
God, in the image of God, and is loved by God.
Without this, it is easy to
be pessimistic, or callous, or judgmental, or hateful about others. It is easy to bully a person or to slander a
person.
The love of our neighbor, our
friends and enemies, is firmly grounded in the love of God.
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