Nakedness & Saul

Then Saul’s anger was aroused against Jonathan, and he said to him, “You son of a perverse, rebellious woman! Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness? For as long as the son of Jesse lives on the earth, you shall not be established, nor your kingdom. Now therefore, send and bring him to me, for he shall surely die.” 

There's an awful lot packed into Saul's insults in 1 Samuel 20:30-31. Initially, it may seem odd that when he is angry with his son Jonathan, he attacks the character of Mrs. Saul. Actually, he's making a subtle, although highly offensive, dig at Jonathan. By making a covenant with David, now Saul's enemy, Jonathan is faithless toward Saul, as though Saul were not in fact his father. Saul alleges that Jonathan's choice suggests he is the product of adultery, which would make Mrs. Saul a perverse and rebellious woman. The only way Jonathan can restore his mother's reputation (in Saul's opinion) is to break his covenant with David and turn him over to Saul.

That reference to "your mother's nakedness" puts me in mind of the Law's various commands that "the nakedness of your [insert category of family relation here] you shall not uncover," the vast majority of which are found in Leviticus 18. Since these are all variations on adultery and already clearly prohibited by the 7th Commandment, one might wonder why they need to be enumerated in such exhausting detail.

The context of Leviticus 18 provides illumination. It prohibits all consanguineous adultery, child sacrifice, and homosexual and bestial sex acts. These were the grave abominations of the Canaanites who the Lord rejected from the land, and can be grouped together as fertility cult practices. Leviticus 18, then, is a specific warning to Israelites to not break covenant with the Lord by adopting the fertility cult religion of the Canaanites.

Fertility cults are attractive because they make the propagation and welfare of the family of central importance, which seems intuitive to most people. And by "most people," I mean "especially men" because the  head of the family, the patriarch, becomes a virtual object of worship. After all, it's his name and reputation that are being preserved and propagated. The recent resurgence of  polygamy in scripted and reality television provides many examples of how the man is the center of his vast family's universe.

Ironically, although his insult against Jonathan is remarkably witty, it's Saul who violates the intention of Leviticus 18. As the patriarch, he considers his will to be inviolable and binding on his son. In commanding Jonathan to break a lawful covenant with David and conspire in his murder, Saul demands he be obeyed rather than the Lord of Israel. He is just another in a long line of fathers who insist their families serve them rather than the Lord's Anointed.

Jupiter Ascending, Downton Abbey, & Leviticus

The reviews of Jupiter Ascending have not been kind, and I suppose I can see why. I am second to none in gape-jawed amazement at The Matrix, with which the Wachowskis exploded onto the film scene, not only revolutionizing the way action sequences ever after would be filmed, but creating one of the most potent allegories of Christ’s redemptive work in recent memory. Though vast in interstellar scope, Jupiter Ascending shares none of The Matrix’s metaphysical or genre-shaping ambitions. Instead, it puts me in mind most of The Fifth Element, and if that silly science-fiction romp is the standard, then Jupiter Ascending is good (and notably clean) fun.

Royalty is a major theme in Jupiter Ascending: it turns out that the earthling Jupiter, the titular character, by pure accident is a genetic duplicate of a now-deceased intergalactic matriarch and vicious capitalist empire-builder. As such, she is by nature “Entitled,” i.e., royal. There’s a rather lovely scene (although, admittedly, somewhat preposterous) in which bees engage in a bit of synchronized swarming in recognition of her majestic status. (It appears bees have something of a sense for this sort of thing.) While this scene has been widely mocked on the interwebs, I thought it hit on what most people, around the world today and throughout time, have intuitively accepted as true: there are some people who are, to borrow from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, more equal than others. Take, for example, the popularity of Downton Abbey: hordes and hordes of Americans, reared on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, adore a story built on the odd conceit that some people are born to rule, and others to serve them. 

In God’s providence, I saw Jupiter Ascending the day before I preached Mark 1:40-45, in which Jesus heals the unclean leper. The leper’s problem was not so much that he was diseased, but that he was ceremonially unclean, and thus unable to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 13-14) and prone to being shunned by those who wished to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 5:3). Under the Old Covenant system of worship, cleanliness and uncleanliness were a symptom of man’s alienation from God: all you had to do was interact with a person with a skin disease, and your inherent sinfulness would, as it were, bubble to the surface and make you unfit to enter the presence of the LORD God to offer up a sacrifice in worship.

It seems to me that (what seems to be) the native human instinct for respecting persons of royal birth is, in some way, a reflection of the Old Testament laws of purity and cleanliness. There are some people who are more holy, more clean, closer to God than others, and such persons must be respected: even if their personal character is not respectable, their status demands our reverence and awe. 

In light of this, Mark 1:41 is shocking: “Moved with pity, [Jesus] stretched out his hand and touched him….” Leviticus 5:3, if not the rest of the Old Testament Law, is extraordinarily clear: to simply touch the unclean is to become unclean oneself. To push the double negative past the breaking point, Jesus not only is unafraid of becoming unclean, but bears a holiness so intrinsic and so powerful that he obliterates the category of uncleanness: he makes all things clean. He cannot be made unclean; instead, the power of sin is so conquered by his person that the unclean has no option but to become clean. “And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:42). Herein lies the immensity of Christ’s work on the Cross: because in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, even the ways in which human societies have intuitively ordered themselves since time immemorial are shown to be mere shadows and types, overturned and abolished in the person and work of our Savior.

(Here, then, lies the peculiarly Christocentric genius of the American experiment in republican self-government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” No royalist, enmeshed as she or he must be in the Old Covenant perspective on the world, could say such a thing.)

We respect royalty because we respect God: that is how we were made. Nonetheless, Christ’s work on the Cross destroys the royal conceit: there is no more clean or unclean, but in Christ all things have become new. “[T]hat is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19)

Matzo and Christian liberty

I listen to the Planet Money podcast for information and insight into economics, but the latest edition related more nearly to my day job. It proved the point of Westminster Confession of Faith 20.1, which says in part "...under the New Testament, the liberty of Christians is further enlarged, in their freedom from the yoke of the ceremonial law, to which the Jewish Church was subjected." The story on the Manischewitz corporation's matzo production facility illustrates the incredible lengths to which Jews have had to go in order to keep the ceremonial law. Of course, rabbinic Judaism, which is descended from New Testament-era Phariseeism, has adumbrated that law with any number of requirements; no doubt, law-keeping during Biblical times was not nearly so complex. Nonetheless, this contemporary illustration can help the modern-day Christian understand just what Leviticus is going on about.

Where sacrifices should be offered

Lev. 17:1 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying,
Lev. 17:2 “Speak to Aaron and his sons and to all the people of Israel and say to them, This is the thing that the Lord has commanded.
Lev. 17:3 If any one of the house of Israel kills an ox or a lamb or a goat in the camp, or kills it outside the camp,
Lev. 17:4 and does not bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting to offer it as a gift to the Lord in front of the tabernacle of the Lord, bloodguilt shall be imputed to that man. He has shed blood, and that man shall be cut off from among his people.
Lev. 17:5 This is to the end that the people of Israel may bring their sacrifices that they sacrifice in the open field, that they may bring them to the Lord, to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and sacrifice them as sacrifices of peace offerings to the Lord.
Lev. 17:6 And the priest shall throw the blood on the altar of the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting and burn the fat for a pleasing aroma to the Lord.
Lev. 17:7 So they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to goat demons, after whom they whore. This shall be a statute forever for them throughout their generations.

Verse 7 takes things in an interesting direction. Up to this point, it seems we have a straightforward application of the 2nd Commandment, a regulation for worship which requires Israelites to offer their sacrifices only in the manner the Lord has regulated rather than worshiping him in whatever manner might occur to them on their own. Leviticus 17:7, though, draws a connection between worship in whatever random location one might choose and the worship of false gods, taking us firmly into 1st Commandment territory. This passage suggests that once one has decided to go one's own way, it's not one's own way for very long; instead, one ends up following the well-worn way of wickedness and perdition laid out by the evil one.

The lectionary bring us to John 4 this coming Lord's Day. There, Jesus famously pronounces the end of Temple worship and its replacement with worship in Spirit and truth. In conjunction with Leviticus 17, it would be an error to presume one gets to worship however or wherever one might like so long as one feels spirity. Instead, the "truth" bit in John 4:23-24 calls us to worship according to the Spirit's instruction through the Word, which requires Christians to worship on heavenly Zion, in the fellowship of the saints as they are gathered together in the Church's Lord's Day worship (Hebrews 12:22-24).

Heb. 13:15 Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.