Holiness and sacredness seemed to be the main theme of the reading today.
There are a whole list of "do nots" in this section. I interpret this in two ways. Perhaps, when Moses was listening to God's instruction, he was commenting on the detestable things that the Israelites were doing around him. For example, when, chapter 18 verse 8, it says, "Do not have sexual relations with your father's wife; that would dishonor your father." I wondered if there was public knowledge that many men or women were sleeping with their father's wife (not necessarily their mother, because their father could have multiple wives).
Or maybe it was the result of something different. Based on the theme of holiness, maybe God was trying to set Israel as a whole apart from the other nations of the land. Perhaps the nations of the land were the ones mainly engaging in all of these sexual activities, practices, and rituals. These were all detestable to God.
It seems like the whole section is best summarized in what I thought was the key verses, Leviticus 20:7, 8 and Leviticus 21:6, 8. "Consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am the LORD your God", "I am the LORD who makes you holy", "... must be holy to their God and must not profane the name of their God", "... because I the LORD am holy-I who make you holy."
The punishment for a lot of the sexual sins are death by stoning, except for the case of the girl who becomes a prostitute, because she must be burned to death. These rules sound to me like what sociologists and religious scholars call pollution laws governed by shame. The idea is that they are not so much rules of right and wrong that are governed by guilt. They do not seem like rules of whether an act adheres to a higher moral code. Usually these moral codes are governed by guilt. A person is guilty because they broke the moral code by action that was within their control but they chose to break it. It is the result of an internal, unstable, and controllable attribution made by the community and the person him/herself. Pollution laws are generally more primitive. They operate on the basis of shame. They are to separate people from "uncleanliness", whatever that group deems as unclean. They are often highly ritualized societies. The idea is to protect the sacred from the profane. The profane is anything that is unclean. Bodily fluids, menstrual blood, certain sexual acts, certain foods, etc. all can make profane that which is sacred. The some things are more out of a person's control than others (e.g., menstruation or nocturnal emissions are uncontrollable). The pollution laws are imposed on the individual. Generally, then, the individual is not in control, there is a sense of internal cause to the pollution, and the pollution may or may not be stable. This generally leads to the feeling of shame. It seems like the Leviticus are shaming laws that are based on pollution-type social mores. In order to make the profane once again sacred or the polluted clean again, many rituals are instituted. In this case, God used the symbol of the pouring of blood and death to redeem those who are guilty of sin, to forgive them. They are redeemed, made sacred again.
What is interesting to me is that Jesus flips this whole paradigm upside down in the New Testament when he turns these pollution regulations into a moral code by internalizing the whole thing. Suddenly, if you so much as hate another person, you have committed something equal to murder. The underlying message to me is that is an act that is internal, unstable, and controllable. Suddenly, you are no longer dealing with a pollution regulation system governed by shame, but a moral framework regulated by guilt.
Once we are guilty, though, thank the Lord that Christ came, because He is the only remedy to make me clean again. He was the final redeemer. Thank God all I have to do is turn my guilt to Him, fall to His feet, and when I ask, He forgives me. Every time. That is my only hope of holiness. The only thing in which I can boast: that I am forgiven through Christ.
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