Main news for 6 March 2025

In our ordinary consciousness, hostility and rebuke are tied together quite firmly. In fact, most often rebuke is the result of a hostile attitude toward the person being rebuked. And even when there is no personal hostility, the person being rebuked is still treated as an opponent who has to be defeated, politically, morally, or in any other way.

But the sacred writer offers us a completely different logic. For him, hostility and rebuke are connected with completely different spiritual states. Indeed, one must rebuke one's neighbor in order not to bear sin because of him. Clearly, this refers to a situation of complicity in something that is sin and in which one cannot take part at all. But refusing to participate in such a situation is, in itself, a rebuke, since when we refuse to support a person we will have to explain ourselves to him one way or another, and such an explanation, if we are not being deceitful, will inevitably become a rebuke. Anger and heartfelt hostility, as we can see, do not presume rebuke.

Of course, hostility hidden in the heart is not anger in itself, but when it does not show itself as it should, it inevitably produces anger. Such hidden hostility ultimately benefits no one: if rebuke often helps to dot the i's, hidden hostility and the anger it produces only confuse both sides even more. Then relations with one's neighbor reach a spiritual dead end, and finding a way out of it can at times be very difficult. This is no surprise: rebuke, even when accompanied by negative emotions, is still based on a desire to sort things out, to understand who is right and who is not, where sin is and where righteousness is.

Hostility, however, is always driven by feelings and intentions that are connected, one way or another, first of all with self-assertion at the neighbor's expense. The desire for self-assertion of this kind excludes from the very beginning the possibility of love, and therefore the possibility that these relationships will ever become part of the Kingdom.

Lev 19:17

NOTES

We have already seen many definitions of holiness in the Book of Leviticus: as dedication to God, as belonging to His people, as religious and moral purity. Today's chapter also begins with...

Chapter 19 begins the second part of the Book of Leviticus, the part biblical scholars have called the Holiness Code. This name is not accidental: in it the words...

Chapter 19 begins the second part of the Book of Leviticus, the part biblical scholars have called the Holiness Code. This name is not accidental: in it God's words are repeated like a refrain, "be holy, because I, Yahweh your God, am holy." What, then, does holiness mean here? Today, as a rule, we understand holiness as righteousness, and specifically Christian righteousness. Those who have become models of such righteousness are the ones we usually call saints. Yet in the Book of Leviticus, and especially in its second part, holiness is understood in a sense already not very different from the New Testament sense.

Here holiness means the state of a person's sanctification, the very state a person acquires when he remains in God's presence. A person became such every time he came to the altar and participated in sacrifice, for there at the altar God was completely and really present, and a person, if he was open to Him, changed just as completely and really as a result of meeting Him.

The problem, however, was that after returning to ordinary everyday life, a person again slid back, becoming what he had been before the encounter with God. The state of sanctification, or holiness, was not stable; it was only temporary, although for truly believing people it was regular enough, since such people usually came to the altar no less than once a week.

For a believing Yahwist, purity had traditionally been considered the main thing: the state of purity made a person ready to meet God and to be sanctified. Now, however, the aim of the believing Yahwist's life becomes not purity, but sanctification itself, holiness as an ordinary, everyday state. This was, of course, an immense task: the revelation had been received, but how to carry it out was not yet clear.

New revelations were needed here, and they came through the prophets, those whom biblical scholars usually call the later prophets, beginning with Amos and ending with Malachi. For the moment, however, the Book of Leviticus offers those seeking a full spiritual life and a relationship with God strict and unwavering observance of all the commandments and all the norms of ritual purity. The goal is clear: to live in such a way as to allow no defilement at all in one's life, not even the slightest. It seemed that if one lived this way, the goal would be reached. It took the experience of many centuries to understand that everything is not so simple and that the goal is not reached by this method; but that is another story.

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