NOTES for Lev 9:1-24
The consecration of priests for service consists of two principal elements. The first is a special purification sacrifice, and the second is a “peace offering.” This is hardly surprising if we recall the meaning of priestly service and of the very existence of the priesthood. Its purpose was to ensure that within the Jewish people, who according to God’s design were to be a community-people, there would always be a kind of community within the community that remained continually consecrated, rather than being consecrated periodically like most of the people.
This is precisely why priests were not to leave the courtyard of the Tabernacle or Temple while performing their service. When their service ended, they naturally left the sacred courtyard and returned home, but others immediately took their place—and then those others in turn became the consecrated community within the community. On entering the Tabernacle or Temple, the priests crossed what was like an invisible line: the boundary separating sacred space, whose center was God’s presence and which was directly defined by that presence, from the rest of the world, where God’s presence was hidden and which therefore existed differently from sacred space.
To cross this boundary, a priest had to be cleansed and consecrated separately, in a special way. In essence, precisely what according to God’s design was meant to happen at the altar to every person who approached it had to happen to him: the will of the person approaching had to be turned toward God, and God’s power had to cleanse his nature from sin and consecrate it through the proper sacrifices.
Ideally, the whole subsequent life of a person cleansed and consecrated in this way was to become different; it was to follow different laws. The person was to acquire a new spiritual quality of life and never lose it again, wherever he might be and whatever he might do (except, of course, for sin, which such a life excluded completely).In practice, however, even after being cleansed and consecrated, a person could not continue to preserve this new spiritual quality of life and soon slipped back into his former condition. Here the priests had an advantage: they did not leave the altar or the sacred space throughout their period of service. There, by the altar, they could, if they made the effort, realize locally and temporarily what was ideally intended for everyone as the norm of life. In practice, of course, things varied; but what matters is that the priests who remained by the altar were given the possibility of a full spiritual life. The rest depended on them.