Concluding Thoughts on Leviticus

On this beautiful spring day, I have finished the Book of Leviticus. Quite unlike Genesis and Exodus, Leviticus is primarily concerned with one thing.... worship. Now that the children of Israel have been freed from slavery in Egypt, now that they have received a new covenant from God via Moses on Mount Sinai, and now that they are on the verge of being led into the Promised Land, the question is, how can they repay God? We do begin to see what exactly that repayment should look like in Exodus, but in Leviticus it is meticulously described. As is implied by the name of the book, the Levites are the focus of Leviticus -- how they should look, how they should act, how exactly they are to offer sacrifices to the Lord. Leviticus captures the essence of the Mosaic Law, that is, the form of divine worship. Now that the new covenant has been established, what will the sacrificial worship look like? We know from reading the Bible that people have been using sacrifice to worship God since virtually the beginning. There is a prayer in the Mass that captures this idea perfectly. As we ask God to accept our sacrifice, we pray: Supra quae propitio ac sereno vultu respicere digneris; et accepta habere, sicuti accepta habere dignatus es munera pueri tui justi Abel, et sacrificium patriarchae nostri Abrahae, et quod tibi obtulit summus sacerdos tuus Melchisedech, sanctum sacrificium, immaculatam hostiam ("And this deign to regard with gracious and kindly attention and hold acceptable, as You deigned to accept the offerings of Abel, Your just servant, and the sacrifice of Abraham our patriarch, and that which Your chief priest Melchisedec offered to You, a holy sacrifice and a spotless victim"). In the words of Martin Mosebach, "Abel, the shepherd, had made a burnt offering of the firstlings of his flock and their fat on the altar of sacrifice; Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice his son and, then, sacrificed a ram in his place; Melchizedek, who was not of the race of Abraham, sacrificed bread and wine." Mosebach is here showing the "evolution" of worship from Adam's son until just before the Mosaic Covenant. Leviticus gives us the next stage of this "evolution." The divine sacrifice is now more lofty than ever, as there is now a permanent priesthood given to the Levites. There is now a tabernacle, an ark, a house of God. Aside from shifting the Divine Presence from the Tabernacle to the Temple, sacrificial worship would remain largely unchanged until Jesus Christ would come to establish Himself as the eternal sacrificial Victim. And that is why Leviticus is so important -- it establishes a foundation for Jewish worship that will set the stage for all the books of the Old Testament that follow.

Worship is the core of what we need to do here on earth. The Commandments begin by telling us to love God before moving on to how we should love our neighbor. Therefore, as worship is our primary vehicle for loving God, it should be rightly appreciated and understood. Continuing the "evolution" analogy, if the nature of worship began with Abel's primitive sacrifice, and then moved on to the Levitical sacrifices, we know that sacrificial worship will continue to advance closer to the perfection God envisions. Bernard O'Reilly writes that "God so ordained it that the Jewish ritual and worship should be a preparation for the Christian liturgy." I found this to be ever so true while reading Leviticus. So much of what is described in this section of the Pentateuch foreshadows the future sacrificial worship of Christians, with Christ as the sacrificial Victim. The concept of atonement, the blood, the incense, the vestments, the Holy of Holies, the veil, the Divine Presence, the bread, etc., all point towards Christian worship. Yet that is not the end. For the "evolution" will continue when this world no longer exists, and then we (if we are so fortunate) will see worship perfected in heaven. O'Reilly further writes, "what God commanded to be done on earth is only the shadow, the preparation, and the foretaste of what takes place in the Heavenly City above, in that divinest of sanctuaries, where He receives unceasingly the worship of Angels and Saints, and in return eternally pours out on them the flood of His blissful love." Worship here on earth, even the Holy Mass, cannot compare to what is waiting in heaven.

Lastly, though I've focused on worship, Leviticus contains a lot of moral precepts as well. It is very instructional. I get the sense that it is a (pardon my lack of reverence) pep-talk given by God to His people before allowing them to lay claim to the Promised Land. In Numbers we see the people resume their journey toward Canaan. In Leviticus there is almost no forward movement, no narrative. It is simply didactic. What good would it have been to allow the people to inhabit the Promised Land with no instruction on how they are to live? In Leviticus God lays it all out there, putting extra emphasis on how His people are to live distinctly different lives from the pagan nations around them. I move on next to the Book of Numbers.