I’ve been reading the book of Leviticus lately. Claiming Leviticus as your favorite book of the Bible would be sort of like claiming green beans as your favorite food—I mean, they’re great and all, but have you tried literally anything else? Many an ambitious Bible-reading plan has died on the rocks of Levitical purity codes.
But the other day my attention snagged on a passaged I’d never paid much attention to before: Leviticus 17:1-9. (Feel free to check it out—I’ll wait.) In this passage the people of God are warned against making sacrifices—a core act of worship in the ancient world—out in the open fields of the country. Instead, they are instructed to bring their sacrifices to the tabernacle, the official “worship tent,” and offer them together with a priest.
As Jesus-centered interpreters of the Bible, there are several ways we might evaluate the significance of such a law.
On the one hand, it would be easy for a modern person to dismiss the whole set of procedures as another negative example of religious hierarchy. Leaders, we might say, are seeking to control the people by interjecting themselves as necessary intermediaries between them and God. Some might even go so far as to suggest that this is really about building up a kind of “religious industrial complex,” privileging certain people with power and money and endlessly building up the system on the backs of everyone else.
I suspect there may be some truth to this perspective. After all, this really is what happened over time, after Leviticus was written. Jesus clashes with exactly this kind of inflated religious system that is built on the backs of poor widows and ends up mostly serving the egos and pocketbooks of the elites.
On the other hand, however, it seems clear that in the context of Leviticus this law was originally established to address a very real and different problem. When the people are out in the open fields, making sacrifices on their own, they frequently end up worshipping false gods, sometimes without knowing it. Lev. 17:7 notes that this has already happened—many people of God, left on their own, have been seduced by other gods popular in the neighborhood around them. As a result, they can end up doing terrible things in the name of religious conviction. For example, in Leviticus 18:21 we find reference to the child sacrifices demanded by one local god named Molech.
The specific examples of Leviticus—goat gods and child sacrifices—feel very ancient and distant. Yet the actual problem feels strikingly familiar. If this kind of scenario was a danger in the ancient world due to the proximity of so many other gods, it is a danger now due to the radical individualism pervasive in western cultures. Our world today is full of people practicing faith alone in a field.
To be clear, the problem isn’t that God isn’t there in the field. The problem is that faith practiced alone in the open field is profoundly vulnerable. Individuals can get swept up in a variety of moral paradigms that feel “normal” in the context of the local neighborhood but are actually deeply destructive and dangerous. Distortions can cluster around the image of God until it is a different god entirely that we end up worshipping.
I recently had a conversation with a Christian who was explaining to me her position on a significant moral issue. The reasons she offered were grounded in a combination of gut-level feelings and a firm conviction that no one has a right to get into anyone else’s business. What I noticed as I listened was that none of her reasons for her position had anything to do with what Jesus revealed about God’s character, God’s interests in the world, or the responsibilities we have to each other as a community. It struck me that none of us are above sacrificing to Molech in whatever way our cultural neighborhood normalizes. This happens in large part not because we’re ill-willed but because, left to ourselves, it’s easy to confuse the spirit of the moment with the Spirit of God.
All of these are very good reasons for the creation of a place to gather and worship, for the establishment of a discernment process to follow as well as a structure for leadership and communal accountability. Faith alone in a field is hazardous, prone to lose sight of God and absorb deadly contaminants. While Jesus points out all the ways that religious systems can be distorted and abused, he does not send people out to worship alone in fields again. He creates a new community where anyone can be a priest and where anywhere can be a temple but where there is meant to be an accountable community of worship and discernment within which everyone’s faith is lived out. Any vision of Christianity that misses this is probably headed, over time, to the collapse of a distinctly Jesus-oriented worldview.
Critique and correct the system, a Jesus-centered reading of Leviticus might say. But don’t idealize the lonely field.
