How To Be Perfect
Daniel M. Harrell
Overview
People who take the Bible seriously never know what to do with the book of Leviticus. This is especially true if they have ever actually read it. Consider Leviticus 19:23- “When you enter the land and plant any kind of fruit tree, regard its fruit as uncircumcised.” What does that mean? And yet Leviticus is historically considered by Jews, and thus by Jesus, as the pivotal book of the Hebrew Bible. It’s impossible to fully comprehend such key New Testament terms as sacrifice, atonement or blood without some understanding of Leviticus. That which Jesus cites as the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” comes from Leviticus (19:18). As a longtime minister and preacher who had successfully skirted Leviticus for most of my life, I needed to come to grips with all that Leviticus teaches—not just loving my neighbor, but the parts about animal sacrifice, Sabbath-keeping, skin diseases, homosexuality and stoning sinners too. Yet rather than approaching Leviticus with a view toward mitigating its commands, what if I simply obeyed them for a change? Such blind obedience is rarely recommended road, but for believers in God, it really isn’t optional (especially since God remains pretty much invisible). But what about some of the crazier laws? Shouldn’t I figure out what they mean before I try to do them? The problem is that Leviticus offers little by way of explanation. The best it does is mostly a divine version of “because I said so.” Clearly, the only chance I had of understanding the why would be to give them a reality spin.
I’d like to say that this idea emerged purely out of my own devotion to God, but in fact I took my cue from a popular book by A. J. Jacobs entitled The Year of Living Biblically (Simon and Schuster, 2007). Jacobs, a self-described agnostic Jew, chronicled a year spent living by the letter of the Bible as a pursuit of curiosity. What would it look like to do it as a pursuit of holiness? This book is about such a pursuit.
Holiness is not purely a personal thing, but essentially something that can happen only communally. Because Leviticus addresses what it means to be a holy community, I managed to recruit (coerce?) 20 others to join me in a month-long effort at living Levitically. Holiness was the ultimate goal, but so was learning. Because I knew preaching a sermon series from Leviticus would go over like a slaughtered sheep, I decided to make our pursuit into a reality sermon series. And not just for my congregation. Given the capabilities of the Internet, we were able to chronicle our adventure for the world wide web to view, complete with videos and pictures. The conversation expanded way beyond the conversation beyond the boundaries of our congregation. And not just the internet, but the printed word picked it up as well.
Needless to say (but crucial to write!), a lot was learned—about Leviticus, about God, about ourselves. Some of it was assuring and some of it disturbing, and yet all of it impressed on us both the power of the obedience and the necessity of grace. In the end, we all realized that God’s involvement in the minutiae of human life is a remarkable reality, even if like God himself, it remains hid from our eyes. This book traces the adventures of a group of people eager to figure out the Bible by living it out.
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