The Other Name

Homily for Proper 25, Year A — Leviticus 19:1–2, 15–18 by the Rev Dr George Lewis Boar-Hays, Vicar of Macomb  

There is an ancient and perhaps incurable tendency of the human mind to mistake the general for the profound. We admire those propositions which, by including everything, seem to require nothing of us. Love your neighbor. Be just. Speak the truth. The sentences possess the serenity of geometrical axioms; we repeat them with the confidence of those who have never been required to demonstrate them.

I have sometimes suspected that their apparent simplicity is a form of concealment.

The nineteenth chapter of Leviticus contains one of these sentences, although it surrounds it with circumstances so particular, so uncomfortably familiar, that we may wonder whether its author intended to deprive us of the consolations of abstraction.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The command is preceded by instructions concerning judges, witnesses, accusations, grudges, and the obscure satisfactions of vengeance. We are told not to favor the poor merely because they are poor, nor the powerful because they are powerful. We are forbidden to circulate slander, to stand idly by when a neighbor’s life is endangered, to preserve hatred in the secret chambers of the heart.

The proximity of these instructions is not accidental.

The ancient text appears to know something that we, despite our greater accumulation of knowledge, are perpetually in danger of forgetting: that love is not the opposite of judgment, that truth is not the enemy of mercy, and that the refusal to acknowledge an injury may be another means of perpetuating it.

I imagine a small community, perhaps a village in ancient Israel, perhaps a congregation in a coastal town whose inhabitants would be astonished to discover themselves included in a book written thousands of years before their birth.

Someone has spoken.

A sentence has passed from one person to another. Its origin is uncertain; its authority increases with each repetition. By the time it reaches the fourth or fifth listener, it has acquired the solidity of a fact, although no one can say precisely what occurred.

The person of whom the sentence was spoken enters the room.

Nothing visible has changed. The chairs remain where they were. The conversation continues. Yet an invisible alteration has taken place. The room contains, in addition to the actual person, another person constructed from words.

The second person may prove more durable than the first.

We know this phenomenon well enough. A reputation can survive the evidence that disproves it. A grievance can outlive the circumstances that produced it. An accusation, once remembered, may become indistinguishable from the memory of an event.

In this sense, every community possesses an invisible library. Its volumes are the stories we tell about one another, the injuries we remember, the motives we assign, the judgments we have inherited without knowing their authors.

Some of these books are true. Others contain fragments of truth. Still others are works of fiction whose principal characters have never been permitted to read them.

Leviticus commands us to examine this library.

It does not ask us to burn its contents, nor does it propose that every account of wrongdoing is merely a misunderstanding. Such an interpretation would be convenient for those whose power depends upon the silence of others.

The text knows that injustice exists. It knows that the vulnerable may require protection, that wrongdoing must sometimes be named, that the injured must not be abandoned to the discretion of those who injured them.

But it also knows that the injured person may become the custodian of a grievance, and that the grievance, through the mysterious operations of memory, may become indispensable to the story that person tells about himself.

There are injuries we rehearse so frequently that we come to possess them as we possess a name.

I am the one who was betrayed.

I am the one who was overlooked.

I am the one who knows what really happened.

These statements may be true. Their danger lies not necessarily in their falsehood but in their completeness. They threaten to make one event the final interpretation of an entire life.

Perhaps this is one of the labyrinths from which the commandment seeks to deliver us.

The text says, “You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.”

The conjunction is remarkable.

We might have expected the prohibition of hatred to be followed by an injunction to forget, to excuse, or to withdraw. Instead, we are instructed to speak.

The ancient law does not confuse peace with silence.

It understands that a community which cannot tell the truth about itself will eventually become a community in which truth can no longer be told. Its members will learn the arts of concealment. Its powerful will call their security harmony. Its vulnerable will be instructed to regard their suffering as the unfortunate price of belonging.

The command to love one’s neighbor interrupts this arrangement.

Yet the interruption is not permission for cruelty. To expose wrongdoing for the pleasure of humiliating another person is merely to give vengeance the appearance of righteousness. To correct someone in order to establish our superiority is to transform truth into an instrument of domination.

The distinction may be difficult to perceive from outside. Two people may utter the same words, recount the same facts, and arrive at the same judgment. Yet one seeks the restoration of a neighbor, while the other seeks the neighbor’s defeat.

The difference is not trivial.

It is the difference between justice and revenge.

There is another peculiarity in this passage, one which we may overlook because we have grown accustomed to religious language.

The commandment does not begin with an argument.

It does not say that holiness is useful, that justice contributes to social stability, or that kindness will eventually be rewarded.

It begins with an assertion that is at once a revelation and a mystery:

“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

The sentence offers no definition of holiness that can be detached from the One who speaks it.

We are not told to become holy because holiness corresponds to an ideal independently established by philosophers, legislators, or the accumulated wisdom of civilizations. We are told to become holy because the God to whom we belong is holy.

The distinction matters.

The holiness of God is not simply a celestial version of our better intentions. It is not a name we give to those virtues of which we already approve. It is the strange and inexhaustible reality by which our judgments, including our judgments about virtue, are themselves judged.

And yet this divine holiness, which we might reasonably expect to encounter in fire, silence, or the inaccessible precincts of a sanctuary, appears here in instructions concerning a neighbor’s reputation, a fair hearing, an unresolved grievance.

The infinite has entered the ordinary.

The God whose name cannot be contained by the world has bound that name to the manner in which one human being treats another.

There is something almost scandalous about this descent into particularity.

We might prefer a holiness that remained safely remote from the parish meeting, the family dispute, the conversation after worship, or the allegation whose truth we have not yet troubled ourselves to establish.

Such a holiness would leave our habits undisturbed.

The God of Leviticus refuses us that convenience.

Centuries later, when Jesus is asked which commandment is greatest, he joins the love of God commanded in Deuteronomy to this command from Leviticus.

He does not invent the love of neighbor. He receives it from the Scriptures of Israel.

The two commandments are not identical, but neither can they be separated. The neighbor whom I encounter, whose motives I misunderstand, whose presence inconveniences me, whose suffering may require something of me, cannot be excluded from the life I claim to offer to God.

There is a temptation to imagine that the command to love one’s neighbor is principally concerned with affection.

But affection is an unreliable guide to justice. We may feel affection for those whom we injure. We may act justly toward those for whom we feel no affection at all.

The commandment concerns something more demanding than sentiment.

It requires us to acknowledge that the other person possesses a life which cannot be reduced to our account of it.

Here we approach a mystery.

I know myself from within, through the confused and continuous experience of memory, desire, fear, and hope. I know my neighbor chiefly through appearances, words, actions, and the interpretations I place upon them.

My own failures are accompanied by explanations. My neighbor’s failures appear to me as facts.

I know the circumstances that led to my impatience; I observe only the impatience of another. I know the complexity of my intentions; I am tempted to regard another person’s intentions as transparent.

Thus, I inhabit a world in which my own life possesses depth and the lives of others are in perpetual danger of becoming surfaces.

The command to love the neighbor as oneself may be understood, at least in part, as a prohibition against this illusion.

It asks me to grant to another person the depth I take for granted in myself.

This does not mean that every action is innocent or every accusation unfounded. It means that justice requires something more exacting than the certainty of my first impression.

It requires evidence.

It requires patience.

It requires the possibility that I have misunderstood.

And, when another person is in danger, it requires the courage to act rather than retreat into the comfortable fiction of neutrality.

There is a sentence in Leviticus whose ancient Hebrew has occasioned more than one interpretation: the prohibition against standing upon, or against, the blood of one’s neighbor.

The precise circumstances imagined by the command remain disputed. What is not disputed is its terrible seriousness.

The neighbor’s blood is at stake.

Words, judgments, silences, and failures of intervention belong to a world in which human beings can be wounded and can die.

We are not merely exchanging opinions.

We are answerable for one another.

It is possible that the most difficult aspect of holiness is its refusal to let us remain spectators.

We would prefer to believe that the moral life consists in choosing between good and evil when they present themselves under unmistakable names. Experience suggests otherwise. More often we must choose between competing accounts, incomplete evidence, divided loyalties, and fears that are not entirely unreasonable.

Sometimes the truthful act will be to speak.

Sometimes it will be to remain silent until we know more.

Sometimes it will require confronting wrongdoing.

Sometimes it will require establishing a boundary that another person will experience as rejection, although its purpose is protection.

No formula will relieve us of the responsibility to discern the difference.

The ancient commandment does not abolish this uncertainty. It places us within it, under the judgment and mercy of God.

And now we come to this table.

We have spent these minutes considering the words by which human beings construct, diminish, accuse, defend, and sometimes restore one another. We have considered the invisible library of our judgments and the possibility that some of its volumes are false.

Here, however, another word is spoken.

It is not a rumor passed from person to person, gaining authority through repetition. It is not a verdict rendered upon the evidence of our accomplishments.

It is the word of Christ, who gives himself for us.

We come with our incomplete stories, our justified injuries, our unjustified certainties, our memories that have become prisons, and our failures to recognize the lives of those who stand beside us.

We do not come because we have successfully made ourselves holy.

We come because the holy God has already claimed us.

Before Israel receives the commandments of Leviticus, Israel belongs to the God who speaks them.

Before we learn the difficult practices of truthful love, we are received into a life we did not create.

The Eucharist does not make our differences imaginary. It does not declare that every conflict has been resolved or that every injury has been healed.

It gathers us into a body whose unity cannot be explained by our agreement.

The person beside me is not merely the person I remember, the person I suspect, or the person whose story I have told myself.

That person, too, has been summoned.

That person, too, stands before the holy God.

Perhaps this is where holiness begins: in the recognition that the neighbor possesses another name, one which I have not bestowed and which I have no authority to erase.

The Scriptures do not disclose that name to me.

They command me to love the one who bears it.

And perhaps, when the final account of our lives is given, we shall discover that holiness consisted less in the extraordinary things we imagined ourselves capable of doing than in the ordinary things we were finally persuaded not to do: the accusation we did not repeat, the judgment we withheld until the truth could be known, the injury we refused to conceal, the vulnerable person we did not abandon.

These acts will leave few monuments.

Some will be forgotten even by those who performed them.

But the God who commands holiness has bound the divine name to these obscure fidelities, and it may be that the world is preserved, more often than we know, by acts of justice and mercy which no historian will record.

“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”