Standing in the Gap: a Reflection on Worship

A while ago, a friend of mine was reading through the Bible, cover to cover for the first time.  She did pretty well with Genesis and Exodus, but when she got to Leviticus, things started to get rocky.

“Why the sudden obsession with cleanliness and animal sacrifice?” she wondered.

While all those elaborate rituals and detailed sacrifices in Leviticus may seem strange to modern readers like us, they’re actually crucial for understanding the person and the ministry of Jesus Christ.

Because the theological vision underlying the Leviticus is that, whatever else God is, he’s transcendent.  The word transcendent means that God is completely other, absolutely unlike anything in Creation.  Like it says in one place:  “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways above your ways.”

Now, we tend to think in spatial terms, so we tend to picture it in this way—that God is “above us” or “far away.”  But in Leviticus, God is not “far away.”  He is the Creator of everything, after all, so he’s always present to the creation; and what’s more, the story of Leviticus is that God has actually come to live right in the midst of his people, in the Tabernacle that Moses made.

God’s Transcendence has to do with his nature, not his location.  God is completely holy, whereas humans sin.  God is completely eternal, whereas humans are tainted by death.  God is pure light in which there is no shadow at all, and humans are ...well, you get the picture.

This is the theological dilemma driving the Book of Leviticus: God is always right there with us, and at the same time, he’s wholly transcendent.  How do you live with a God like that?

In Leviticus the answer is through the ministry of a priest.  A priest must “go between” for the people, in the way that God prescribes, according to rituals he describes, rituals which not only “represent” God’s transcendence to us, but also “bridge it” so that we can in fact, live with him.

So ritual washing, for instance, reminds us that God’s pure and we’re unclean, but it also deals with the problem, by making us clean.  And the rituals of animal sacrifice address the fact that it would mean death for flesh-and-blood creatures like us to stand in the presence of a Holy God, but it also deals with this problem.

The whole Bible agrees with Leviticus on this one:  God is completely transcendent and yet, at the same time, always there.  And because of this, there is no way for Humans to do life-together-with-God—to worship, or pray, or celebrate him—without the work of a Mediator like this.

Someone needs to enter God’s presence on our behalf, bringing “the things of humanity to God,” and bringing the “things of God to us.”

And this is where Jesus comes in.  Because Christians, of course, while they may share the vision of God that Leviticus describes, they don’t actually observe any of the rituals it prescribes.

And this is because the writers of the New Testament kept insisting that Jesus is the fulfillment of the vision for life with God that we find in the Torah.  He is the Great High Priest, but he is also the sacrificial Lamb.  He is the Tabernacle where God’s Glory dwells, but he’s also the Perfect Mediator who enters the Tabernacle for us.

This is why the teaching that Jesus is both fully God and fully human matters so much, because only a fully-human-fully-divine saviour could bridge God’s transcendence for us, brining the things of God to us, and at the same time, bringing human being like us into the divine presence.

For the Christian every aspect of our life with God is really just a participation in the Priestly Ministry of Jesus, who stands as our human representative before God.  Through faith and by the Holy Spirit, our worship, our prayer, our ministry, our very lives are untied with the worship, prayer and ministry that Jesus offers the Father on our behalf.

And because it’s offered in him, it is accepted as holy: pure, perfect and pleasing to God.