Born Against: The Way of Jesus as Protest

A.J. Swoboda recently wrote a very thoughtful piece on how the Christian faith relates to the occupy protest movement. I want to make sure at the outset that I acknowledge the article said many positive things about the movement including,

Protest isn’t new. The prophets protested endlessly against evil, injustice, and at times the institution in the Hebrew Scriptures…Jesus protested too. His entire existence was a protest against death, sin, and evil.

However, Swoboda also says, “We are not born against. We are born again. We are born for.” While this was written as a critique of protest movements, I think it fundamentally misunderstands this particular movement. In some ways it may also misunderstand something fundamental about the Christian narrative.

I previously wrote about why the Occupy movement’s position is not primarily (or only) against something (Occupy This Blog?!). Certainly there are some basic grievances that the movement has made clear. However, Douglas Rushkoff has said that the Occupy protests are a “beta test for a new way of living”, not just a way to be against something.

If we take seriously the idea that the Exodus narrative is at the very core of the biblical narrative, fundamental to the identity of the Israelites and paradigmatic for understanding the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus (the Last Supper was after all a Passover meal), then we must wrestle with the basic character of this narrative. The Exodus narrative does not begin with a vision for the future. It begins with a movement of protest.

First, comes the creative resistance of the Hebrew midwives rescuing the Hebrew babies that Pharaoh tried to kill. Moses is born and left to die, but his sister manipulates his rescue into the hands of the powerful. As a man torn between his position of power and Hebrew roots, he lashes out in violence at the injustice of oppression murdering an Egyptian. But this violent resistance will not be the way of YHWH. His own people condemn his actions and Pharaoh puts him on his watch list (there were no airplanes so he couldn’t yet be on the no-fly list). Then Moses disappears. As we know, he will be a reluctant leader. It is not his charisma that sparks this movement of liberation. It is the people crying out against.

During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.” (Exodus 2: 23-25 ESV)

God acts on behalf of the Hebrews, not by giving them a vision of what they should be for, but because God is inherently against the injustice and oppression they suffer. The ensuing plagues ultimately demonstrate, not what God is for, but that God is fundamentally against, Pharaoh. Certainly the wilderness is a liminal space in which God begins to unfold God’s vision for an economy of gift, grace and abundance (think manna and quail). Yet, even then the people grumble about the circumstances and long for the “good life” they had under Pharaoh. Forgetting what they are against leads them to romanticize their own oppression, because after all liberation is hard work. A new way of living requires sacrifice and letting go of our previous life, even though there was some stability and certainty (even if false) in the old order of things.

So, perhaps the idea that the Edenic narratives in Genesis provide a blueprint for how God intended the world to be is less helpful than the very clear reality that God’s mission in the world begins fundamentally by being against certain things. This is true also in the patriarchal narratives, where God is against Cain and later the rest of humanity in the Noah story because of their propensity for violence (Genesis 6-9). There are certainly glimpses of what God is for, the Jubilee in Leviticus 25 is an idealistic vision that qualifies. The prophets sometimes hint at this other way of living, but more often than not they were first against the Pharaoh-like actions of Israel’s own rulers.

Clearly these are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, how can one be against something without some vision for the way the world should be? The prophets’ outcry against injustice was certainly motivated in some way by a vision for how God intended Israel to live. My point here is not to say that we should not discover what we are for and what God is for. The point is that God does not begin with the same starting point that Swoboda and others seem to require of ourselves. In many ways I think that we are uncomfortable being against things, because it is that prophetic stance that gets people killed and inspired the violence of Empires throughout history.

The way to be for a different order of life is to begin to live it out together, as Occupy Wall Street is attempting. What makes us squirm is the way that living out the way of Jesus inevitably forces us to be against some things and the actions of some people. As liberation theology points out, the God of justice is necessarily against the wealthy for their own liberation and salvation. God cannot be just without being against those causing the people to cry out for help. If we could be for the kingdom of God without having to be against the injustices ad systems of oppression, we could have liberation without any struggle or need to deal with the reality of the world we have created. It would be like the question Julie Clawson recently posed, “When does speaking of liberation actually enable oppression?” on her blog. Real liberation involves being against the order of this world and hopefully embodying what we are for in our churches and communities which inevitably makes the Powers (and often ourselves) nervous.

Coveting, Control and Captivity (Leviticus 25)

You can search this site for “jubilee”, “leviticus 25″ and “sabbath” to read more about the connections I make between Sabbath practices, ecology, economics, Jesus and Isaiah. To find something fresh to say about this central passage in the biblical narrative I turn to one of my favorite scholars.

The text of Leviticus 25 asserts both Yahweh’s radical intention and the radical social practice of entitlement that necessarily accompanies Yahweh’s intention. (103)

So, Walter Brueggeman sums up the well-known Jubilee chapter of Leviticus. Many people, particularly conservatives, hear the word entitlement primarily with negative connotations. However, the concept of predistribution which I mentioned before in relationship to Peter Barnes’ book Capitalism 3.0 is a more positive description of what Brueggeman means. Brueggeman also supports what I’ve often claimed for the importance of this chapter for understanding Israel, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in his book Finally Comes the Poet,

Israel’s theological conviction about the land is asserted positively in the great social vision of Leviticus 25, the text on the Jubilee year. A number of scholars now argue that this text provides the cornerstone for Israel’s ethical practice. (102)

Brueggeman makes this claim in the context of his exegesis of the command not to covet (Ex 20:17) in which he says,

Marvin Cheney has argued, and I agree, that covet in the Decalogue refers in principle to land tenure systems and land management policies. To covet means to arrange loan credit, tax, and inheritance so that some may have land that others should rightfully possess. That is, it is the systemic economic practice of greed. (99)

It is helpful to put the redistribution scheme of Leviticus 25 in the context of prohibitions against covetousness and greed. In other words, the Jubilee is the positive vision of what the world could or should be in light of the negative reality highlighted by the prohibitions in the Decalogue. Greed, or covetousness, is both based on and results in inequalities of the distribution of wealth and power. For the biblical world this comes primarily in the form of access and ownership of land. Brueggeman goes on to explore this further,

There is an important line of scholarship that argues that early Israel (which gives us the seed of all biblical faith) is essentially a social revolution concerning land tenure systems. This charter for “egalitarianism” culminated in the commandment against coveting that prohibits the rapacious policies of the state that characteristically monopolize law, power, and wealth… The Bible has understood, long before Karl Marx, that the basic human issues concern land, power, and the means of production. (99-100)

I have argued before in these virtual pages that a biblical economy is based on the land, and I’m happy to find confirmation from such a highly respected biblical, particularly Old Testament, scholar. Some will dismiss everything at the mention of that dreaded name, “Marx”, but will have missed the point Brueggeman makes that, far from being “Marxist”, the Bible is fundamentally human. Where Marx gets things right he happens to agree with the biblical emphasis on justice, egalitarianism and land reform. Most Christians read the Ten Commandments (and the whole biblical narrative) primarily in individualistic terms. What they miss is the socio-political context of these commands which were understood in much more radical terms by the original hearers.

So, Jubilee is the antithesis to coveting, but Brueggeman unpacks this further in terms of control and captivity,

The theological issue related to the land is sharing— respecting the entitlement of others. The preacher’s theme for those who gather is greed. Greed touches every aspect of our lives: economic, political, sexual, psychological, and theological. Greed bespeaks a fundamental disorder in our lives, a disorder that reflects distortion in our relation with God.

Central to this issue is the addiction to control that permeates human history. In verse 6 the text poses the question most people probably have when reading about letting the land lie fallow for a year, “What then shall we eat?” I hope to explore this aspect of Jubilee further, but the response of the text is that God provides abundantly, such that the people will still be eating from the produce of the Sabbath year three years later. Loss of control is scary, but God clearly promises that letting go of control is actually better than when we hold tightly to the reins.

This addiction to control is a kind of captivity or slavery. When we hold our possessions and wealth tightly, we are possessed by them. We become slaves to the things we pretend to have control over. Their is a subtle reversal in the relationship to material goods that most people don’t recognize in their daily lives. The logic of greed and coveting and the systems that perpetuate these values traps us in a spiral from which we cannot extricate ourselves. This kind of captivity is picked up by the prophet Isaiah (61:1-2) when he proclaims “good news to the poor”, “liberty to the captives” and the “year of the Lord’s favor”. Many scholars argue that this is a reference to the Jubilee, which is then appropriated by Jesus when he quotes Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth and says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4:21). This proclamation of liberation from captivity which is good news to the poor is a thread connecting the Torah, Prophets, Gospels and on through Paul and James. This Jubilee thread weaves a tapestry that paints a picture of the “kingdom of heaven” at the core of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

But Brueggeman also admonishes that the prohibition against coveting and the positive command of the Jubilee are not based on a revelatory “because God said so”, but instead on real world experience.

This claim about God and the distribution of land is not accepted simply on the basis of revelation, but can be established in terms of social experience. Excessive land grabbing leads to death, whether in the family, in the church, in the faculty, or in Latin America. (101)

Living among people that are desperate for access to land, I can attest to the timelessness of this assertion. North American and western cultures have isolated themselves from the death that the injustice and inequality of economic systems creates, causes and exacerbates, but it is very real. Those at the very bottom understand that their inability to access land is the basis of their poverty and exploitation. For middle class westerners so detached and abstracted from their land base, it seems strange that people are still fighting over access to land. We have been sold the lie that we can solve poverty and basic inequalities in the system without dealing with the most fundamental issue of access to land and exploitation of natural resources. It is so important to recognize that this is not an arbitrary commandment, but one based on the social and economic realities of human existence which continue to apply today.

I’d like to share a story that Brueggeman relates which, I think, helps connect this ancient text and practice to our current context,

A concrete embodiment of the Jubilee command- ment was evidenced in a rural church in Iowa during the “farm crisis.” The banker in the town held mortgages on many farms. The banker and the farmers belonged to the same church. The banker could have foreclosed. He did not because, he said, “These are my neighbors and I want to live here a long time.” He extended the loans and did not collect the interest that was rightly his. The pastor concluded, “He was practicing the law of the Jubilee year, and he did not even know it.” The pastor might also have noted that the reason the banker could take such action is that his bank was a rare exception. It was locally and independently owned, not controlled by a larger Chicago banking system. (104)

Finally, let me end with this challenge from Brueggeman,

What if the central claim of the Tenth Commandment is true: that coveting kills, that taking what belongs to another destroys, and that life-giving social practice requires giving things back to people! (106)

Holy Bread Batman! (Leviticus 24:5-9)

Leviticus 24: 5-6, 8-9 You shall take fine flour and bake twelve loaves from it; two tenths of an ephah shall be in each loaf. And you shall set them in two piles, six in a pile, on the table of pure gold before the LORD… Every Sabbath day Aaron shall arrange it before the LORD regularly; it is from the people of Israel as a covenant forever. And it shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place, since it is for him a most holy portion out of the LORD’s food offerings, a perpetual due.

Baking God’s Bread
Bread is one of the most common foods around the world. Almost every culture has some form of it whether it’s tortillas in Mexico, naan in India, pita in Greece or any number of variations across cultures. So, it seems both unusual and obvious that this staple is a part of sacred rituals. The unleavened bread prepared in the Exodus for a hasty departure is enshrined in the rituals of Passover. Later Jesus takes this Passover bread along with wine, another ordinary staple of the time, and institutes a new ritual to remember his life and coming death. These ordinary things are consecrated and made holy in their rituals.

The passage under consideration from Leviticus 24 concerns how to prepare and arrange the consecrated bread “as a memorial portion as a food offering” and for the priests to eat. There is nothing very interesting about the passage that I can see, except that something so ordinary as bread is made into something holy. In my post What’s for Dinner? on Leviticus 11 and the dietary laws I considered the distinction drawn in that chapter between what is holy and what is common. In that post I asked, “So, what separates the holy from the common? What turns bread and wine from a simple meal into a holy ritual? How does this union of the holy and the common teach us to live?” Perhaps we can find some answers in an incident involving this holy bread.

One Order of Holy Bread… Comin’ Up!
In 1 Sam 21 David is fleeing the wrath of King Saul and comes to the priest Ahimelech in Nob. David lies to Ahimelech about being on a secret mission from the king and asks him for “five loaves of bread, or whatever is here” (1 Sam 21: 3). Ahimelech responds, “I have no common bread on hand, but there is holy bread—if the young men have kept themselves from women.” (1 Sam 21:4) Notice the distinction of holy and common once again. David promises the men are pure enough to receive the holy bread. The bread is handed over without reservation. It doesn’t seem that David is crossing some sort of religious or ethical boundary by taking the bread, nor the priest by giving it. Perhaps the urgency of a secret mission under the authority of the king made it a situation in which this use of the bread was more acceptable. The text, however, does not indicate that there is any problem with the bread being used for such purposes. The text explains, “So the priest gave him the holy bread, for there was no bread there but the bread of the Presence, which is removed from before the LORD, to be replaced by hot bread on the day it is taken away.” The rationale is simply that there was no other bread available.

This episode is picked up by Jesus when his disciples are rebuked by some Pharisees for plucking heads of grain and eating them on the Sabbath (the same day that the bread described in Levticus 24 and 1 Sam 21 was made). This incident occurs in all of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 12:1-8; Mark 2:23-28; Luke 6:1-5) and has very little variation between the Gospels. The Pharisees ask, “why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” (Mt 12:24) To which Jesus responds,

Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him? (Mt 12:25-26)

Leviticus does make it clear that the bread was “a perpetual due” (Lev 24:9) for the priests, but does not forbid its consumption by others in this passage. Certainly that tradition came from the ritual purpose of the bread and its intended consumption by the priests who depended on the sacrificial system for their food. Matthew’s Jesus responds by saying “something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless.” (Mt 12:6-7) This recalls the words of the prophet Isaiah concerning the emptiness of sacrifices in the presence of injustice (Isaiah 1:11-17). It raises the question concerning the purpose of sacrifices and things consecrated such as the bread.

I Am The Living Bread
Jesus calls into question the assumptions that had developed over the years in terms of his own mission and vocation. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27-28). The first part of this statement reorients the Sabbath tradition and practices around their intended purpose. It is not an arbitrary rule which people must follow in order to fulfill some religious law and achieve purity or holiness. No, the Sabbath is permeated by an acknowledgment of right relationships throughout creation. I have previously written about connecting the Sabbath day to the practices of the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee as a nexus of practices that are interwoven and interrelated. I have also pointed out previously that the Sabbath is first a practice of remembering and retelling the creation story including and perhaps most importantly our place as human beings and creatures within that creation.

The statement that Jesus is “lord of the Sabbath” is the concluding statement in all of the Synoptic Gospels. In light of our broader understanding of the nature of Sabbath practices this statement is far more than an assertion of religious authority. It gather together the Sabbath practices and asserts that right-relatedness to God, other people and the earth finds its ultimate revelation in the person of Jesus. It is this principle of right-relatedness that governs religious practices such as the Sabbath. On the surface this conflict with the Pharisees and Jesus over his disciples’ breaking of Sabbath observance concerns primarily what is or is not allowed during the weekly observance of the Sabbath day. However, Jesus’ response to the confrontation clearly places it within a larger context and places himself at the center of mediating the right-relatedness at the heart of the Sabbath observance.

Returning then to our initial question concerning what makes something holy, we find that Jesus has, as usual, subverted our questions by shifting the focus. The point is not what is holy or common, clean or unclean. The proper perspective concerns our relationship to our fellow humans and our individual and collective relationship to the earth. The fact that sacred rituals make common elements and objects into holy things teaches us that they are not magic talismans. They remain ordinary staples that can be consumed in a moment of need. The Sabbath can be broken based on its own inherent principle of right-relatedness. This teaches us the principle that our relationships to our neighbor and the biosphere take priority over religious rituals, even when, and especially if, the rituals intended to serve that purpose fail to do so.

Be Still And Know

Psalm 46:10 Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!

So, I was sitting in my backyard the other night staring up at the stars. Sometimes I am struck by the fact that I live in the Southern Hemisphere, in South America, in Bolivia, in the Chaco, in a little town called Charagua. It’s very far from where I have spent the majority of my life, Central Texas. As I was staring into the night sky I was struck by the fact that as I sat still in my chair I was actually hurtling through space in orbit around the sun and as the earth spins.

Maybe meditation and quieting ourselves is really a way to notice the energy of the world around us that we mask by our activity. Crickets chirping, air moving, birds flying, the world is never still. As Heraclitus first posited, It seems that the very nature of existence is change. The underlying elemental force is fire according to Heraclitus. The world is dynamic, alive and buzzing. Yet we barely notice. For modern humans, being still mainly involves turning off the television, taking off the headphones, closing the laptop, and unplugging the phone. This only gets us to the point where we ourselves are still and silent. That is when we begin to notice that the world is not silent. There are engines, motors, cars, people, planes, lights, power lines, computers and lots of machines that constitute a low buzz of man-made noise that fills our lives.

Yet, if we were to find a place where these things were absent we would notice that the world itself is alive with noise, activity and life. There’s a constant flow of change, growth, birth, death, eating, pooping, playing, singing, yelling, fighting, crying and laughing going on all around us. Some of it under our feet, in the soil or the water, where it is invisible to us. Some of it in trees, on the ground, in the air or hidden in holes of caves. One of the most profound moments of my life was on a tiny island in the middle of the Boundary Waters, where engines were not allowed. I spent 45 minutes alone observing, thinking, praying and listening. It was certainly the closest I have felt to nature.

I had a thought on that island that has stuck with me over the years. I suddenly realized that all the activity and life I witnessed around me continued all the time whether or not I, or anyone else was there to pay attention. This is not a philosophical statement about the nature of reality, but a realization about the nature of nature. In our own place of stillness and quiet we are able to feel connected to that which continues without us, without our constant attention, care and maintenance.

In the oft-quoted verse above there is a connection between stillness, knowing God and God’s revelation of Godself through nature. We have a very Greek understanding of what it means to “know” something or someone. In Hebrew the idea of “knowing” something or someone connotes a relational way of knowing. We don’t know the thing in itself. We know it as we relate to it. Knowing God is relating to God and being in relationship. One of the ways we do this is through nature and the kind of stillness that creates an awareness of our connection to the earth, other humans and therefore God.

The purpose of meditation, contemplation, centering prayer or whatever you call it is not to escape from the world and push it away, but to remove all of the obstacles and noise from our lives and minds that keep us from experiencing the world and knowing ourselves. There is no stillness. There is no quiet. We are always hurtling through space around the sun. There is always motion, change, growth, death. What we call stillness and quiet is our attempt to reconnect with this truth and this reality.

The Law of Liberty (Leviticus 19 The New Testament Remix)

One semester in seminary I was taking a New Testament class and a Greek class on the Letter of James. In my New Testament class I volunteered to write a paper about James 1:25-27. I thought I’d have a leg up since I was already doing research by reading the letter in Greek for another class. I discovered a couple of wonderful texts on James that connected it to this chapter of Leviticus. First, Luke Timothy Johnson wrote an article asserting that the entire letter of James can be read as a gloss of Leviticus 19. He lines up the topics covered side by side, verse by verse, and it is astonishing to see the parallels. Robert Wall wrote an excellent commentary on James in which he suggests that the reference to the “law of liberty” in the passage I was assigned, or also “royal law” (2:8), is a reference to the Jubilee in Leviticus 25. These two commentaries have a lot to do with the way I read James, Leviticus 19 and ultimately the biblical narrative. I would like to consider these two insights, first reading James’ letter as a gloss of Leviticus 19 and then the idea that the “law of liberty” and “royal law” is a reference to Leviticus 25 and the Jubilee.

If you just read Leviticus 19 and the James’ letter together the parallels jump out. James 2:1-7 is an extended exposition of Leviticus 19:15, “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.” However, James does not settle for the total impartiality in Leviticus, but seems to suggest in verses 5-7 the “preferential option for the poor” argued for by liberation theology.

Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called?

Perhaps James, reading Leviticus 19, realized that it is rarely the poor that are shown partiality or favoritism within the unjust systems with which he was familiar. This is then followed by James’ quote of Leviticus 19:18 (to which we will return later). James 4:11 finds its corollary in Leviticus 19:16 concerning slandering and treatment of neighbors. James’ invective against the rich and oppressors in 5:1-6 very closely resembles Leviticus 19: 9-11, 13 and 35-36. These are the most obvious connections, but more commonalities exist concerning the more general tone and emphasis on the outworking of covenantal relationship with God through the just relationships within the community and to the earth. In James’ language we are to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (1:22).

The Law of Liberty
I also wrote a paper in seminary arguing that, in terms of the relationship of faith and works, Paul and James are actually on the same page, but are coming from different perspectives, particularly in terms of their unique missions, and writing to very different audiences. This is very important in terms of the way James and Paul use the term “law”. Paul’s Gentile audience does not have the same relationship to Torah that James’ Jewish audience does. Now, let’s turn to the way that James uses the term “law”.

James uses the term law in seven verses. Out of those seven three use the phrase “law of liberty” or “royal law”. Are these just stylistic flourishes? The repetition of the phrase “law of liberty” in both 1:25 and 2:12 suggests an intentionality and distinction from other uses of the term. In verse 25 it is the “perfect law, the law of liberty”, further elevating the status of the phrase. This comes as James is making the central argument of his letter, the judgment of true or sincere faith by the actions it produces (1:22-25). The next use of the phrase “law of liberty” occurs within the same passage as the term “royal law”; therefore we will consider them together.

Verse 8, which quotes directly the “love your neighbor” command in Leviticus 19:8, comes immediately after the discourse on partiality and favoritism towards the rich and the “preferential option for the poor” which I mentioned above. “If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, You shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well” (Jas 2:8). This love command does away with the partiality and favoritism as illustrated in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 (discussed in the previous post). The designation “royal law” seems to carry the same weight that Jesus gives to Leviticus 19:18 in Matthew 22:39 and Mark 12:31where it is paired with the Shema as the commandment on which “depend all the Law and Prophets” (22:40). So, this is nothing new from what we have already seen.

The Jubilee in Leviticus is described in this way “And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (Lev 25:10). So, if we take Robert Wall’s suggestion that the “law of liberty” is a reference to the Jubilee, then we should read 1:25 and 2:12 in light of this reference. James concludes his diatribe against partiality and the law with verses 12-13, “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.” In the context of the Jubilee then this can be read as a reference to the forgiveness of debts, freeing of slaves and return of land and with the land the equality of economic opportunity.

The “law of liberty”, then, represents an ideal of social, economic and ecological relationships that may have never actually been practiced according to many scholars. Thus James’ insistence that “the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing” (1:25) may be an indictment of Israel’s inability to fulfill this “perfect law”. It represents a messianic hope for the coming reign of God where all injustice and inequality will be done away with, while simultaneously urging Israel and the church to embody this coming hope in concrete practice that was not considered a distant impossibility.

Conclusion
In the first post on Leviticus 19 in its original context, I argued that the entire chapter concerns the convergence of relationships between God, humanity and the earth. In light of this, what we have said about the New Testament passages and references to Leviticus 19 should also be read in light of the connections that Leviticus 19 itself makes between the command to “love your neighbor” and the Sabbath practices to care for the earth which includes the Jubilee. I think that this integrated, holistic way of thinking is assumed by Jesus, Paul and James in their words and actions.

We have also seen how the law to “love your neighbor” includes the social and political realms. Our relationship to possessions and wealth is directly related by Jesus to our living out the “love your neighbor” law. Jesus moves this law from the realm of feeling, where we have relegated it, into the realm of action by transforming neighbor from a category of people into an action taken by the righteous person. Paul challenges the Powers by elevating this law of love above “what is owed” to the Powers and authorities of this world. He also defines our understanding of the freedom we have in Christ in terms of the limits that the law of love places on freedom because of its social, political and economic implications. This is exactly what James does in his letter concerning the practical application of the law of love, the “royal law”, and its companion, the Jubilee, in which this law of love is expressed most concretely in terms of the social, economic and ecological ordering of our lives.

The command to “love your neighbor” has never seemed both so simple and complex at the same time. This law of love draws to itself so many aspects of our lives and society that are broken and unjust. Yet, Paul simplifies it so eloquently for us in his advice to the Romans living in the heart of the Empire, “Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Ro 13:8). The outworking of this reality will take a lifetime for individuals and longer for the world, but we don’t have to perfect it before we can begin practicing it in our lives and embodying it in our communities and churches.