God's Flexibility

God’s Flexibility
NUMBERS 8: 5-9: 14

A woman came to talk to me after church two weeks ago. In the sermon I had described the way the Psalms invite us in prayer to appeal to God’s compassion, grace, and steadfast love, especially when we know we are in the wrong in relation to God. She could not really believe God is like that. From childhood God had been portrayed to her as holy, strict, and hard-nosed. With God, you couldn’t get away with anything. We stood outside church on the main street with cars and buses passing, and she wept at the idea of God’s being compassionate, loving, and merciful, as the Old Testament says...

The Passover story provides another example. The Torah has given many detailed instructions about how the Israelites must do this and that and get every detail right. You could get the impression that God is really anal. Then along comes a situation when following God’s instructions raises problems. When someone died just before Passover and the family had to bury him, they had the taint of death on them and could not go straight into worshiping the living God. What are they to do?

Moses would take such a conundrum to the meeting tent to consult God. Meanwhile the family wait to discover what they are to do. Why will this take some time? Perhaps we should not be too supernaturalist about the process. While Moses sometimes hears a supernatural voice, I doubt whether we need to assume this always happens. Decisions perhaps come by similar processes to ours. Moses asks Aaron what he thinks and goes to the meeting tent and sits and thinks about the pros and cons of various possibilities (“Should they ignore the taboo rule? Hardly. Could we have a special purification process in the circumstances? Would that work? Should they watch the Passover observance from a distance? That would seem phony.”) He asks God to guide his thinking, then makes a decision in the conviction that God is doing so. One way or another, God says, “Don’t worry, it’s not a problem. I’m not legalistic. They can celebrate Passover next month.”

“They do need to keep the rest of the rules,” God adds. “Being flexible because of circumstances doesn’t mean you can ignore them. They’re there for a reason. They aren’t arbitrary.” Thus on other occasions God comes down like a ton of bricks on someone who ignores the rules (Numbers 15 provides a scary example). It’s possible to project legalistic attitudes onto God when really we are the legalistic ones, like the people who gave that misleading impression of God to the woman I spoke of. We’d like life and our relationship with God to be governed by totally clear rules. It isn’t. That’s a mercy, because life is messy. We need the kind of flexibility God is prepared to show.

The Levites’ dedication to God’s service raises overlapping issues. While they don’t get ordained like the priests (see Leviticus 8–9), they do go through a multifaceted process that takes them from being ordinary Israelites to being people who give their lives to their work, which they will do on behalf of the entire people. The Israelites put their hands on them as a gesture indicating that the Levites do represent them and take their place, and that they associate themselves with them. Their commissioning involves a process of cleansing that suggests removing anything that clashes with who God is, and it involves offerings that seal this removing. This enables them to spend their time in close proximity to God in a way that would imperil ordinary people; it would be too “hot.” God knows people need to be aware of the difference between God and them, but also makes provision to ensure this does not make them unable to relate to God. The Levites act as a buffer zone, a pair of oven gloves, an equivalent to the vest you wear when someone has an x-ray. The people can then come into God’s presence with safety.

One of the Levites’ ongoing duties will be to ensure people don’t come too near the sanctuary in a taboo state or drunk. In the immediate context, their work will involve demanding physical service, carrying the parts of the dwelling while the people are on their journey. That will continue after their arrival and until the time of David, as the portable sanctuary seems to move around. Only when Solomon built a fixed temple did it stop doing so. They do this from the age of twenty-five to the age of fifty (if seventy is now the new sixty, in a society with poor health resources and diet, fifty is the old sixty).

As with other aspects of this story, the actual history of the role of the Levites in Israel was more complicated than this orderly narrative paints it. What Leviticus and Numbers give to Israel is a theological scheme for understanding how things turned out to be.


Taken from Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone by John Goldingay