The (re-)establishment of order: Disorder in the priestly understanding and in the teaching and acts of Jesus

Abstract

While a biblical doctrine of sin requires the honest and careful assessment of the complexity and plurality of the biblical witness,2 especially with regard to the relationship of the two Testaments, scholarship often draws lines of demarcation between the two Testaments too sharply. Ancient Israel’s priests devoted significant attention to the “objective” quality of wrong done as a pastoral problem, for example. Leviticus establishes that “unintentional sin” covers the whole gamut of behaviors short of willful sin that can result in terrible injury and harm. Indeed, the priests so consistently held the notion that wrong inheres in a situation, regardless of the intention of the actor, that they could use the language of sin to discuss skin diseases (Lev 14:1–32) and mold in houses (Lev 14:33–53). Israel’s priests did not speculate as to the precise point along the spectrum of willfulness and inadvertence at which one becomes morally culpable in the legal sense. Instead, their approach was much more pastoral: whatever the psychological and ethical dynamics preceding and underlying a wrong, the priests saw their role primarily in terms of healing, restoration, and restitution. Jesus and James expanded the priestly notion of sin as an objective reality to include intention as a category in the discussion of sin, but did not make it definitive of sin. Although the Gospels preserve no other discourse of Jesus even impinging on the subject of the concrete reality of sin, Jesus’ behaviors, especially instances when he healed without assigning blame or seeking repentance first, manifest his priestly concern for correcting inherent wrongness, for restoring rightness. Following Jesus, the priests’ view that any disorder threatens the harmony of the cultic community can supply useful and pertinent raw material for Christian theology and ethics today.