Homilies on Leviticus

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.5 · 2.1–3.2 · 3.3–4.1 · 4.2–4.9 · 4.10–5.4 · 5.5–5.11 · 5.12 · 6.1–6.6 · 7.1–7.3 · 7.4–8.2 · 8.3–8.10 · 8.11–9.4 · 9.5–9.9 · 9.10–10.2 · 11.1–11.3 · 12.1–12.7 · 13.1–13.6 · 14.1–15.3 · 16.1–16.6 · 16.7

1. 1.1As the Word was clothed in flesh, so Scripture is clothed in the letter; the spiritual sense of Leviticus must be sought, or the church would be bound to offer animal sacrifices.
2. 1.2Leviticus distinguishes who offers (man, soul, high priest, synagogue, ruler); the 'man' is the human race, and the calf without blemish is Christ, offered outside the door.
3. 1.3The blood poured at the altar by the door signifies Christ's death in Jerusalem and also his sacrifice for heavenly beings: a twofold victim through two veils.
4. 1.4Flaying and dividing the calf signify removing the veil of the letter and distributing teaching suited to beginners, the progressing, and the perfect; the washing of entrails and feet signifies baptism.
5. 1.5Morally, one's own flesh is the calf to be offered in chastity, but bodily chastity without the other virtues is like the foolish virgins' lamps without oil.
6. 2.1Origen recalls the laws of gifts and of sin offerings read previously (for the high priest, the synagogue, a ruler, and a single soul) whose explanation had been left over.
7. 2.2The 'man' who offers animals is the rational person made in God's image; the 'soul' offering only flour is Paul's natural man; the first fruits point to Pentecost; it is the soul, not the spirit, that sins.
8. 2.3Even the high priest can sin, and God appointed priests who share human weakness; Christ, offered as a gift in heaven and for sin on earth, suffered 'outside the camp' of the heavenly angels.
9. 2.4Against the fear that Christians have only one forgiveness (baptism), Origen lists seven remissions of sins in the Gospel (baptism, martyrdom, almsgiving, forgiving others, converting a sinner, love, and penance) and matches them to the Levitical sacrifices.
10. 2.5The soul 'from the people of the land' that does a commandment 'which shall not be done' is the one that keeps the sacrificial law literally, since God gave such commands to signify Christ, not to be done.
11. 3.1Christ as high priest offered 'for sin' because he was made sin for us; he 'made the people sin' because his passion, life to believers, became an occasion of guilt to those who rejected him.
12. 3.2The law that one who knows of a sin and stays silent shares its guilt agrees with the Gospel order of private rebuke, witnesses, and the church; the scribes who keep silent about the oath of Ps 110 share Israel's sin.
13. 3.3Touching the unclean signifies contact with sin (desire, greed) and following those dead in sin, whether 'men', 'clean animals' of the church, or those seized by the devil; literal corpse-impurity is rejected.
14. 3.4The oath 'to do evil' is the vow to chastise the flesh for the sake of the spirit; the command to 'declare' one's sin means accusing oneself first, before the devil accuses.
15. 3.5Every victim bears the image of Christ: the fat is his soul between divinity and flesh, the sevenfold sprinkling the Spirit, the four horns the Gospels, and the blood at the base the final salvation of Israel.
16. 3.6The sin in holy things admits no cheaper substitute; literally it concerns those who misuse offerings given to the church for the saints, the clergy, and the poor, who must restore them with interest.
17. 3.7Hearers who receive the Lord's word and forget it have taken holy things; they must restore their five senses to God's service, add the five spiritual senses, and refer all to the one God.
18. 3.8The ram bought with the holy shekel is Christ, acquired by one's own riches of wisdom and above all by a sincere and approved faith, free of heresy, which alone obtains remission of sins.
19. 4.1Since the Lord and God are spirit and Christ's words are 'spirit and life', the words God spoke through Moses must also be heard spiritually.
20. 4.2The law on denying deposits, fraud in partnership, and robbery edifies the weak literally, but Origen refuses to think the faithful guilty of such crimes and turns to the spiritual sense.
21. 4.3The deposit entrusted to each believer is soul and body, above all God's image and likeness, and also Christ, the Holy Spirit, and our rational powers, all to be returned whole.
22. 4.4Partnership is spiritually our fellowship with the Father, Son, Spirit, and the saints, denied by sin; 'robbery' is seizing the church's deeper mysteries before being purified.
23. 4.5To 'find perdition' is what heretics do in searching Scripture for their doctrines; sins outside holy things need a ram at an unnamed price, sold by the prophets and apostles, whose price is study, vigils, and obedience.
24. 4.6The ever-burning altar fire and the priest's linen and change of robes signify faith, chastity, and the teacher's practice, like Paul's and Christ's, of speaking one way to the perfect and another to the crowds.
25. 4.7The law that whoever touches the holy sacrifice is sanctified cannot be true literally (a murderer touching it would be sanctified), so it must be understood through the Gospel, which removes the veil from Moses.
26. 4.8Christ is the one sacrifice whose flesh sanctifies all who touch it in faith, as the woman with the flow of blood did; only 'males', mature souls, may eat it, and only within the church, not among schismatics.
27. 4.9The full handful with oil and incense signifies generous mercy and service; the 'memorial' is remembering Scripture and what is taught in church, and what exceeds one's understanding is to be left to the priest and teacher.
28. 4.10The high priest's daily offering, half morning and half evening, is the law in its letter and its spirit, the latter given at the Saviour's coming; the law is 'eternal' only spiritually, and Christ's own word, like a whole burnt offering, is not to be revised.
29. 5.1Read literally, the laws of sacrifice would hinder Christianity; read spiritually, they make the hearer a Jew inwardly, and the heretics who reject them fail to see that Scripture, like the world, has body, soul, and spirit.
30. 5.2Some victims belong to God alone, some to priests, some also to the people; but the inward Jew must seek these victims within his own soul, a world in miniature containing all that the world contains.
31. 5.3The sin offering slain where the burnt offering is shows God's mercy; Christ is both the holy victim and the priest who 'eats', that is consumes like fire, the people's sins, and the church's priests must imitate him; some mysteries are reserved for God alone.
32. 5.4An 'offence' is lighter than a 'sin'; the fat offered signifies the grossness within that must be burned away, and the priest's portion is in the sinners he brings to repentance.
33. 5.5The oven, frying pan, and griddle signify the three levels of Scripture (hidden, discoverable by study, and plain), corresponding to its mystical, moral, and historical senses, as do the basket of three loaves and the three loaves of the parable.
34. 5.6Sacrifices with oil are peace offerings, those without oil are for sin, which has no gladness or sweet odour; Origen admits that much in these laws exceeds his understanding.
35. 5.7The peace offering of praise is offered by one whose life causes God to be praised; its flesh, the solid food of perfect teaching, belongs to priests, and the leavened bread signifies secular learning admitted only to serve the word of God.
36. 5.8The peace offering must be eaten the same day because the priest's 'flesh', the word of God taught in church, must always be fresh and spiritual, not stale and literal; the old will be a blessing only in the age to come.
37. 5.9The two days on which the vow offering may be eaten are the two Testaments, from which all knowledge of God is to be drawn; what they leave unresolved must not be supplied from a 'third scripture' but left to God.
38. 5.10The three uncleannesses that bar eating sacred flesh signify sound teaching corrupted by error (such as denying the resurrection of the flesh), receiving the mysteries before purification, and defilement through companionship with sinners.
39. 5.11The ban on eating fat signifies not causing believers, the church of Christ's friends, to stumble; the ban on eating blood signifies not insulting Israel, Abraham's descendants by blood, whose fall should be met with fear, not boasting.
40. 5.12Only the healed may offer the peace offering, by the 'hands' of good works; the priest's portion, the breast and right shoulder, signifies the converted heart and right-handed works of sinners brought back by the priest's labour.
41. 6.1Only those who turn wholly to God, freed from worldly cares and devoted to prayer and Scripture, can see past the veil of the law on the priestly garments.
42. 6.2Moses, that is, the law, first washes and then clothes the priest; so those seeking baptism must first be purified by the law, and the priestly garments of incorruption replace Adam's tunics of skin.
43. 6.3The people's presence at the high priest's consecration shows that the most worthy must be chosen openly; his two tunics signify knowing the law in letter and spirit, while the apostles keep only the inner, spiritual one; the ephod signifies works.
44. 6.4The double girdle binds the priest in word and deed; the rational with 'manifestation and truth' signifies wisdom that can be explained to the people and never departs from truth; works must precede wisdom.
45. 6.5The mitre and golden plate bearing God's name signify that the knowledge of God crowns all knowledge; whoever is washed, anointed, kept in baptismal grace, chaste, and adorned with works and wisdom is a high priest before God.
46. 6.6The lesser priests' simpler garments show that the name of priest does not guarantee the merit of the high priesthood; the omitted linen breeches signify teachers' restraint before unworthy hearers, and the high priest's work is to learn from God, teach, and pray.
47. 7.1The law forbidding priests wine at the altar teaches sobriety, which the Gospel confirms; mystically, Christ the high priest drank wine with his disciples before his passion, but at the altar of the cross vowed not to drink until he drinks it new in the kingdom.
48. 7.2Christ does not yet drink the wine of gladness because, as our advocate at the heavenly altar, he mourns our sins; he, the apostles, and the saints await the perfection of the whole body, when all are subject to God and the new wine is drunk in the kingdom.
49. 7.3The 'breast of segregation' is knowledge of the Trinity, set apart from all creation, which Christ possesses and reveals to the apostles; the 'shoulder of separation' is surpassing works, such as Christ's doing the Father's will.
50. 7.4Paul's calling the law's food and drink 'spiritual' and 'a shadow', and Peter's vision at Joppa, interpreted by him as meaning that no human being is common or unclean, show that the clean and unclean animals signify people.
51. 7.5Christ's parable of the net shows that the clean and unclean fish are people; each person gives others clean or unclean 'food' in conversation, and even the Gospel's letter, such as eating Christ's flesh, kills unless taken spiritually.
52. 7.6The clean animal chews the cud (meditates on Scripture spiritually) and divides the hoof (lives with the age to come in view); the captive woman of Deut 21 signifies pagan learning, to be purified of everything dead before it is taken up.
53. 7.7Fish with fins and scales are those who rise from the mud of this life toward the spirit and shed the old garments; unclean carrion birds are people who prey on the dead or whose learning is betrayed by dead works.
54. 8.1Christ the heavenly physician heals the sick in his church, such as the woman unclean from childbirth and the leper, not with herbs but with the medicines of Scripture's words, whose power lies beneath the rough surface.
55. 8.2The law speaks of a woman who 'has conceived seed' to exempt Mary, who conceived without seed; Paul's calling her 'woman' refers to sex and age, not to loss of virginity.
56. 8.3Origen sees a hidden mystery in the impurity of childbirth: the saints never celebrated birthdays, Jeremiah and Job cursed theirs, David was conceived in iniquity, and the church baptizes infants for the remission of sins; the circumcision that matters is of the spirit.
57. 8.4The 'week' of impurity is this life, and the eighth day the age to come, when the manly soul is purified at once; Mary's offering of the poor man's victim shows Christ's chosen poverty.
58. 8.5The six kinds of leprosy signify kinds of sin, some curable and some not, in this life and after it, judged by Christ the high priest; the scar is the trace sin leaves even in a healed soul, and leprosy reappears when old sin breaks out again after conversion.
59. 8.6Leprosy covering the whole body is 'clean' because it signifies those deprived of reason (by infancy or madness), whose acts are not reckoned as sin; the 'living colour' is restored reason, after which sin is imputed.
60. 8.7The healed ulcer whose scar remains white and red signifies a soul cured of impure desires in which signs of the sin still show, perhaps a sin unto death, making the soul low.
61. 8.8Burns signify the fiery darts of the devil, carnal love, ambition, and anger; if after healing the old vice breaks out again from the scar, the soul is again judged leprous.
62. 8.9Leprosy of the head signifies having someone other than Christ as head, such as Epicurus; leprosy of the beard, boyish defeat by sin; and a woman with a leprous head, a soul following an unclean teacher like Marcion or Valentinus.
63. 8.10The leper's unsewn garments and bare head signify open confession of sin, his covered mouth the loss of authority to teach; the rite of the two birds, cedar, scarlet, hyssop, water, and blood signifies purification through Christ's cross and the water and blood from his side, also in penance.
64. 8.11The repeated 'and he shall be clean' shows stages of purification after sin; the shaving, washing, offerings, and anointing of the cleansed leper signify the penitent's progress to full reconciliation, the oil being the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit.
65. 9.1The Day of Atonement and the death of Nadab and Abihu teach every believer, as a member of a priestly people, how to approach God's altar with clean garments and the true fire.
66. 9.2The high priest's linen garments are read as figures of Christ's earthly and virginally conceived body and of the chastity of those who imitate him.
67. 9.3The two goats of the Day of Atonement represent those in the church who are the Lord's lot and those who are cast out into the wilderness.
68. 9.4The 'ready man' who leads the scapegoat away is like the angels who carry each person to the destiny chosen by his own life, as with Lazarus and the rich man.
69. 9.5Christ is the 'ready man' who leads the hostile powers into the wilderness and, as true high priest, enters the heavenly Holy of Holies to intercede for those who wait for him.
70. 9.6The Lord's lot means what God chooses, the other lot what he rejects; each person, like the 'ready man', must cast evil thoughts out of the heart.
71. 9.7As Isaiah's lips were purged by a coal, so sinners need fire for every member that has sinned; lack of faith and neglect of Scripture leave the flesh stronger than the spirit.
72. 9.8The altar's fire purges the saints, while sinners face the fire of their own kindling; Christ fills his hands with the 'fine compounded incense' of virtues and spiritual understanding offered by believers.
73. 9.9The outer and inner sanctuaries signify the church on earth and heaven; believers, as priests, must offer the burnt offering of their lives so that Christ may find living coals in them to carry to the Father.
74. 9.10The sprinkling of blood toward the east points to Christ's blood, known to the initiated, and to Christ, 'the East', from whom light and atonement come.
75. 9.11'There shall be no man' in the tabernacle means that those who follow Christ into heaven become like angels; the soul is mortal or immortal according to whether it shares in death or in life.
76. 10.1The law's rites were like a sculptor's clay model, needed only until Christ, the true temple, high priest, and Lamb, brought the finished work; therefore God let the temple be destroyed.
77. 10.2Christians should not keep the Jewish fast of the Day of Atonement; Barabbas and Jesus are the two goats, and Christian fasting means abstaining from sin, with set fasts and fasting to feed the poor.
78. 11.1As firstborn animals, sacred vessels, and priestly garments are 'holy' because set apart for God alone, so a person is holy who separates himself from worldly life and keeps his vows to God.
79. 11.2Origen distinguishes commandments from judgments with penalties and argues that the law's death penalty for adultery purged the sinner, whereas Christians, spared bodily punishment, must be purged by repentance or face future judgment.
80. 11.3Cursing father or mother deserves death because God is our spiritual Father and the heavenly Jerusalem our mother; earthly parents must be honoured, and those who blaspheme the Creator are worse still.
81. 12.1Christ alone is the truly 'great priest', who entered heaven and forgives sins by his own blood; the Jewish high priest bore the title only as a shadow.
82. 12.2The 'great priest from among his brothers' is Jesus, great because sinless; spiritual greatness comes from virtue, and the strong must care for the little ones in faith.
83. 12.3Christ alone fits the description of the great priest: anointed with the oil of gladness, with perfected hands, never laying aside his head, God, and never entering a soul dead in sin.
84. 12.4Christ alone was 'not defiled for father and mother', being born of an undefiled body without human father and never sinning against God the Father or the heavenly mother; he never leaves the holy place, which is found in holy deeds, not locations.
85. 12.5Christ's bride is the church, a virgin in the simplicity of faith; the 'widow' is the soul that leaves the law without taking up the Gospel, and 'of his own race' marks the church, not Israel, as Christ's kin.
86. 12.6The soul 'cast out' is one guilty of mortal sin, whether or not the bishop excludes it; the 'defiled' soul has sinned in thought or lesser ways; Christ joins to himself only a pure soul.
87. 12.7The harlot soul is one that receives the devil and his spirits; teachers must sow the word of God only in pure souls, in whom Christ is then formed.
88. 13.1The perfect learn the meaning of the festivals directly from God, others through teachers; Origen introduces the laws of the lamp and the loaves of presentation.
89. 13.2The lamp fed by the people's oil is the law and the prophets, which went out among the Jews when their good works failed; Christians must keep their own lamps burning with the oil of good works, love, and peace.
90. 13.3The loaves of presentation point to Christ, the bread from heaven, and to the eucharistic memorial; spiritually they distinguish deep teaching ('fine flour', as Abraham's loaves) from ordinary moral exhortation ('meal', as Lot's).
91. 13.4Each loaf of 'two tenths' figures the confession of Father and Son as one substance yet two distinct persons, against heretics who separate them; the twelve loaves stand for the orders of rational creation.
92. 13.5The pure frankincense on the loaves is pure prayer, the sabbath is the soul's rest in God, and the 'holy place' where the loaves are eaten is a pure soul, which alone may receive the Lord's body worthily.
93. 13.6As the loaves are 'holy of holies', so the deeper meaning of God's word is reserved for the pure in heart, while others receive it in parables.
94. 14.1Origen sets out the literal account of the blasphemer, son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father, who quarrelled with an Israelite and cursed the Name.
95. 14.2The blasphemer of mixed descent figures the heretic who keeps the letter of Scripture but rejects its spiritual sense and so curses the Creator; slander against God or neighbour excludes from the kingdom.
96. 14.3Origen consoles habitual slanderers with the many degrees of blessedness and the graded fire that tests wood, hay, and stubble, but urges them to reform; one 'goes out' of the church by sin, not by an unjust sentence.
97. 14.4The law gives death to the one who 'names' the Name but only 'sin' to the one who curses God because death in this life purges sin, while unpunished sin is carried to eternal punishment; hence penitents should welcome bodily affliction.
98. 15.1Origen sets out the three laws on redeeming houses: in walled cities within a year, in unwalled villages at any time, and Levitical houses always.
99. 15.2The houses are the heavenly dwelling built by fear of God and right living; lighter sins can always be redeemed by repentance, while for graver crimes repentance is granted only once.
100. 15.3The priest's and Levite's house, always redeemable, is the perfect soul which, like David, repents at once; the sins of the patriarchs are redeemed by figurative interpretation.
101. 16.1The blessings at the end of Leviticus, like prizes in the games, reward keeping God's law; since the law is spiritual, its blessings are spiritual and open to all who share the virtues of those first blessed.
102. 16.2The promised rain is not the common rain given to just and unjust but the word of God, which must be given 'in its season', suited to each hearer's capacity.
103. 16.3The 'produce of the earth' promised is not grain such as the wicked also have, but the fruit of the heart that receives the word, as in the parable of the sower.
104. 16.4The 'trees of the fields' are the virtues planted in the soul, such as righteousness, prudence, fortitude, temperance, and wisdom, the tree of life.
105. 16.5Threshing, vintage, sowing, bread, safe dwelling, and peace promised in Lev 26 signify the testing and teaching of Scripture, Christ the living bread, firmness in faith, and the peace of God.
106. 16.6The righteous need fear nothing; the 'evil beasts' and 'wars' God removes are the devil, demons, and the inner battles of the passions, which fall when we put our earthly members to death.
107. 16.7The 'five' who rout a hundred are the wise teachers who overcome unbelief with the sword of God's word; God's look restores, as with Peter, and the old law gives way to the new, so that God dwells in the renewed heart.