Detail holiness

The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary today challenge us to approach the otherness of God which we call holiness. Friar Jude Winkler tells us that the passage from the Book of Leviticus is from the holiness codes of that text.  Baruch A. Levine explains the contents of the Book of Leviticus as diverse, but unified by the theme of holiness. The direction of the text is to model the otherness of God in how we treat others. The challenge to ancient Israel and to modern people is to love your neighbour as yourself. The otherness of an idea is often attractive to our intellectual nature. Thinking about and contemplation of a world defined by love of neighbour may bring Utopian warmth to our hopes of the possibility of one world. The experience of Paul in Corinth, the great city of commerce and cosmopolitan influences established by the Romans in Greece was that the predisposition of the Gentile audience there for attraction to philosophical ideas and the competition of philosophers in ability to engage the mind had created factions in the Christian community. The attraction to human leaders is a diversion from journeying to model the holiness of God. The Gospel from Matthew is a continuation of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is not replacing the Law as He instructs the people. He is filling it out. Friar Jude reminds us that the concept of the eye for an eye was setting a merciful limit to retribution, which in ancient time could include destruction of the family of the offending person. In approaching the holiness of God, Carol Zuegner of CreightonUniversity tells us that God is in the details. This phrase may catch us as being similar to the devil being in the details. The latter phrase is claimed by the Random House Dictionary to have appeared after the original phase 'Le bon Dieu est dans le detail'. We need to move, as Pope Francis exhorts, to the details of a Gospel of Joy which finds the truth that Paul declares to the Corinthians, we are temples of God and the Spirit of God dwells in us. Friar Jude encourages us to see the other with the eyes of Christ and to see the burdens which the world declares as unfair and more than one needs to do as opportunities to show a bit of the boundless charity and graciousness of the One to whom we journey in pursuit of the otherness of holiness.