Canter Bridge

The attempt to codify the Levitical prescriptions according to some logical scheme usually founders on the very arbitrariness of the distinctions enshrined in these complex directives.

When ‘distinguishing’—the word recurs—between clean and unclean, the priests appear to be training Israel in the art of obeying inscrutable instructions delivered to them by the enigmatic deity whom the Psalms would refer to as ‘the One of Sinai’.

It is a most un-modern concept, indeed one that rubs raw the sensitivities of all post-Enlightenment awareness, not least that of Descartes whose radical positioning of the thinking, reasoning, sensing self at the center of reality lives on in a million imitations.

What is one to do with such uncompromising religion? How is one to respect oneself when reasons for the daily practice to which one remains committed so often remain shrouded in that darkness that is the divine will?

Consider Aaron’s sons.

Their fatal religious error was derivative. They did not invent a new religion, a novel conception of the divine persona. Far from it.

Noticing the potency in the divine presence, indeed the power of worship, they took matters into their own hands. The text, taciturn when it comes to spiritual realia, tells us only that they offered ‘strange’ fire before the Lord.

With vivid poetic justice, a fire comes out from the Lord to consume them.

How thoroughly non-Western this recognition of divine power in such a spiritual encounter. The text seems not flirt with reductionism such as might employ a metaphorized sociological analysis of rebellion against Mosaic/Aaronide authority. Rather, there appears the candid observation of power reacting against the human reflex for taking control of spiritual force with self-interested motives, the kind of frankness that characterizes most of today’s humanity when they speak or think about spiritual realities.

The biblical text would erase our distinction between arbitrary and real. If one accepts the invitation to enter the conceptual world of the Bible, the penultimate role of critical analysis becomes a given, a subjugation of the human soul that the Western mind finds grotesque. Those things that are most fundamental to created reality, we are invited to consider, remain arbitrary at the interface with human encounter.

Fire is to be offered in this way, not in that. Such proscription being violated, divine fire becomes not a tool in the hands of innovators but a consuming flame that snuffs out those who opt for the easier path of command and control.