Today we read one of the first of the “clobber verses” in the discussion around homosexuality and the bible.  These clobber verses have been used to attack and bloody the LGBTQ community throughout history.  God did not give us His Word to be used as a club against others and must be deeply disappointed in those who do.

This section on “unlawful sexual relations” is an interesting one for a number of reasons.  It begins with a summary – don’t have sex with a close relation.  Speaking only to the men in it’s patriarchal society, the point seems to be holiness, separation from the society around them in terms of sexual behavior.  It goes on to list the people one must avoid sexually, including moms, daughters, aunts, granddaughters, and others.  Then a similar theme comes, sexual relations during a woman’s period.  Since blood was unclean, this makes sense.

Suddenly, it forbids child sacrifice.  This seems almost a non-sequiter.  But then a forbidding of homosexual activity and bestiality finish off the section.  One final statement of the purpose of these prohibitions – to remain separate from the nations around you – ends the chapter.

None of these prohibitions have been either allowed or ignored since this was written.  We still forbid close sexual relations, child sacrifice, and bestiality.  So the “Old Testament is irrelevant” argument doesn’t apply here, though it may elsewhere.  Yet we seem to have ignored the most important part of this whole chapter: holiness.  We really don’t put much import at all on being noticeably different from the nations around us.  In fact, many tout the value of being like the people at our work, school, or neighborhood in terms of evangelism.

Is it ok for us to proclaim the importance of holding to these individual laws while virtually ignoring the whole point of those laws?  Is it appropriate for us to blend in to the society around us, or should we still be attempting to be noticeably different or separate – in a word, holy – from the people around us?  Is it more important to be accepted by our schoolmates or workmates, or to stand out as a Christian?

It is interesting to read the Scapegoat and the Trial of Jesus in the same day.  At Jesus’ baptism, John tells us in his gospel that John the Baptist prophetically pointed to Jesus with the words, “behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”  There are many lambs that John the Baptist could have been referring to.  It could have been the lamb of the sin offering we’ve been reading about.  It could have been the lamb of the Passover, whose blood decorated the frame of the door as a sign for the angel of death to pass over the house.

But the phrase, “takes away” leads us toward this idea of the scapegoat.  The scapegoat was, well, a goat (yes, not a lamb but still) that took the sins of the people upon itself and then took them away into the wilderness.  It is from this practice of the People of God that we get our modern idea of a scapegoat, a person to take the blame for something we’ve done wrong.

But unlike the scapegoat of the Old Testament, Jesus was not chosen by lot but was chosen by God, His own Heavenly Father.  To choose ones own son to diminish so as to become human and then to suffer and die at our hands is an agony we cannot imagine.  We see hints of Jesus’ own agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, but for God the Father, who’s emotions we cannot begin to comprehend, it is simply too much.  He has to look away.

Every one of us is broken in some way.  The sin to which we are exposed mars our spirits in ways we cannot comprehend, and so we come to Jesus in worship, in prayer, and in relationship as broken people.  And still He loves us.  In fact, He loves us so much that he is willing to take our brokenness upon Himself and then take it to the ultimate wilderness, death itself.  But the Good News is that unlike the scapegoat, He came back.  More on that later this week.