Holiness and Mission. Morna D. Hooker

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СКАЧАТЬ – they alone – and they were concerned to keep their community pure. Later still, the members of the Dead Sea community at Qumran seem to have had a similar understanding of the meaning of holiness, since they endeavoured to keep themselves separate from anyone who was unholy.3 This was how the Pharisees – the name means ‘the separated ones’ – understood holiness, and how Paul had understood it before he became a Christian.4 One can depict this response diagramatically, by means of a straight line joining two dots. God has called us, his people, to be holy, but God’s grace apparently stops here, with us, the lucky recipients. The relationship between God and his people is seen as an exclusive one.

The alternative approach understood God’s purpose in choosing the Jews as extending beyond Israel to the other nations. Certainly God had separated them from other nations – but it was for a purpose, and this purpose, paradoxically, involved the other nations. This time, the relationship is triangular, involving God, Israel and the Gentiles, so our diagram now must be of a triangle instead of a straight line. It is adumbrated already in the call of Abraham, who is chosen by God to be the ancestor of a great nation. Nevertheless, God’s covenant with him includes the promise that he will be the source of blessing to all the nations of the earth.5

But it is the prophets who spell out the implications of what it meant to be God’s holy people – in particular the prophet who wrote some of the later chapters of Isaiah. He understood God’s call of Israel to be his people as a call to reveal him to the other nations. The basis of his understanding of Israel’s role was his conviction that Yahweh, the God of Israel, was the only true God, and the gods worshipped by other nations did not in fact exist. If this God – the Holy One of Israel6 – was the God of all the earth and all its peoples, should not they, too, be taught about him, and should they not worship and serve him? Israel’s task was to be a witness to God’s power and love – to be ‘a light to the nations’ (Isaiah 42.6) – since God’s purpose was that his salvation should ‘reach to the end of the earth’ (Isaiah 49.6). Even earlier, another prophet had prophesied that the day would come when all the nations would flock to Jerusalem to worship God and learn his ways.7 This idea was picked up by yet another prophet, who declared that on that day,

      the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,

      to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,

      and to be his servants . . .

      these I will bring to my holy mountain,

      and make them joyful in my house of prayer . . .

      for my house shall be called a house of prayer

      for all peoples.

      (Isaiah 56.6–7)

The prophet who spoke these words believed that God had chosen Israel as his people, and that her role was to reveal his glory to other nations.8

      In what sense, then, is Israel a light to the nations? What form does her mission take? Another prophet who shared this vision of Israel’s call wrote the book of Jonah, a story that symbolizes Israel’s mission to other nations – and her reluctance to undertake the task given her. The prophet Jonah, after initially refusing God’s commission, and taking flight, is depicted as finally obeying God’s summons to go to Nineveh, where he proclaims the message entrusted to him – a message of coming judgement. When his words are effective, the people of Nineveh are – to Jonah’s great annoyance – saved.

      Usually, however, the witness seems to be in deed rather than word. Isaiah 42 speaks of God’s Servant, who is probably to be identified with Israel, but if not, then the Servant is certainly the representative of Israel. The prophet describes how God’s Servant will establish justice on the earth. God has called him and given him

      . . . as a covenant to the people,

      a light to the nations,

      to open the eyes that are blind,

      to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,

      from the prison those who sit in darkness.

      (Isaiah 42.6–7)

      On Sinai, God had called Israel to be his people and made a covenant with her. Now, Israel is herself a covenant – the means of binding together God and the nations of the world. Israel herself had been brought out of darkness and slavery in Egypt, and her task now is to assist in doing for others what has been done for her: to open blind eyes, release prisoners, and establish justice on the earth. In other words, Israel is called to act as God’s representative on earth. This will become a key element in the biblical understanding of God’s call.

God’s command to his people to ‘be holy as I am holy’ is a command to be like God, to represent who and what he is to the world. He is a loving God, just but merciful, who brings salvation and healing, and the nation’s task is to be and to do the same. This vision is a long way from the nationalism that we find in some books of the Old Testament, which arises when the command to be holy is interpreted as a command to keep aloof – the interpretation of the relationship between God and his people which we have suggested could be represented by a straight line between two fixed points. What the prophets were insisting was that God’s grace did not stop with Israel, but extended to the whole human race. Israel’s task was to reflect that grace: this is what it meant to act as God’s representatives on earth. This task had, according to the story in Genesis 1, originally been entrusted to Adam in the Garden of Eden, and at that time, according to Jewish legend, Adam – created in the image of God – reflected God’s glory.9 No wonder, then, that God’s command to his people was to ‘be holy as I am holy’ – in other words, to be like him. Israel was called to be what Adam had failed to be. The nation’s commission was to reveal God to his world – to be a light to the Gentiles, and so bring them to worship him.

      What kind of God?

So what is God like? What kind of a God was Israel worshipping? According to Richard Dawkins, Israel’s God was an extremely nasty piece of work – cruel, unjust, unmerciful, and unreasonable in his demands.10 It is not a picture that I recognize. To be sure, there are passages – as we have already seen – which depict God as a triumphant war-lord, demanding the death of his enemies. They were written by men who understood the demand for holiness to mean the radical rooting out of anything that was not ‘holy’, as they understood that term. But if we turn to the scene in Exodus where God establishes his covenant with Israel, we find a very different picture. God reveals himself to Moses there as

      a God merciful and gracious,

      slow to anger,

      and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,

      keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,

      forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

      (Exodus 34.6–7, NRSV)

      What God demanded of Israel must reflect this. Not surprisingly, then, we find Micah declaring:

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