The Meaning of Holiness

 

This week is Holy Week – the week in the Christian Kalendar (liturgical calendar) that begins with Palm Sunday, ends with Holy Saturday, the eve of Easter, and includes Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  Each of these days is a remembrance of important events that took place in the week immediately prior to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the event remembered on Easter itself.     The account of the events of this week and of the Resurrection itself occupy about a third of each of the Synoptic Gospels and just under a half of the Gospel according to St. John.   The Death and Burial of Christ, along with His Resurrection are the events proclaimed in the Christian Gospel (1 Cor. 15:3-4).   That it commemorates the most important events in Christian salvation history, the events at the heart of the Christian kerygma, explains why this week is Holy Week.  In this essay we will be considering the what rather than the why.   What does it mean to say that a week – or anything else for that matter – is holy?

 

Probably the most common mistake made about holiness – the condition of being holy – today is to regard it as being the same thing as purity.   It is a subtle mistake since holiness and purity are very much related.   The concept of separation or apartness is essential to both.   (1)     Purity, however, is a separation in which the from is emphasized.   Water is pure, when it is has been separated from all contaminants or, as we are more likely to think of it, when all contaminants have been separated from it, by a filter, for example.   Holiness, by contrast, is a separation that emphasized that for which something has been set apart.   Something is made holy by being set aside for God.    While holiness implies and includes the kind of separation involved in purity – you cannot separate something unto God without separating it from something else – the reverse is not the case, you can separate something from something else without separating it unto God or anything else.    That having been said, holiness, properly understood, does not have the same implications about that from which the holy has been separated as purity does.   When something is consecrated – made holy by being set aside for God – this suggests that everything that has not been consecrated, everything from which the holy has been set apart, is ordinary, everyday, common and mundane, but not necessarily that it is in some way bad.

 

The Fourth Commandment (2) illustrates this point:

 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.   Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.  (Exodus 20:8-11)

 

The commandment is to keep the Sabbath holy.   The rest of the passage is the explanation of the commandment.     It would be absurd to read into this that the labour in which the Israelites were engaged during the rest of the week was bad or sinful.   That is obviously not what we are supposed to take away from this.   Rather, the point of it all is that for this day to be reserved for God, it had to be kept apart from the usage of ordinary weekdays, and hence from their labour, good and necessary as that may happen to be.  

 

The word “reserved” is an especially good one for explaining the meaning of holiness.   We all understand the concept of a restaurant table or a hotel room or a cabin at a ski resort being “reserved”.   This is what happens when the restaurant, hotel, or resort takes the table, room or cabin out of general availability and reserves its use for a specific party.   If you think of God as having made a reservation for one day out of the seven (the Sabbath), one nation out of the nations of the world (Israel), one tribe of priests out of that nation (the Levites), one building and its furnishings (the Tabernacle/Temple) so that they are no longer generally available but are set aside for His Own use this will give you a pretty good grasp of the notion of holiness as it applies to people, places, and things other than God Himself.        

 

The holiness of God Himself, it needs to be noted, cannot be explained this way.   Try it and you will see just how strange it sounds.   Earthly holiness, however, is the illustration God has given us of His Own holiness.    The better we understand earthly holiness – how the Sabbath, Tabernacle, etc. were holy – the better a picture we will have of God’s holiness, provided that we remember that as an illustration of God’s Own holiness, earthly holiness is rather like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave and that analogies can only go so far in what they say about God before they become mostly apophatic, that is, telling us what God is not like rather than what He is like.    When used of God Himself, holiness speaks of His supreme transcendence over all Creation that makes all earthly holiness seem ordinary and common by comparison.   A glimpse of it, such as that which the prophet Isaiah caught in his vision of the divine throne room and the seraphim singing the Sanctus, invites the prophet’s response: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seek the King, the LORD of hosts” (Is. 6:5).

 

In the Old Testament, the Ceremonial Law – the dietary restrictions separating “clean” from “unclean” animals, the designating of the weekly Sabbath and certain annual Feasts as holy days, the establishment of the Tabernacle/Temple, priesthood, and sacrificial system and the elaborate instructions for consecrating everything involved in these – well illustrates the earthly holiness, the setting of times and places and people and things aside and reserving them for God, that is itself an illustration of God’s transcendent holiness.    In the events that we remember in Holy Week, Jesus Christ fulfilled the Old Testament promises that God would establish a New Covenant that would be superior to the Mosaic Covenant of which the Ceremonial Law was a part.    In the Book of Acts and the epistles of St. Paul, the New Testament makes it quite clear that the Ceremonial Law of the Mosaic Code is not binding upon the Church established under the New Covenant.   The reason for this is also made clear – in the Church, believers in Jesus Christ whether they be Jew or Gentile, are united in one body and so that which had kept them apart is removed.

 

This does not mean that holiness is any less important under the New Covenant than under the Old.   The New Testament frequently speaks of holiness, most often in reference to God, with the vast majority of these references being mentions of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, i.e., the Holy Spirit.  The Scriptures, prophets, city Jerusalem, Temple, Sinaitic Covenant, and angels are all called holy.   There are also uses of the term that are distinct to the New Testament.    It is applied to both individual Christians and to Churches.  In the salutation at the beginning of almost all of his epistles, St. Paul addresses the members of the Churches to which he is writing as “holy ones”, or, as the Authorized Bible renders this expression, “saints”.  (3)    The Church is called a “holy temple”, a “holy priesthood” and a “holy nation” (4) and the root of her very name in the original Greek New Testament has connotations similar to those of the words meaning holy. (5)

 

In reference to Christian believers and Churches, holiness can either be something attributed to us on account of what Jesus Christ accomplished for us by His Death (Heb. 10:14) or it can be something to which we are called to strive (Heb. 12:14, 1 Pet 1:15-16).   Clearly there is a difference between these two kinds of holiness and the difference is comparable to that between two different kinds of righteousness that the New Testament also speaks about, that which St. Paul discusses at length in his epistle to the Romans as being credited to the believer on the basis of grace (Rom. 4) and that which St. James attributes to the believer’s works (Jas. 2:14-26).   It should not be assumed that because of this parallel usage in the New Testament holiness has become merely another word for righteousness.   Holiness retains its primary meaning from the Old Testament of being reserved or set apart for God.  By His Sacrifice on the Cross, Jesus Christ has reserved us who believe in Him, individually and as the spiritual society that is His Church, for Himself.   By the same Sacrifice He has taken away our sins and given to us the righteousness whereby we are accepted by God.    Although accomplished by the same Saviour in the same Sacrifice these are two different things and our understanding and appreciation of what our Saviour has done for us is diminished if we blur them into one.   Similarly, when St. Peter calls us to be “holy in all manner of conversation (6)” (1 Petr 1:15) the holiness of which he writes must be distinguished from what is often called practical righteousness.   Since both pertain to everyday behaviour it might be harder to conceptualize the difference here, but think of practical righteousness and practical holiness as two different aspects of the behaviour to which the Christian is called.   Practical righteousness is the aspect defined by it being right rather than wrong.   Holiness, however, is the aspect that sets it apart from the behaviour of the world.  The opposite of the holiness to which the Christian is called is worldliness.   Worldliness is the condition of being of the world.   “The world” in this sense of the word means neither “God’s Creation” nor “human civilization” but rather the evil that operates in these and which forms, along with the flesh in the sense of the evil in fallen human nature and the devil the triumvirate of the Christian’s spiritual enemies.   It consists, St. John tells us, of “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16).   Worldliness is conformity to these things, holiness is being set apart unto God from them.  

 

That the New Testament does not provide the Church with a lengthy and elaborate set of rules about consecrating places and times to replace the Ceremonial Law of the Old Testament does not mean that reserving these things for God is any less important under the New Covenant than the Old.   The Old Covenant operated on the principle of Law.   The New Covenant, the Covenant of the Gospel, operates on the principles of Grace and Liberty.   The Christian’s liberty, St. Paul tells us in several places, is not to be used as a license to sin and the Christian living out his liberty under the Gospel should, actually, manifest a higher level of righteousness than that attainable under the Law.   Since, as we have seen, holiness is no less important under the New Testament than the Old, what is true of righteousness is true of holiness as well.   Those who take Christian liberty to mean that the Church, no longer under the Ceremonial Law that separated Israel from the Gentile nations, ought not to consecrate the spaces and places in which she meets to God, or to reserve the day of Resurrection for God each week as the Lord’s Day, or to set Holy Feasts and Fasts in commemoration of the events of the Gospel such as those remembered this week have twisted the matter entirely beyond recognition.   Christian liberty means that the Church is free to do precisely this and since her appreciation of and capacity for holiness ought to be greater under the Covenant of Christian liberty than what was available under the Law and we should expect more places, people, and days to be reserved for God under the Gospel than under the Law rather than fewer and have no business sneering at the holy days celebrated in Christian liberty in remembrance of the Gospel as “man-made” or “pagan”.

 

   (1)   The primary words used for “holy” in the Hebrew Old Testament – קָדוֹשׁ (qadosh), Greek New Testament -  ἅγιος  (hagios), and in the Latin liturgy – sanctus, all belong to word families  that stress the ideas of  “separate”, “set apart” or even “cut”, as do the primary English synonyms for “holy” – “sacred” and the archaic “hallowed”   Oddly enough, this is not the case with the word “holy” and its German cognate heilig.   These belong to a family of words including “health” and “whole” which would seem to have almost the opposite flavor, that of completeness rather than separation.

   (2)   This is the Fourth Commandment by the Jewish, Reformed, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox systems of numbering the Commandments.   The Roman Catholics and Lutherans number it as the Third Commandment.

   (3)   Obviously this does not apply to the epistles addressed to individuals rather than Churches.   Interestingly though, in his epistle to Philemon he twice uses the same term to refer to the Christians in the Colossian Church to which Philemon belonged.   In his first epistle to the Thessalonians he uses a similar expression “holy brethren”, albeit at the end of the epistle when he gives instructions for its reading (5:27).   In Hebrews there is no formal salutation at the beginning of the epistles, but he calls those to whom he is writing “holy brethren” in one spot (3:1), and instructs his readers to “salute…all the saints” at the end (13:24).    This leaves the Galatians as the notable exception to the rule.

   (4)   St. Paul twice speaks about a “temple of God” in 1 Corinthians.   The second time, the nineteenth verse of the sixth chapter, would seem from the context to be talking about the literal, physical, bodies of the Corinthian believers.   The first time, however, in the third chapter verses 16-17, which begin with “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God”, the wording suggests that they are collectively the temple of God, meaning that the Corinthian Church is in view, which makes sense considering that schism is the topic that is being addressed in this earlier section of the epistle.   The references to the Church as a “holy priesthood” and “holy nation” come from 1 Peter, verses 2:5 and 2:9 respectively.   St. Peter is addressing the same mostly Jewish Christians in what we now call Turkey to whom St. Paul wrote the epistle of Hebrews and in these verses he makes his point by employing the Old Testament’s language regarding Israel.

   (5)    Ἐκκλησία when used in non-religious contexts would usually be translated “assembly”.   The legislative assembly of Athens, for example, was called by this word.   It was formed by adding the preposition meaning “out of” in both Greek and Latin to the verb καλέω which means exactly what it sounds like as it shares a common ancestor with its English equivalent “I call”.    The “assembly” is formed of those who are “called out” (cf. Rev. 5:9-10).       

   (6)   “Conversation” in the English of the Authorized Bible does not mean what it means in present day usage.   We use it to mean talking to each other.   In 1611 it meant conduct or behaviour as carried out in society, in the company of others.