Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
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But if the Ten Commandments are not primarily a guide to personal behavior—and I emphasize the word ‘primarily’—then what is their point? Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann offers one possibility. In a podcast posted[i] earlier this past week online and titled “Strategies for Staying Emancipated” Professor Brueggemann connects the Ten Commandments to the liberation of the Hebrews from generations of slavery in Egypt. God gives the commandments to the Hebrew people through Moses towards the end of their years of wandering in the wilderness after leaving Egypt and they mark the covenant and the beginning their life as a self-defining community. If I may quote:
“… the Ten Commandments are strategies for staying emancipated once you get away from Pharaoh. This new strategy, first of all, says you have to honor God—that’s the first three commandments—to the exclusion of every idol, every “ism” such as racism, or sexism, or nationalism, or the worship of stuff that is rare or precious or attractive or beautiful or empowering.
“The new strategy means in the Ten Commandments to take the neighbor with utmost seriousness. So, the last five commandments are all about the neighbor and treating neighbors with legitimacy and dignity and viability and especially disadvantaged neighbors--not to violate the neighbor for the sake of greed.
“And between these two commandments of honoring God and taking the neighbor seriously, at the center of the Ten Commandments, is Sabbath day. Keep Sabbath: take a break from the rat race of busyness and exhaustion and do not let Pharaoh define your life.”
In short, for Brueggemann the Ten Commandments are a survival plan for a recently liberated people. And long before serving for an individual’s examination of conscience, they are a social and communal document, a clarion call away from a mentality of enslavement toward survival and flourishing as a people, as a nation, as a human family, as God's children.
We could easily spend hours—or a lifetime—examining the way this plays out concretely in our shared existence. The demand to have no other God, no idol, but solely the God who liberates is a reminder that we are tempted to seek our security in what will never make for safety or for human thriving in the long run. As Brueggemann says, we are tempted to all sorts of isms. But only in understanding ourselves as journeying under the hand and eye of a liberating God will we find the security we yearn for. And by “we” I mean everyone. And the demand to treat our neighbor with integrity, to honor and preserve life and that which makes life sustainable, the demand to honor relationships and commitments, and the demand to not be enslaved by our desires are the very stuff that makes a healthy human society possible. As is the establishment of Sabbath rest that is not so much about worship as it is about refusing to be enslaved to the ethic of Pharaoh who demanded work 24/7 of his Hebrew conscripts.
All three elements, all three kinds of commandments, are necessary if this is to work. We need to be rooted and grounded in a liberating and loving God, in a transcendent vision and reality, if we're not to ignore our responsibilities to our neighbors and to ourselves. And to do this, we need time—Sabbath time—time to step back and see how this working out, time to catch our breath, and remembering that everyone else is a free person deserving of that same rest. Again, to quote Brueggemann: “These commands might be taken not as a series of rules, but as a proclamation in God's own mouth of who God is and how God shall be ‘practiced’ by this community of liberated slaves."[ii] And we are all liberated slaves.
Yet another commentator notes that these very terse, very pointed commandments, these directives, need to be fleshed out. They're more like social policy statements than detailed action plans. Our task as human beings and as people of faith is to determine how we apply them to form societies or cultures where people can grow and flourish and where we can shape our own life within that container. There is a long history of case law or casuistry based on the Commandments. You have only to skim the next few chapters of Exodus to see example after example. And if we are awake, we are faced with its challenges daily. How do we apply the commandments in our own day? What, for example, does bearing false witness mean in a society such as ours where “truthiness” has become a substitute for truth and where fake news inundates us. What does stealing or killing or adultery mean in a society and a world where people are denied dignity, and the material means to live a dignified life, and respect for the integrity of commitments and relationships which are its foundation? And just what is coveting anyway? It has taken me a few decades to wrap my mind around that. I now understand it not as simply being attracted to someone or something but becoming fixated on it and obsessed by it, wanting it so bad that you’re willing to do almost anything to obtain it. Our commandment doesn’t resolve this dynamic for us, of course, but it may serve to warn us: “Watch out! You’re on shaky ground. This is not the path that leads to life, but to death.” And not only us but our culture with its emphasis on having, using, possessing no matter what the cost and no matter what the consequences. And just so with all the commandments.
We began this morning's Eucharist with a penitential order where we heard what is often called the Summary of the Law. They are the words of Jesus as reported in Saint Mark’s gospel, though they are not original with him: “The first commandment is this: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” How true it is that in the end all the commandments, all the advice, all the ethical guidelines, all the rules and goodwill come down to this: You shall love. You shall love God. You shall love your neighbor. As the rabbis would say, the rest is commentary and application.
And our work is cut out for us.
Amen.
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