Lent III 2009 (Year B)

I was thinking what a person would make of the “The Ten Commandments” if you saw it on a cover in a bookstore, and knew absolutely nothing about the Bible. You’d probably guess that a book with that title was one of those self-help advice books that promises to turn your life around, like “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” or “The Eight Laws of Spiritual Growth”. These ten commandments would provide the basis for living a decent life - setting some boundaries - staying out of trouble while you find your way towards fulfilment.

If you opened the book and looked at the table of contents, it would likely confirm that view. There are the prohibitions at the end of the list, which make sense to just about anyone: no murder, theft, adultery, false witness. No coveting - maybe harder to explain in a modern context but it still makes sense: coveting is about wanting to take what someone else has and make it your own, and that always leads to unhappiness whether you succeed or not. Then there are the two positive instructions at #5 and #4 on the list, and they look pretty sound too: honouring your parents means respecting your own roots, but also recognizing how we grow up into a web of mutual obligation that has existed since before we were even born. And keeping the sabbath - making space for rest, leisure, and quiet - the importance of that needs no explanation in the world we live in.

The first three commandments would take some extra decoding for a modern secular reader, but I think you could still do it. Taking the name of God in vain isn’t just about swearing, (though that’s just as corrosive a habit for people who aren’t religious as for those who are) - it’s also a kind of failure to take responsibility. Blaming the great Mystery when life doesn’t work out the way we want it to - that’s really opting out of our own sense of purpose. And being too casual about our ‘Higher Power’ eventually leads us to the point where we take nothing seriously. You could make a similar argument about not making idols and not having more than one god. Our spiritual centre can’t be divided, nor can it be compromised by being too closely identified with something physical.

So you could probably write and sell a book called “The Ten Commandments” which would be a popular best-seller and would convince thousands of people that this was a great way to live their lives, without ever mentioning the words Exodus, Bible, or Israel. Do you think a book like that would be missing any of the true meaning of the command-ments? Perhaps not - for Christians, the commandments have often been treated as abstract moral principles, to be followed simply because they are right. That’s why we don’t mind summarizing or restating them, as we often do in our service-books by replacing them with Jesus’ “two great commandments” about loving God and loving our neighbour.

But if there’s something missing from this picture, it would have to be the story of the Bible, in which the ten commandments are embedded. They weren’t written in the skies at the beginning of creation: they were written on stone tablets while the people of Israel camped at Mount Sinai. They weren’t timeless good advice: they formed part of a covenant, a responsibility solemnly chosen and undertaken by God’s people when it was offered to them. And that also means they weren’t impersonal and abstract: they were a way of expressing a relationship with a very personal God, who had and still has a name and an identity far more specific than our modern pluralist world is comfortable with.

From that point of view, these commandments look very different. They’re not guides for us to follow if we’re smart enough to figure out that they‘re actually good for us. Nor are they “God’s laws” boomed down arbitrarily from on high whether we like them or not. They take on more the nature of a commitment or a promise. God has invited us to live in a particular way in order to be a sign to our world of what human life with God can really look like. And we’ve agreed to do that! So a violation of these parameters isn’t so much a mistake, or a crime, as it is a failure - failing God, failing ourselves, failing the relationship with God that we’ve made a commitment to.

This perspective on the commandments as a covenant is not without its risks. Perhaps the biggest risk is the one embodied in the other story we heard today, the gospel story of Jesus making a whip and driving people out of the temple. It’s a hard-hitting story and it’s relevance is hard to escape. It describes a community of religious people who have re-told and re-shaped the story of their relationship with God, to the point where it becomes simply a justification or a rationalization for the way they have chosen to live their life. As a result, the image of what life with God is supposed to look like is turned upside down: worship of God is profaned, and neighbour-love replaced by the profit motive. As a more recent poet put it: “Thou shalt have one God only, who / Would be at the expense of two?… Thou shalt not covet, but tradition / Approves all forms of competition.”

That story is just as much about as us as the Mount Sinai one is. Everyone rationalizes their behaviour, but religious people have an especially troubling habit of trying to co-opt God into their rationalizations. That’s true whether we describe our life as a church or as individuals. It’s one more reason why we need this season of Lent, to remember that it’s time for God to speak and for us to listen. Listening means listening to Jesus poke holes in our cover story. Listening to the real truth about how our relationship with God is supposed to be, and how badly we’ve distorted it. Listening to God’s anger with us - and not rushing to the conclusion “Oh well, but God really loves us so it’s going to be OK,” which is just one more rationalization. When we really love God, and know that God really loves us, that should make our failure and God’s anger harder to bear, not easier.

The kernel of truth in that one last justification is that God really does love us - not more, and not less, than every other single human being to whom God is reaching out, and for whom Christ died. And that means that we still represent to people around us what life with God looks like - not because we’re any more successful than anyone else at following the rules, but because we try, and we fail, and we fool ourselves, and we look like hypocrites, and God’s love is still there. That’s the amazing truth of the good news of God in Jesus, and that’s the only thing that can really move us to clean up our act.

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