Earlier in this service we included a form of the Prayers of Penitence which is different from what we have normally. Usually, very near the beginning of our worship we hear the 'Summary of the Law'. When asked to define the greatest commandment, Jesus responds: 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart ... soul, and ... mind.' He then adds that a second commandment is like it: 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.' Jesus concludes: 'On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.' (Matt. 22:34-40) This twofold love of God and neighbour is what God longs to see in us; it is what God in his love created us for, and it is the way of living that God in his sovereign authority commands us to follow. After we hear these words, we reflect on our failure to love God and neighbour as we should, we confess ours sins, and the priest declares that God forgives us and opens up for us a new start. It's an important part of our worship every Sunday.
But today, because our Old Testament reading was the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17), instead of the Summary of the Law, Helen read to us at least part of each of the commandments, followed by related words, usually from the New Testament. For example: 'You shall not commit adultery' (the seventh commandment), followed by 'Know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit' (from the New Testament). And ten times we responded: 'Amen. Lord have mercy.'
We don't often hear the Ten Commandments in an Anglican church nowadays. It used to be the norm to hear them in full at every service of Holy Communion, but for some time they have been replaced nearly everywhere by the Summary of the Law. That's understandable, but there is also some loss in it. When he summarizes the law, Jesus isn't encouraging us to forget about all the other biblical laws, among which the Ten Commandments had a unique status. He's speaking to people who know all the laws very well, but can get lost in the details, failing to see the wood for the trees. He tells them that the underlying point of the law is to steer us towards love of God and neighbour. It's important that we grasp that big picture.
But equally, if we only ever hear 'Love God, love neighbour', that can be a bit vague. What does it actually look like, in a human life, to love God and love neighbour? Well, we can above all point to the life of the Lord Jesus himself and say: 'It looks like that; it looks like him.' But we can also point to the Ten Commandments. So let's reflect on them a bit this morning.
First, the question: Where in the long story of the people of Israel do the Ten Commandments come? You might think God would get these in right at the start: 'OK everyone, God here. Listen carefully. If you are to be my people, let's be clear about a few things from day one. Here's what you're to do, and here's what you're not to do. If you follow the rules you might just be alright.' But the Ten Commandments don't come at the start of this people's story, and God doesn't talk to them like that. Before God gives the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai a lot else has happened first: God has heard the groaning of the people in slavery in Egypt, God knows their sufferings, and in compassion God has come down to them and called them to liberty, has set them free (Ex. 3:7-9; 6:5-7). And when we come at last to the giving of the Ten Commandments after various episodes in the wilderness, God reminds them of this. Before the first of the Commandments, God says: 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery' (20:2). Before Israel hears the demands of the Ten Commandments, it must first hear who God is and what God has done. God has already redeemed his people from slavery, has saved them from a living death, and is leading them to a promised land, before ever God tells them how they are called to live.
Just as the people of Israel had to get things that way round in their hearts and minds, so must we. God says: 'What I am for you, and what I have done for you, comes before what I ask of you, what I call you to do and to become.'
The Christian life is very demanding. It makes high demands of us, ultimately to become like Jesus himself, perfect in love of God and neighbour (Matt. 5.48). We fail, every day. And we do not have the option of watering down the demands of the Christan life, because they come from God, and they are the way to true freedom, true fulfilment. But what we must do is to learn to hear within the demands of the Christian life the voice of God who says to us: 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.' This makes all the difference. To follow God's commandments is to walk in the ways of freedom, the ways of justice and right relationships, into which God, in his grace, has led us.
If we can listen in this way to the Ten Commandments, the two great commandments to love God and neighbour, and all the other demands of the Christian life, we will not hear them as a forbidding catalogue of tests that we will fail, or even (far worse) as a source of opportunities to think we are a lot better than most other people. Instead, we will hear God's laws with gratitude, and even a sense of anticipation of what, by God's grace, we can become (1 Jn 3:1-3). We will hear God's law knowing we are failures, but knowing that's not the end of us, because in Christ God has embraced and forgiven us and brought us to new life; we will hear God's law with no desire to compare ourselves (favourably or unfavourably) with anyone else, because the God who knows the truth about us like nobody else does also loves and accepts us as we are and leads us on. If we can hear God's law like that, we can even start to say from our hearts, as in one of the Psalms (119:97, 32): 'Lord, how I love your law!' and 'I will run in the way of your commandments.'
I've used up most of my time and we haven't even reached the first commandment! We could think about each of them for a very long time and reflect on how they apply to us today. (Helen's doing that next week: bring a packed lunch to church.) But in the time available this morning, I've tried to suggest how we listen to them as a whole. Drawing on clues within the Ten Commandments and in the words of Jesus, we see that before starting to consider what we have to do, we first remember who God is and what God has done for us; and then as we hear these commands we keep in mind that they are all ultimately about loving God and one another. So the Ten Commandments fill out the command to love God, reminding us that only God is God; that God, who made us in his image, defines who he is – it's not for us to define who God is, making him in our image. The commandments call us to honour God, giving God time and space in our lives. And they fill out the command to love our neighbour, starting with our parents, and warning us of fundamental ways that human relationships go wrong, through violence, infidelity, greed, dishonesty. It would be a good Lenten exercise to take time, Sabbath-time, to reflect on the Ten Commandments, maybe in the form we heard them in today's liturgy, looking honestly at our lives and asking God to show us where we need grace to grow, to become more like the people God made us to be.
That's an exercise that it would be good for each of us to carry out as individuals, but finally we should remember that the Ten Commandments come to a people, and they speak to us as a community, a church. Our relationship with God is totally bound up with our relationship with our neighbour. If the vertical and horizontal dimensions of Christian faith drift apart, each becomes unreal without the other. It has been said that in the laws of the Old Testament God was founding a 'kingdom of right relationships' (John V. Taylor, Enough is Enough). Through Jesus Christ, God has brought us into this kingdom, and God calls us to live together in it as his beloved children, learning how to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and to love our neighbour as ourself.
David Marshall