Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity 2023

 

Lectionary readings: Exodus 20.1–20 and Philippians 3.4–14 and Matthew 21.33–46

I wonder what comes to mind when you hear mention of the Ten Commandments? Perhaps you’ve known them used as a blunt weapon for exercising control, wielded by Catholic nuns in schools or American Evangelicals in the public square? Perhaps they give rise to unwelcome feelings of inadequacy or failure, a sense of shame? Perhaps you believe them to be obsolete, a fossil record from another age? Is it even conceivable that they might be words of life?

There’s a God whose story is told in the Bible, whose name is Yahweh, which means ‘I call into being.’ We first meet this God in the first verse of the first book of the Bible, when they ‘call into being’ ‘the heavens and the earth,’ fashioning worlds of Sky and Earth and Sea. In response, all life unfolds, watched over by appointed guardians, until it fills every vast open space and tiny nook and cranny, complete with catastrophe and failure, mutation, and imaginative leaps along the way. Dinosaurs and dung beetles, pygmy shrews and kangaroos, penguins and pandas, crocodiles and condors, humpbacked whales, and woolly mammoths. This company loving God calls into being angelic beings [gods] and human beings and invites all creation to participate in the miracle of life. But not everything, not everyone, does so choose, at least not consistently.

After many adventures, with many friends, this God appears to Moses. Moses is a trauma survivor trying to rebuild a life, complete with catastrophe and imaginative leaps along the way. Yahweh convinces him to join forces and return to Egypt, to his beginnings, to liberate Moses’ people from the pantheon of Egyptian gods to whom they lived in bondage. And having mounted a successful operation to free them, this God introduces himself to the people. ‘I am Yahweh, the one who calls you into being.’

Whenever God speaks, it is to call something into being, to shape the world in a particular way, so that life can flourish. The ‘Ten Words,’ or Commandments, are words of life, continually calling a people—the people of [this] God—into being. They underwrite a moral universe and are also permissive invitations to respond, complete with those catastrophes and imaginative leaps along the way, already noted above.

The first word establishes an enduring freedom from the fear of a return to debt bondage. [This is the most common form of slavery in the world today, experienced by over 8 million people.] Yahweh, who has rescued this people in the immediate past, proclaims that the day will not come to pass when some other god will recapture them. Literally, Yahweh—who is eternal—will not live to see it. Even when Yahweh does later hand the people over to other gods, as the consequence of their unfaithfulness, terms are clearly stated and upheld—a seventy-year-long exile. If we were to trust this first word, if we were to seek to be shaped by it, we would reject the path of seeking to control others, would reject manipulation as a legitimate use of whatever power we have in the world. We might find ourselves on such a trajectory, but we would turn around, turn back. Even if we did not, life, as God has decreed it, would turn us back, eventually.

The second word establishes steadfast love as the way Yahweh will reconcile all creation, across space and time, including the realm of the dead, even in the face of rebellion. Love is the way, and love wins, in the end. A people seeking to be shaped by this word are empowered to be living images of this god of steadfast love: hearing, seeing, speaking, acting in and for love.

The third word establishes the absolute refusal to weaponize God against our neighbour. A people shaped by this word are freed to love the Other, those who look different and live differently to us, those whom we might otherwise fear. My God, do we need to embrace this word today.

The fourth word establishes delight in regular rest from labour, a delight that reveals God as King over creation and history. A people shaped by this word are set free and empowered to be strengthened by joy. When I was growing up, in a nation misshaped by austere religion, Sundays dragged on like long Covid. Where I live these days, they are, perhaps, a day in search of a purpose. What might it feel like, not to hold out for the weekend in a way that devalues the rest of the week, but to set apart one day in seven to revel in God’s sheer goodness?

The fifth word establishes human participation in God’s glory. For mortal creatures, this results in a weight, or heaviness, that increases over time: so, there is a dignity, or gravitas, to aging. The fifth word sets the people free from idolising youth or fearing old age; frees the young to cherish the old, and the old to continue to share with the young the life they gave them in the first place.

The sixth word negates murder. Unlawful killings occur; but they will not have the final word. This God commits to calling light from darkness, hope from despair, life from even unlawful death. Moses himself is a murderer, in his past: this word takes that burden up and transforms it, so that Moses can be one who brings life to many. This word so fully establishes the world that even when ‘the Word took on flesh,’ and was murdered—an act that is both deicide and genocide—the murder of God and of humanity is negated in the resurrected Christ.

The seventh word negates adultery. Infidelity occurs, with unoriginal repetition, pulling a community into psychological and material chaos; yet, here again, God declares that infidelity will not have the final word, for God commits to negate it, to call healthy relationships into being, again and again. This word, then—like all the others—is grace to those who stumble, good news to the poor in spirit.

The eighth word negates loss—whether of property, as in theft, or persons, as in kidnapping—by stealth. Stealth catches us out, when we least expect it; but this, too, however tragic, however great a violation, will not have the final word.

The ninth word negates deception, false testimony. It reveals a principle we have already seen in this people’s history. Joseph was sold into slavery, his brothers deceiving their father that he was dead. This Joseph was later thrown in prison, the victim of false testimony. Yet from such hopeless circumstances, God called into being the feeding of an empire through seven years of famine.

The tenth word negates false desire. We stumble down the road of laying claim, in our heart, to what has been given to another; but, sooner or later, we are confronted by God, who transforms our desire, so we are more able than before to love rightly. To treasure what has been given to us, and to value what has been given to others without needing to possess those gifts for ourselves.

The ten words really are words of life, re-ordering the universe, establishing a world that is truly as its Creator intended. And yet we only have to look around to see that even (sometimes, it feels, especially) those who claim to believe in the God who established such a world don’t live as if it were possible, let alone the real world.

The people said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.’ And they were right. If we even hear God speak, we will experience death—which is why so many of us do not wish to hear God speak today. But all that will die is all that needs to die, to be returned to earth, that life might reemerge.

This is why the church-planter Paul speaks of the treasures of the Law being incomplete until they find their fulfilment in Christ Jesus, his Lord; why he regards his entire history—personal and corporate—as manure; why he longs to share in Christ’s death and resurrection; as his life, and the life of the household of God, unfolds, to fill the Roman Empire and beyond, from the sea of slaves to the small corners occupied by freemen and the elite, spreading to every continent, century, and  culture.

And, yes, we’ve found ourselves lost in catastrophes, needing imaginative leaps. But what God has called into being cannot be undone. God is not done with us yet. Love wins, in the end.