Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Third Sunday in Lent, 3^rd of March 2024

Exodus 20:1-20
Psalm 19

Let the spoken words of my mouth
and the meditation of all our hearts
be acceptable to you, O Lord,
our redeemer and our rock.

The Ten Commandments, known by Hebrew scholars as the ‘Ten Words,’ do not have a good reputation among some Christians. I suspect we can blame this on the Apostle Paul, and his distinction between Law and Grace. In his letter to the Romans Paul even writes that, ‘if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”’ (Romans 7:7) Despite Paul saying in the very same passage that ‘the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good,’ (Romans 7:12) some Christians have taken the apparent impossibility of humans successfully obeying the law to mean that God never intended it to be obeyed. When I was at Williamstown Uniting Church the children spent a year reading through The Jesus Storybook Bible,[1] which told the entire Bible story through the lens of Jesus. The chapter on the Ten Words is called ‘Ten Ways to be Perfect’. It shows Moses receiving the Ten Words in the middle of a rather terrifying thunderstorm. Moses then tells the people that if they keep these rules God will always look after them, and the people promise that they will. But the Storybook Bible immediately says that this is impossible; that God knew it would be impossible; and suggests that God only gave the Ten Words so that the people would fail and turn to Jesus, the one Person who could keep all the rules. That particular story ended: ‘the rules couldn’t save them. Only God could save them’.

Even Christians who do accept the Ten Words as part of our heritage can struggle to see them as positive. C. S. Lewis, writing about today’s psalm, said: ‘“Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery” – I can understand that a man can, and must, respect these “statutes”, and try to obey them, and assent to them in his heart. But it is very hard to find how they could be, so to speak, delicious, how they exhilarate.’[2] And yet the author of today’s psalm was serious when they wrote: ‘More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.’

As with any piece of scripture, it is important to read the Ten Words in context. The people of Israel had just been saved from slavery in Egypt. They had been the victims of a powerful empire ruled over by a human ruler who claimed to be a god. They had been persecuted to the point of attempted genocide. And from all this, they had been saved by the God who had heard their groaning; remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; and taken notice of them. Now this liberating God has claimed them as his own people. It is within this context the Ten Words were given. They are a gift given by the God who saved his people to enable them to continue to live as his people. They are a gift given to a people who had long lived under slavery, to enable them to live in freedom.

The Ten Words can be divided into two, just as we are told God wrote them on two tablets. The first four Words describe how Israel is to relate to the God who has brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and how they are, in Jesus’ words, to love the Lord their God with all their hearts, and with all their souls, and with all their minds. They are to have no other gods but God. They are not to make for themselves any idols; nor are they to make wrongful use of God’s name. These words tell the people that it is God who is to be loved, served and trusted – not Pharaoh and the way of life he represented. Biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann calls these first Words ‘nothing less than regime change’.[3]

The next commandment is to ‘remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy’. The people may work for six days, but on the seventh day everyone is to rest: not just the heads of households but their sons and daughters, male and female slaves, livestock, and alien residents. All work is to be stopped. Brueggemann writes that this commandment gives the people an alternative to allowing their lives to ‘be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being’. They had been slaves in Egypt, forced to work constantly and produce ever more. They are now free people, and that means they can rest.

The latter six Words are the equivalent of Jesus’ ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, and they are meant to enable people to live together as a community, as ‘the people of God’. The command to honour our parents reminds us that we do not lose our worth as we age, and that just as children deserve particular care because of their vulnerability, so do the elderly. It is obvious that members of a community must not murder each other, or have illicit sexual affairs with one another, breaking promises and abusing trust. It might be less obvious that members of a community must also behave honestly with their neighbours’ property, including their neighbours’ reputations. The Words recognise that coveting is not an innocent pastime, but something that leads to envy and greed and so harms both our neighbours and us. It is not hard to imagine that people living in slavery, desperate to survive, would often have been willing to steal from and betray each other. These final Words remind the Israelites that the people of God are not to behave like that.

Freedom is at the heart of all these Words. Because the Israelites are in relationship with God, they are free not to need any other gods, including Pharoah. Because God loves them, they are free to take rest, and not to resort to stealing, lying and covetousness to live. These Words, like all the Law, are revelations of the nature of God, and of the freedom that relationship with God brings. And so today’s psalm praises the decrees of the Lord given in the Law as ‘more to be desired … than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb’. The psalmist encounters God through the Law; the Law is the revelation by which God revives, enhances, and guides human life. To live by the Law is to live life as God intends it, so in praising the Law the psalmist is praising the God revealed by that Law. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of my favourite twentieth-century theologians, writes: ‘It is grace to know God’s commands. They release us from self-made plans and conflicts. They make our steps certain and our way joyful.’[4] For Jews, God’s commands are known through the Law. For we Christians, they are known through Jesus, who said ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil.’ (Matthew 5:17)

The psalmist ends today’s psalm by asking to be saved from their hidden faults, aware that without God none of us can ‘be blameless, and innocent of great transgression,’ and that is a prayer that we can all pray. I may not agree with the author of The Jesus Storybook Bible that the Ten Words were only given to the people of Israel so that they would discover the impossibility of keeping them, but I am aware that none of us could stand up today and say that we have followed them all perfectly. We may want to live as members of a free community, saved by the God who brought us out of the house of slavery, but it is not easy. So, given that I have recently been re-reading Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love to prepare for the Lenten Studies that will start today, I want to end with the reassurance God offered her when she worried about her sin.

Julian of Norwich by Connie Wendleton https://fineartamerica.com/featured/julian-of-norwich-connie-wendleton.html

God revealed to Julian that it is a sin to focus too much on our own sinfulness. Being aware of our sin, she writes, ‘makes us sorry and so unhappy that we can hardly find any comfort, and we sometimes take this fear for humility, but it is foul ignorance and weakness … for just as through his generosity God forgives our sin when we repent, so he wants us to forget our sin of unreasonable depression and doubtful fear’.[5] ‘In heaven we shall see truly and everlastingly that we have sinned grievously in this life, and we shall see that in spite of this, [God’s] love for us remained unharmed and we were never less valuable to him’.[6] When we recognise that we have sinned God wants us to ‘behave like a child; for when it is hurt or frightened it runs to its mother for help as fast as it can’[7] and God wants us to do the same, because ‘God is our mother as truly as he is our father’.[8]

‘God’s perfect law revives the soul. God’s stable rule guides the simple. God’s just demands delight the heart. God’s clear commands sharpen vision. God’s faultless decrees stand forever. God’s right judgements keep their truth.’[9] But if and when we fail to live out the Ten Words, and must confess our failure to God, we can do so with absolute confidence remembering that, in the words of Mother Julian: ‘to the eyes of our heavenly Mother, [we] are precious and lovely’. And if we struggle to believe that in God’s sight we are ‘precious and lovely’, then be assured: the day will come when ‘we shall really understand what [God] means in these sweet words where he says, “All shall be well, and you shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well.”’[10] Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name (2007).

[2] C. S. Lewis, Reflection on the Psalms (1969), pp. 49-50.

[3] Walter Bruggemann, Journey to the Common Good (2010).

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1974, pp. 31-2.

[5] Chapter 73 in Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, translated by Elizabeth Spearing (Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 162.

[6] Chapter 61, p. 143.

[7] Chapter 61, p. 144.

[8] Chapter 59, p. 139.

[9] From the translation of Psalm 19 by the International Consultation on English in the Liturgy.

[10] Chapter 63, p. 147.