Sermon for August 6th, 2023
Matthew 22:34-40
34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Deuteronomy 5:1-7
1Moses convened all Israel, and said to them: Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently. 2The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. 3Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today. 4The Lord spoke with you face to face at the mountain, out of the fire. 5(At that time I was standing between the Lord and you to declare to you the words of the Lord; for you were afraid because of the fire and did not go up the mountain.) And he said: 6 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 7you shall have no other gods before me.
Ten Laws, One Love: The First Commandment
Tomorrow is the first day of school for many of you—and that usually means going over class rules, policies, routines and guidelines—figuring out all the things you’re supposed to do, and not supposed to do in order to be a good student and have a good year. Rules are important; they are necessary so we can all get along and work together—but I don’t know anyone (including teachers!) who actually looks forward to this talk at the beginning of each year. I think the same must have been true for the ancient Israelites when God first gave them the Ten Commandments—if you look at verse 5 of our scripture passage in Deuteronomy, Moses says “I was standing between the Lord and you to declare to you the words of the Lord; for you were afraid because of the fire and did not go up the mountain.”
If you know the story of the Ten Commandments, you also know that on the second day of class, while Moses went up the mountain, the Israelites had a substitute teacher (Moses’ brother, Aaron) and as you might expect with a sub, things got out of hand pretty quickly. Rules were broken. Excuses were made. The teacher got angry. And…the Israelites ended up with 40 years of detention in the Sinai desert.
Fast forward about a thousand years, and a Jewish Rabbi (Rabbi is just a Hebrew word that means teacher) named Jesus was holding class one day with his students (probably going over the class rules), and that one kid raised his hand… you know—that kid who knows all the rules by heart, but pretends not to so he can plead ignorance? The kid who calls everyone else out when they break a rule but somehow manages to twist the rules to his benefit when he breaks them. This kid asks the teacher, Jesus, of all the class rules, which one is the most important? Which is another way of saying, which ones are less important? Which ones can I get away with breaking?
And the wise teacher looks at this kid and says, “Let me summarize all the rules just for you: Love God, and don’t be a jerk.” Only I think the Hebrew word for jerk was a little longer and somehow related to the word for donkey.
Today, we begin a sermon series on the Ten Commandments—ten rules for life that have shaped entire cultures, societies, and legal codes across the world for thousands of years. We’re going to look at each one of those Ten Commandments through the lens of what Jesus called the “greatest commandment” —the command to love God with everything you’ve got, and to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.
Now, I started out the sermon comparing the Ten Commandments to class rules—something we know we need, but don’t always particularly enjoy learning about. The Ten Commandments are also frequently seen as laws, or regulations, things meant to restrict and constrain our freedom (or possibly our tendency to selfish behaviors!). There’s an entire theology in many churches that looks at the Ten Commandments (and all of the rest of the laws in the book of Deuteronomy) as one big gotcha—a trap, a stumbling block that we are incapable of getting over, and a setup for the New Testament. It goes something like this (you may have heard it):
- God is righteous and perfect, and demands that we be righteous and perfect as well.
- So God gives us a set of rules (the Ten Commandments) to follow so that we can be perfect.
- But no matter how hard we try, we keep breaking the rules. Maybe not all of them, but most of them. We can’t help ourselves.
- The penalty for breaking God’s law (any of it) is, for some unexplainable reason, death. Basically, we’re toast.
- So God sends Jesus, his son,, who DID follow all the laws, perfectly, and then stood in our place to take our punishment on our behalf.
- So the purpose of the law (according to this theology) is to teach us how bad we are, and how much we need God’s grace…to save us from God’s punishment…for breaking the law that he gave us…which was really to teach us how bad we are, and how much we need God’s grace…
I’ve never really been convinced by that theology, in case you couldn’t tell. And so in the course of this sermon series, I hope to convince you that The Ten Commandments are not a burden or a stumbling block, but rather part of God’s grace, a gift to us to inspire us, to instruct us, to help us, to draw us closer to God and closer to each other.
In order for us to move in that direction, we need to stop thinking of them as rules, laws, or commandments altogether. Because the Bible doesn’t actually call them any of those things. Throughout the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, Moses and God both call them עשרת הדברים (aseret = 10 + d'barim = words). The ten words, or ten sayings. It's easy to understand how this became mistranslated, though--they are a list of imperatives: "do this," "don't do this," and so "commandments" seemed like a good English word choice. But there are several other words in Hebrew that do mean commandments, laws, rules, and these words are used to refer to the hundreds of other laws and commandments in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. הדברים seems to be very intentionally used, always when talking about this collection of ten…spoken things.
In Greek, the Ten commandments are called the δεκάλογος (deca = 10 + logos = word). That word, λογος, should sound a little familiar. It's the same one used in the first chapter of John to refer to Jesus: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Twice in the Bible, God sends his λογος, his הדברים, his Word into the world in solid tangible form: In the New Testament, it is Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament, it is the stone tablets of the ten commandments. Both are God's gift to his people, the visible, tangible representation of God with us here on earth.
What are the Ten Commandments? This is the first thing I want you to remember: The ten commandments are a gift; a representation of who God is, to help us discover who we are...and who we can become.
There’s one more thing I want you to remember in answer to the question, "What are the Ten Commandments." For the second thing, we need to look at the historical context of the Ten Commandments—examining what was happening all around our Biblical story can help us to understand what it all means and how it came to be.
The Ten Commandments (if seen as an ancient "law code" or list of rules) often gets compared with another famous, even more ancient law code from the same region: The Code of Hammurabi. But if you look at the two closely, you'll find they're quite different. The code of Hammurabi is 282 laws, not ten. They deal with everything from contracts, to trade, military service, and the judicial process. They are very specific laws, whereas the Ten Commandments are broad and general. The code of Hammurabi actually resembles more closely the Law of Moses--the other laws found in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers. The same holds true if you compare other ancient law codes to the Ten Commandments...they're more different than alike. But there is one type of ancient document that bears a remarkable resemblance to the Ten Commandments. It's not a law code, not a list o rules or regulations. It's actually a treaty.
When an ancient, Middle-Eastern King would acquire a new territory (either by conquering it, or at the request of its people to protect them) he would draw up a treaty that laid out the expectations and responsibilities of the new relationship. It usually had three parts: First, the King would remind the people what he would do for them, or remind them what he had already done for them. The second part would outline how the king's subjects were to relate to people outside the kingdom ("enemies") and third, how they were to relate to the people within the kingdom ("friends").
Listen to verse six of today's scripture passage: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." Remember what I've done for you! The first two commandments deal with idolatry--how you should relate to those foreign Gods, enemies. The last six commandments deal with how you should relate to each other--get along! Be peaceful!
So this is the second thing to remember about the Ten Commandments: It is a contract, an agreement between a King and his people. Just like a marriage license, it’s the formal sign and seal for a lasting, committed relationship. By the way, this is probably the reason there were two stone tablets—Hebrew is a pretty compact language, so even carved into stone you could easily fit all Ten Commandments onto one tablet. The reason there are two tablets is because you always make two copies of a contract—one for each party.
So to wrap all that up: The Ten Commandments are not laws or rules to constrain us and take away our freedom; They aren’t a stumbling block to trap us, to show us how bad we are, or put us in the path of God’s wrath. The Ten Commandments are a gift—God’s wisdom and God’s words to us, reflecting who he is, and who we can be. The Ten Commandments are a covenant and a promise, establishing a relationship: He is our God, and we are his people.
One final warning: Please don't leave here thinking, "Pastor Neal said I can ignore that thing about not committing adultery. It's not a commandment, it's just a saying." Over the next ten weeks, we'll talk about each one of the Ten Commandments; we'll learn why each one is important to God, and why each one should be important to us as God's people. But if all you see when you look at the Ten Commandments is a list of rules to obey...like a student on the first day of class… you'll have a hard time truly embracing them. My hope and my prayer is that you will come to see in them, through them, and all around them...not rules, but relationships. Not ten laws, but one love.
