Wednesday March 27
Readings: DT 4:1, 5-9; MT 5:17-19
Moses is instructing the Israelites to heed the decrees and statues that God has given to them. He counsels them to “not to forget the things which your own eyes have seen, nor let them slip from your memory as long as you live.” This is the generation that witnessed the escape from Egypt, survived in the desert and received the commandments.
And Jesus speaks to how he has come not to abolish anything or get anyone of the hook but instead to fulfill it. He goes on to say that whoever breaks the least of the commandments would be considered the least in God’s kingdom.
Was Jesus a legalist of some kind? Why was he so insistent on the commandments – like Moses was? What was he talking about?
If you grew up catholic, you probably grew up with a distorted idea of the 10 commandments and the Law of Moses that was probably based on the Charlton Heston movie. I know that I often lament receiving such a limited teaching on this history.
Ana Levy-Lyons, who is both and observant Jew and a senior minister at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, says that what we miss about the laws and decrees – that Jesus likely saw – is that, “they are not enforcers of the power structures of society; on the contrary, they are tools for resisting oppression, both external and internal.”
She goes on to say (and I’d recommend a read of her reflections at https://auburnseminary.org/voices/the-ten-commandments-politics/)
The Ten Commandments emerged out of a people’s experience of slavery….And as they regrouped in the desert after crossing the Red Sea, they had to create a new society from scratch. How should they organize their new world? What would it take to create a culture free from the kinds of oppression, violence, cruelty, and excess that characterized the world they’d left? How could they ensure that they would never again become slaves themselves, nor enslave others? The Ten Commandments were conceived/ received as an answer to these questions.
The first commandment teaches us to have no other gods…[and] most of the problems we face in our world today stem from serving “other gods.” We have the obvious ones – the god of money, the god of power, the god of prestige and success, the god of pleasure. We have the less obvious ones – the god of culturally-defined beauty, the god of what-other-people-think, and the god of getting-to-choose. And each of us has private, secret other gods…
Beyond personal practices, the commandments also guide our collective behavior. This is where their origin in a story of oppression renders them politically radical. In the Scripture text, God speaks the commandments in second person singular – to the community as a whole, as one entity responsible for keeping them. The commandment “do not steal” prohibits individual theft, but it also teaches us to build a society in which theft is not built into our economic structures. The commandment “do not kill” prohibits murder, but it also exhorts us to create systems that do not kill through poverty, racism, and the proliferation of weapons. The commandment to keep a Sabbath day requires us to ensure that our corporations pay a living wage so that everyone can afford to rest one day a week.
The laws and decrees of Moses were understood by Jesus as the blueprint for a just society, so, of course he did not come to abolish them. He came to show us how to embody them.