by CCW | 17 November 2017 15:42
A moment’s reflection on the Scripture readings of the past few weeks suggests how powerfully they speak to many of the current confusions and uncertainties in our culture. Just recently we have been pondering the spiritual journey that takes us from the Covenant with Noah to the Abrahamic Covenant, from Moses and the Burning Bush to the Mosaic Covenant in The Ten Commandments, the moral code for our humanity, as it were, written in stone. This provides the background, too, for The Beatitudes which presuppose the Law and perfect it, at least in the Christian understanding. At the very least, they stand in a complementary relation to each other.
“I Am Who Am” is God’s revelation of himself as the ultimate principle of thinking and knowing without which there can be no causality at all. That leads in the thinking of Exodus to the further revelation of God’s will for our humanity in the ethical principles of The Ten Commandments, themselves a coherent set of interrelated concepts that speak to the nature of our humanity individually and communally and always in relation to God as the causal principle of all and every good. Not unlike Plato’s arguments about the ethical and intellectual priority of the Good in which the being and the knowing of all things depend.
This way of thinking is framed as a rejection of the fearful uncertainties of the ancient Mesopotamian world and its legacy wherever the movement of thought goes from chaos to order. For the ancient Sumerians, for instance in The Epic of Gilgamesh, this sense of fearful uncertainty about reality is imaged in figures like Humbaba the unknowable, the Bull of Heaven which Ishtar unleashes upon the City of Uruk symbolizing drought, and the ancient flood story which threatens even the Gods. In all of those images, chaos is seen as always fearfully present and as capable of upending everything. Even the gods are a most uncertain quantity. Quite apart from any sort of confidence even simply in “natural processes”, all is basically “random” even though the ancient Sumerians, much like our own culture, were remarkably practical about many things from irrigation to sailing to wine-making. The first major technological revolution speaks to its latest iteration and, yet, with a similar degree of uncertainty.
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic view as further shaped by Greek philosophy counters that sense of fearful uncertainty not simply with dogmatic certainty, as it might seem, but reflectively. The Ten Commandments are, to be sure, presented authoritatively, but they provide an intellectual and ordered set of ethical principles that are anything but arbitrary or random. They begin by recalling the revelation of God to Moses in the Burning Bush and to the profound idea of Law as liberation. “I am the Lord thy God who brought you … out of the house of bondage”.
Freedom without order and order without freedom are both perfectly deadly and destructive of human personality and the human community – themes which Genesis thoroughly explores. The pageant of Scripture readings in Chapel is about the education of our humanity in the recognition of the necessity and the priority of order in our lives for our freedom. That reaches its apogee in the Hebrew Scriptures in The Ten Commandments, understood as the heart of the Torah. While the order or numbering of the commandments varies – there are two main traditions – the structure overall is clear; ethical principles about our relation to God and ethical principles about our relation to one another.
They are also comprehensive in the sense that they cover the complete range of human life both in terms of things outward and things inward. God is God and God alone; hence “none other gods.” Because God is God he is not to be confused with anything in the created order; hence the proscription against idols which remains a fundamental distinction that runs through all of the Commandments. Because God is God his name as revealed in the Burning Bush is not to be casually or carelessly bandied about but held in respect and honour. Because God is God, time, too, has a sacred dimension signalled in the idea of the Sabbath and recalling us to the purpose of creation as that in which God and our humanity delight.
Because God is God, the author of our natural being and relations, then we are to honour our parents. Note that it has nothing to do with the dynamic of our relationships: whether we like them or not they are our parents objectively considered. Because God is God and we made in his image, there can be no murder of others; we are not the authors of our own being nor that of others who are similarly made in the image of God and therefore we have no right to take another’s life. Because God is God, “thou shalt not commit adultery”; marriage and family, too, is sacred and to be respected and honoured. Because God is God, “thou shalt not steal”; the distinction between mine and thine follows the same logic of respect and honour since property is an extension of personality. Because God is God, “thou shalt not bear false witness”; our tongues are given to utter truth again because of who we are in the sight of God. A lie, after all, has no power apart from the truth it presupposes. Because God is God, “thou shalt not covet” – desire or want what another has for yourself. Notice that with the commandment against coveting we move into the heart and soul of our humanity – to our inmost desires. They, too, belong to our relationship with God.
In short, The Ten Commandments are summed up in the Jewish Shema; the love of God and the love of neighbour, what Christians refer to as The Summary of the Law. It calls us to account and provides a critical reflection on the nature of true freedom. It is a freedom to God, to the principle in which we “live and move and have our being”. The Law is our delight and all because God is God. Only so can we live for one another.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/11/17/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-12-november/
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