KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 27 November
I am the Lord thy God who brought you … out of the house of bondage.
The educational and ethical journey of the exodus reaches its climax with the story of the giving of the Law, the Ten Commandments. We have looked at the birth of Moses, the revelation of God as “I am Who I am” to Moses in the Burning Bush, the ‘star wars contest’ between Pharaoh as a ‘god’ and God with Moses as his agent culminating in the Passover story, the story of the Crossing of the Red Sea, and the provisions of manna to the people of Israel in the wilderness. That wilderness journey is about liberation from slavery understood literally and ethically. Something good is learned in the wilderness. The greater manna, we might say, is not simply God’s provisions for us physically but the manna of God’s Word and Will for us.
The Ten Commandments are not precisely numbered in the Exodus account and there are different traditions about their numbering. They are neither a list from which we might pick and choose nor are they simply a set of suggestions. There can be no additions to nor substractions from them. In other words, they form a complete series of interrelated ethical principles that comprise the moral code for our humanity. They are universal and while presented authoritatively, they are actually the precepts that belong to natural reason. They are for thought and are about thought itself; God’s thinking for our thinking and acting. They are really the authority of thought or reason itself.
It might seem that they are negative given their proscriptive force: “thou shalt not.” But this is to miss the essential content and positive meaning of what is set before us and which shape an understanding of law and order externally and internally. They reveal for thought what is known by reason about ethical thinking and practice. They are the unfolding of the principle of God for us in terms of an understanding of the real truth and dignity of our humanity. It is an axiom of thought that a principle cannot be demonstrated by anything prior to it but only by the dependency of everything else upon it. The Ten Commandments are the unpacking of God as the principle of the being and knowing of all things. They begin with God as principle; “I Am Who I Am.” “I Am the Lord thy God” marks the beginning of the Commandments.
Because God is God there can be no other gods. Because God is God, God is not to be confused with anything in the created order; in short, God cannot be imaged for that would deny the reality of God as that upon which everything else depends. An image is not the reality. This is true and necessary for our thinking about God but also for us. You are not your ‘selfie’. Your instagram images are not you. You are more than your image. Thus our self-knowledge depends upon the knowledge of God and God’s self-knowledge. Because God is God, God’s name is not to be taken in vain which means that God is not to be used for our ends and purposes, as if God were subject to us.