by CCW | 1 December 2019 15:00
It is the great ethical insight of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding albeit in different registers of expression. To put it another way, law is love. That is a challenging concept which requires some thought about both terms.
Advent awakens us to the deeper meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity through the coming of God’s Word to us. That idea belongs to revelation and to reason. There is the coming of God’s Word to Moses on Mount Sinai in the thunderous words of the Law encapsulated profoundly in the Ten Commandments. There is the coming of God’s Word in judgement in the powerful Gospel for the First Sunday in Advent with the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem on what Christians will later call Palm Sunday and which is here already associated with the ancient Jewish rites of the Passover. But even more, as Cranmer understood in the sixteenth century, that coming in judgement is seen most tellingly in the cleansing of the Temple, the passage which follows immediately in Matthew’s Gospel upon the entrance into the city. Here is the wrath of Jesus and yet that wrath is really love, God’s love of his own righteousness and truth without which there is no truth or righteousness.
Thus are we awakened to the dies irae, the day of judgment which is ever-present because truth is ever-present. The judgement is the coming of God’s Word as light and truth into the darknesses of our world and our hearts. But this is actually love. Why and how? Because the coming of God to us is the goodness of God for us. And it is something known at once by revelation and by reason.
The Ten Commandments mark the climax of the ethical and educational journey of the exodus. The Book of Exodus is an ethical treatise that seeks to awaken us to a fundamental truth and principle upon which our thinking and living depend. The idea of God is not and cannot be simply a human construct – the assumption of every garden variety atheist. The wonder of the exodus is that God makes himself known as “I Am Who I Am” to Moses in the Burning Bush. In the exodus journey in the wilderness God reveals his will for our humanity in the thunderous words of the Ten Commandments. Allah is all but it is the will of Allah, of God, that defines Jew, and Christian, and Muslim alike. But that will, which itself is nothing less than the explicit expression of the goodness of God, is something that is also known through the exercise of reason in its discovery of that upon which our knowing and reason depend, a principle which cannot by definition be defined by anything prior to it but only by everything which depends upon it.
This is wonderful but not new. For centuries upon centuries and in different ways, the Law in its summary form and as the Ten Commandments has been known as the universal moral code for our humanity, something known at once as given authoritatively but also as given for thought. In our liturgy we regularly and perhaps complacently say the Summary of the Law. We rarely hear the Ten Commandments even though in the history of our own Anglican tradition, at least until the dominance of the 19th century Gothic revival, our churches in their seventeenth and eighteenth century architectural form as auditory chapels often had on the walls of the sanctuary “The Belief,” the summary of the Christian principles of the Faith; to wit, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostle’s Creed. What do Christians essentially believe? There it is. We forget and neglect such things at our peril. We also misunderstand those principles when we reduce them to a set of propositions but that is another story about modern and post-modern narratives and their self-contradictions.
Because God is God, there can be no other Gods. The recognition of a First Principle is an intellectual necessity that belongs to reason itself as witnessed in various ways in the great philosophical and religious traditions of the world. The Ten Commandments are simply the unpacking of this First Principle, a logical explication of the Good, if you will, upon which depends the ordering of our souls and our lives in a community of souls. The Ten Commandments are not a list of ‘maybe’s’; nor are they a list of suggestions from which to pick and choose whatever happens to take your fancy and to reject what doesn’t. They are a complete and interconnected set of principles that literally encompass and comprehend the whole of our humanity. As presented in the form of two tablets, they comprise what belongs to the nature of our relation to God and to one another; God and Man; God and neighbour. The Law is itself the expression of God’s goodness in the articulation of what belongs to the truth and goodness of our humanity. There can be neither additions nor substractions from them.
Because God is God, God is not to be confused with anything in the created order. This too belongs to natural reason. The principle of our being and knowing cannot be identified and confused with what depends upon it; to invert the relationship between cause and effect, as it were, is to confuse Creator and created. The language of ‘image’ here is particularly important. The image is not the reality. And even in our image obsessed age, the simple point is that you are not your image, your picture, your selfie. This also relates to the discovery of our own self-consciousness as utterly dependent upon the divine self-consciousness in whose image we are made. God is the reality who is not to be confused with anything in the created order.
Because God is God, it logically follows that we are subject to God’s will and not God to our wills and desires. That God has revealed himself in his ‘name’ as “I Am Who I Am” means that God’s name is not to be taken “in vain”; invoking God’s name for our ends and purposes and not honouring the principle itself. Because God is God, there is the sanctification of time. “Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.” Here we discover another feature of the essential goodness of the Commandments. They are not essentially negatives, a list of proscriptions, the ‘thou shalt nots’. They are essentially positive in the sense that they show the nature of the relation to truth upon which every law and regulation of our lives depend. Such is the nature of an ethical principle.
The Ten Commandments are in this sense more than laws; they are the ethical precepts which shape and inform all law. They reveal that upon which all laws fundamentally depend. Here the idea of the Sabbath recalls us to creation itself and to God’s own love and delight in that which he has made. We are called to share in that love and delight by keeping the Sabbath. Here is the great counter to our endless and mindless busyness.
This speaks as well to the nature of the interplay between the Commandments. “The fool has said in his heart there is no God,” the psalmist notes (Ps. 14.1). Anselm, in his famous ontological argument for the necessary existence of God, interprets that passage to mean that the fool is preoccupied with the world and its busyness and in that sense is radically unthoughtful, hence a fool. The Sabbath is about our resting in the truth of God, our mindfulness of God, as it were.
The Commandments then turn from our direct relation to God in himself to our relations with one another as grounded in God. Because God is God, “thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother.” Notice, yet again that this is a positive commandment and notice too that like the Sabbath commandment it recalls us to creation. Here we are taught to recognise our natural derivations, our parents and family. This is something over which we have no control except the fundamental freedom to honour the life which has been given to us. We are all the children of parents regardless of how we might feel about them. The Ten Commandments begin with the recognition that “the Lord God has brought us out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” As such all of the commandments signify our freedom, our freedom to will the truth.
Because God is God, “thou shalt not kill.” This too builds on the same idea of God as source and principle of all life, not us. In acknowledging this we recognise that just as we are not the authors of our own being, either directly or indirectly, then we have no right to take the life of another or of ourselves. Because God is God, “thou shalt not commit adultery”; this also belongs to the same logic of creation. Marriage is the basis of the family, “instituted in the time of man’s innocency” as the Prayer Book puts it, recalling us to creation and to God’s purpose for our creation. This, too, is something universal even given the different practices about marriage in terms of polygamy, monogamy, and questions about divorce in various cultures.
Because God is God, “thou shalt not steal.” Property is an extension of personality. Theft is a violation of the personal, a denial of the distinction between mine and thine which is a denial of the other and an assertion of oneself and one’s self-interest over and against others. Because God is God, “thou shalt not bear false witness.” Our tongues are meant to be connected to our reason; they are for speaking truth not lies. A lie is a self-contradiction because every lie depends utterly upon the truth. All the Commandments speak to some form of self-contradiction by our reason.
Because God is God, “thou shalt not covet,” that is to say, to desire for oneself what another has. Here we discover the spiritual force and intellectual truth of the Commandments. They speak not only to our outward relations with one another but to our hearts, to what is inward; what we desire is hidden within us. This commandment at once convicts us, as Paul realizes, but also recalls us to the principle upon which our desiring depends, namely, the goodness of God. As the great ethical traditions argue, you can only desire what is good. You can, of course, be ignorant and mistaken about the Good. This commandment returns us to the beginning, to God as the principle of the whole of our lives, to what is known in the soul and mind of our very being.
To be reminded in these explicit ways of this perfect and complete system of thought is God’s goodness towards us. The Law is love and so Paul in the epistle reading rightly argues that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” He does so largely by reference to the love of neighbour but the point is that all love depends upon God. Love of God and love of neighbour are inextricably bound together just as self-knowledge and the knowledge of God are inextricably connected.
It is on the basis of the logic of the Commandments that we can understand the ‘wrath’ or ‘anger’ of Christ at our misuse and abuse of the things that have been given to us, particularly in the case of the Gospel, our misuse of the temple, of the holy places as places of teaching. We neglect and deny the real purpose of our churches when we allow our worldly and economic concerns to dominate and define us. There has to be a “casting out” of such things in our souls in order to be recalled to who we are in the sight of God. Such is the way of God’s love; it is simply about recalling us to truth.
Advent is about the coming of God’s Word as light and truth, thus it marks the way of illumination and the way of purgation and points us to the way of union and perfection which is ultimately realized in the intimacy of the Word made flesh who dwells among us. Here in our liturgy, law is love and love is the fulfilling of the law, the law of our life with God and with one another.
Fr. David Curry
Advent 1, 2019
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