Law is liberation
How wonderful that we go from the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis to the giving of the Law in Exodus in the form of the Ten Commandments! In the story of the Fall and in the story of Cain and Abel, God calls us to account, to an awareness of our separation from what belongs to the truth of our being and knowing. It is the beginning of an ethical understanding which has its fullest expression in the Law as the moral and ethical code for our humanity. It has its counterpart in the ethical teaching of Confucianism and Daoism, of Hinduism and Buddhism, of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, what C.S. Lewis termed the Tao, the ethical way of life for our humanity.
The principles that define the worth and dignity of our humanity in relation to God and to one another are set before us. The Book of Leviticus will give us explicitly the commandment “to love your neighbour as yourself,” the neighbour who is also the sojourner, the stranger in your midst! Yet already in the Ten Commandments we have explicit directives about the nature of our obligations and duties towards one another. The love of God and the love of neighbour are inseparable.
There is all the difference in the world between Law or legislation and Rules or regulation. Rules and regulation bind and limit our thoughts and actions; in a way they imprison us. Law liberates and frees us towards God and one another. This is clearly shown in the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses. It begins with Revelation: God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush – another great and powerful story that contrasts God, the Uncreated, with the things of the created order. The bush burns but is not consumed. God speaks out of the burning bush and identifies himself to Moses as “I Am Who I Am,” the principle of reality. This leads to the exodus journey of Israel out of bondage in Egypt into the wilderness where the challenge is about learning what it means to be the people of God. The high point of the exodus is the giving of the Law to Israel. They are to be the people of the Law who are freed to God.
The Law is given precisely in the context of liberation. It begins with God’s words: “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” “I am the Lord thy God” is a circumlocution for “I Am Who I Am.”
Everything flows from that statement. Because God is God, there are no other gods; because God is God, there is to be no confusion between God and the created world; in short, no images, no idols which mistake God for the things which God has made. Because God is God, his Name, meaning “I Am Who I Am,” is to be honoured and respected, not taken in vain and used for our ends and purposes. Because God is God, “remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath.” This recalls us to creation and to God’s purpose for his creation. The Sabbath is his delight in creation, in its goodness and truth, and so, too, we are to take delight in creation and not reduce the world to mere stuff for us to manipulate and abuse. This is quite powerful and speaks to our current anxieties and assumptions about our technocratic dominance of the world.
The turn towards creation leads to the fifth commandment about “honouring thy father and thy mother;” thus acknowledging our natural origins in family as something given by God. This is the very thing which Cain negated and which is also present in the sixth commandment against murder, the very thing which Cain did. What does this commandment teach us ethically? That we don’t hold the right of life and death over each other or even over ourselves because not only are we all in some way or another the children of our parents, of a father and a mother, but we are also all made in the image of God. It is a strong reminder to us against the presumption of annihilating one another; itself a kind of self-contradiction. We are meant to be our brother’s keeper.
Because God is God, “thou shalt not commit adultery.” Here, too, we have an echo back to Genesis, in this case about marriage. Instead of being governed by our passions and lusts we are to uphold the objective relations of marriage which turn on mutual respect and dignity, the honouring of the marriage bond as something sacred. Because God is God, “thou shalt not steal.” Property too connects us to each other as persons and to respect for what each has been given. Thus the fourth through to the eighth commandment relate to our lives in terms of family and society.
The Commandments then take a more inward turn. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” Lies seek the hurt of others. Our tongues are given for the purpose of speaking the truth, of “speaking the truth in love,” as Paul will put it, which means seeking the good of one another. This leads to our hearts, to what is most inward and most hidden, our desires. “Thou shalt not covet,” meaning desire what someone else has, wanting it for yourself and at their expense. This is again something which was already implicit in the story of Cain and Abel.
The Ten Commandments are more than a list; they form a complete package that embraces everything that belongs to our duties and obligations to God and one another. They are all interconnected and interrelated. The Ten Commandments are not negative but a remarkably coherent set of ethical teachings which have their complement in a number of other traditions. One might consider Sri Krishna’s advice to Arjuna as he stands between two opposing forces that are his relatives in the Bhagavad Gita. The advice is to follow your Dharma, the eternal Law of your being but to do so without attachment to results.
The most famous illustration of Dharma is the story of the scorpion and the Hindu wise man. He keeps rescuing the scorpion from the river and keeps getting stung. Asked why he is doing it, he says ‘it is the dharma of the scorpion to sting, but the dharma of humans is to help.’ Thus the Gita, too, is a way of trying to transcend the fatal and deadly conflicts of our world that arise from our hearts of division and harm. In this sense the Law, like Dharma, is a kind of grace that liberates us to the truth and dignity of our humanity and to the qualities of grace that seek the good of one another.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy