The Heart of the Ten Commandments
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 12, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.
As we hover on the cusp of our yearly observance of the Great Lent as a Cathedral family, I wanted to ponder with you what the commandments are for. Moses tells us in our passage from Deuteronomy that the Israelites–and by extension this community that God longs to shape and fashion for Godself as a people who “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God,” (Micah 6:8)--have before us, “life and prosperity, death and adversity.” “Choose life!” Moses says. The commandments are not a set of rules to follow that if we mess up cast us into eternal hellfire. That’s a picture of a God unworthy of worship, and unrecognizable from what we see of who and how God is as revealed in the person of Jesus.
Let me ask you this. What is God’s deepest desire? To create a bunch of rules no one can follow and who then delights in catching us out in a clerical error? Is God some kind of maniacal adjunct professor of English composition whose greatest pleasure is to circle a comma-splice with a red Sharpie? Or is our God a God whose deepest desire is fashion for Godself a people who know the unconditional love of God, that they might be (gasp) happy, flourishing, compassionate and kind, and whose life as a community reflects the beauty, truth, and goodness of God? Light to the nations. A truly human human community.
I want to suggest that it’s this latter picture of a God of unconditional mercy whose love loves us into loving others that is at the heart of what we know as the ten commandments. The commandments are actually a way to a life that is truly life (1 Timothy 6:19). The commandments are pointers to life in union and communion with God, individually and corporately. The commandments are guidepoints for a life of human flourishing, true aliveness, in this life, not simply the standard by which we will be judged (and found wanting) in the life to come. God wants us to be happy, thriving, here and now, and gives us the terrible power to choose happiness, or something that only hollows us out from the inside. Psalm 119–that great (and extremely long hymn of praise to the law)--tells us again and again and again (and again): “Happy are they….” Not phew, ain’t that a relief, dodged a bullet kind of happy, but vibrant, joyful, flourishing happiness. First day of spring bird song and cherry blossom happy. “The Glory of God is the human person fully alive,” as Irenaeus reminds us.
So if the commandments are all about human happiness and flourishing, what does it mean to, “Choose life”? Where is “life that is truly life,” this “Happy are they,” to be found? In tribal affiliation and allegiance? In huddling up against an outcast, scapegoated other? In “belonging to Paul… or to Apollos?” That would be like having a bumper sticker with the name and face of the person who baptized you on your car. Kind of crazy! Is happiness to be found in judging others and finding them wanting? In wanting what you don’t have? In grabbing after things with your right (and also presumably with your left) hand? In each of these instances, happiness is sought as an object outside of ourselves that we can acquire, possess, and control. Like one in water crying, "I thirst!" Like the child of a rich parent wandering poor on this earth… we search and search for happiness that is already given—“the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). The happiness for which we are made, for which our hearts are restless, cannot be earned, possessed, gained, or self-improved to. It is received. As pure gift. Thanks be to God.
Happiness, life that is truly life, turns out to be a matter of where one is looking for it. And as human beings, but especially as human beings in the out-there, object-rich environment of consumer capitalism facilitated by a 24-hour news cycle and super-computers in our pockets, we tend to look in the wrong place, in the wrong direction. We think that some person, some relationship, some new toy, some drug, some job, will be the place where happiness is to be found. Addictions of every kind come from this misdirected looking.
Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground. “What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked. “My key,” said the Mulla. So they both went down on their knees and looked for it. After a time the other man asked: “Where exactly did you drop it?” “In my own house.” “Then why are you looking here?” “There is more light here than inside my own house.”
It’s funny, but in a kind devastating, diagnostic way. It’s funny in a way that we recognize that we’ve been looking under the streetlamp for what we lost in the house.
Jesus, in his hyperbolic way, is pointing us to this simple fact of mis-directed looking. He singles out looking with lust at another person merely as an example. If you’re looking always “out-there” (there is no “out there” in the God in whom we live and move and have our being) for happiness, you’ll never find it! Plucking out the eye and chopping off the hand are exaggeratedly shocking reminders to us to stop the outward search for happiness in people, possessions, prestige and all the rest. All the injunctions about “poverty of spirit,” of being like a little child, of not carrying a bag or an extra cloak, of letting ourselves be washed by Jesus instead of scrambling about trying to give him a pedicure after dinner, are pointing to the futility of this acquisitional outward search, and directing us back to the God who has already made God’s home in us in the “closet of the heart” as Greek fathers call it. In the “ground of our being,” as Paul Tillich calls it. A non-negotiable and indissoluable bond of love between God and each and every person just as they are without exception, just waiting to be recognized, marinated and stabilized in, then lived from for others.
Why is this so difficult? Well, because we aren’t really trained in receiving. We know how to grab, grasp, and take, but we aren’t really practiced in receiving, yielding, giving up the illusion of control, and allowing. It’s foreign territory–kind of like the Promised Land that we, with the Israelites, ping-pong into and back out of. We know how to make bricks. Do lots of things. Earn. Win. Succeed. But receiving is a different story. It’s first of all a humble admission of our need for God, our need for something other than our own efforts to secure our salvation, our need for something other than an endless panopoly of objects to make us happy. Pluck out the eye that always looks at objects to grasp, and turn that light around. Notice that what you’re looking for, the very light of your seeing, is actually what you are really looking for. God’s not an object. The one doing the looking is what we’re looking for. Seeker and sought, widow and lost coin, shepherd and lost sheep, are one. Here already, so close and simple and ordinary we overlook it as a matter of habit: our healing, our salvation, our wholeness, our refuge and peace in what doesn’t come and go. “I played the flute for you and you did not dance!” Cue piccolos.
The reason we find this receiving thing so hard is because you can’t do it well or badly. You can’t do Master’s degrees in receiving. You can’t be the world’s best yielder to presence, the Olympic champion of allowing mercy to wash you. It’s a totally level playing field upon which there is no better or worse. Grace abounds! No exceptions. Makes sense that just eight verses after our passage for today we hear those lines that so chafe against our need to earn, merit, win: “for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). The truth is, I, we all, want to have earned our “place in the sun,” and then look down our noses at those who haven’t earned as well as we have.
So plucking out the eye and chopping off the hand, dropping your grudges is all a call for us to wake from our slumber and addiction to pursuing happiness out there and wake to the boundless, conditionless, unshakeable peace that is already given. It’s a call to come (don’t go anywhere, be quiet, still), to see (look at who’s looking through you), to stay (with that restlessness that says, “It can’t be this easy,” “This is boring,” “This isn’t it,” “I’m not good at this God thing,”) and remain in the Temple with Anna long enough that the belovedness that is our birthright, the love that is who we really are, might start to, “flame up like shining from shook foil, gather to a greatness like the ooze of oil crushed,” as Hopkins has it.
Before we’ve moved a muscle… beloved. Before we’ve applied a technique… beloved. Before we’ve improved ourselves… beloved. Old, young, sick, well, still crazy after all these years… beloved. It dawns on us that the only true thing we can say about ourselves or others, is, “Beloved.” As the background hum of all experience that we overlook… belovedness. As the screen upon which every image of the film of our life appears… belovedness. If I’m beloved, and you’re beloved and this has all happened without us doing anything, what else is there for us to do but share what was gifted to us in the first place? We don’t have to pluck out our eyes, or chop off our hands, divide the world in those who belong to Paul or Apollos–all that just makes us all the more likely to perform that self-righteous, disfiguring surgery on others and huddle in fear against an imaginary other. Instead, listen to Dame Julian of Norwich, “What, do you wish to know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, Love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For Love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same.” Amen.