Peace be with you.
Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent,
the Church asks us to look at one of the really great
texts in the Old Testament
—namely, the Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus.
I’ve said before that Lent’s a time of
getting back to basics spiritually,
and this is a good way to do it.
Just as an athlete will go back to the
fundamental moves of his sport,
so in the moral and spiritual order,
we go back to fundamentals, go back to basics.
Can I suggest to you,
go back to this text in Exodus.
If you don’t have the Ten Commandments clearly in mind,
commit them to memory.
They’re a wonderful way to examine your conscience
as you prepare for Confession.
Even at the end of the day,
to go through the Ten Commandments, say,
“Well, how did I do in regard to these basics of the spiritual life?”
So, I want to say in this brief homily
something very simple about each one.
We know that the Ten Commandments are divided
into two tables or tablets.
The first three, dealing with our relation to God,
and then the last seven,
dealing with our relations with each other.
The first table is,
by leaps and bounds, the most important.
It’s a basic biblical intuition.
Having our relationship with God right
is the condition for the possibility
of anything else being right in our lives.
If the relation to God is off-kilter,
everything else will become off-kilter.
And so we pay special attention to the first table.
Commandment one:
“I am the Lord your God.
You shall have no other gods besides me.”
Now, there’s a trivial way to read this,
that God is sort of this petty,
jealous tyrant.
No, no.
It’s the most important element in the spiritual life.
God doesn’t need us.
God doesn’t need anything.
So, it’s not a matter of
God falling into a jealous snit here.
When there’s clarity about what we worship,
the rest of our life falls into order.
When there’s ambiguity about that,
then there’s difficulty across the board.
And I’ve said this to you before:
We all worship something.
There’s always something in your life of supreme value.
There’s some center of gravity,
if I can shift metaphors.
Now, it could be pleasure,
it could be money, it could be your country,
your family, all sorts of things.
“You shall have no other God besides me.”
In other words, any act of idolatry,
turning something other than God into God,
will throw the rest of your life off-kilter.
Clarity about the one God whom we worship,
that’s the most important.
Second commandment:
“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”
Now, there’s a legitimate sense here where
we shouldn’t swear, as we put it.
We shouldn’t use the name of God in this disrespectful way,
and that’s certainly true.
Probably though what they had in mind here in the Old Testament
was something like the use of God’s name
in a superstitious way as a kind of incantation.
I’m going to use the name of God to get God to do
something that I want.
See, now we’re getting close to the spiritual problem here.
The idea is to worship God.
That means God is my highest value.
I’ve turned my life over to God.
But there’s a permanent danger in the spiritual order
that I’m going to try to use God for my purposes.
I spoke last week about falling in love with the benefits of God.
If I can manipulate God so as to get what I want,
see, now I’m in bad spiritual territory.
So don’t use the name of the Lord your God in vain
means don’t think you can ever manipulate God
or put God to the test.
No, no.
God puts us to the test sometimes.
We heard that with Abraham last week.
Saw it with Job.
But we don’t put God to the test.
We don’t use his name as a kind of manipulative incantation.
Third commandment:
“Remember to keep holy the sabbath day.”
How basic this was, everyone,
to the biblical Israelites.
The sabbath.
Not just the day of rest but the day of worship.
The day when we, in an embodied,
concrete, conscious way,
order our lives through ritual practice to God.
Every part of that, I think, matters.
It’s so easy to make this abstract.
“Oh, sure. I believe in God.
I’ve got this idea of God in my mind.”
Well, that’s not sufficient.
“Oh yeah, God’s the central value of my life.”
Yeah, but do you express that and act that out ritually?
See, if we were angels, that might be enough.
I just have this kind of clear notion.
But we’re not angels.
We’re embodied spirits,
as we heard a couple of weeks ago.
Therefore, to make my worship of God real to me,
it has to be expressed in this disciplined
and regular and ritualized way.
May I suggest, everyone,
that the falling away of so many in the Western culture
from keeping holy the sabbath has wreaked havoc.
That when we stop signaling to ourselves and to others
that we do indeed worship God,
things tend to fall apart in us.
The test is
—“Oh, yeah, I believe in God.
Oh yeah, God’s most important”
—well, show me, show me.
What does that look like in your life?
Keep holy the sabbath day.
Now, that’s the first table, the first three commandments,
having to do with our relation to God.
Nothing more important.
Now, the second table, the remaining seven,
having to do with our relation to each other.
Now, why?
Well, if you’re in touch with God, who is love,
that love is going to surge through you into the world.
That’s the way it works.
The more you’re connected to God,
the more that love will flow through you into the world.
So, fourth commandment:
“Honor your father and your mother.”
Well, yes, your literal father and mother,
but most of the commentators say this means something like
reverence and honor and love your family.
If you claim to be a person of God,
which means a person of love,
but you can’t love your own family,
something is really off in you.
If you can’t love those who are nearest
and dearest to you, well, then,
how will you love anybody else?
So starting at home,
starting with those closest and dearest to us,
of course, we should love them.
Fifth commandment:
“You shall not kill.”
Probably best rendered, or better rendered,
“You shall not commit murder,”
because there are exceptions.
We talk about just war and self-defense and so on,
where a killing might be morally justified.
But you shall not murder.
Now, I know most of those who listen to me,
I hope this is true, are not murderers.
They have no intention of murdering anybody.
But it’s simply not the case that
murder isn’t a problem in our society.
How about the sixty million abortions
since Roe v. Wade was passed?
How about the almost casual murders taking place
on the streets of our major cities?
How about euthanasia laws, et cetera, et cetera?
There is a growing indifference to life in our society.
John Paul II named it
“the culture of death.”
And so we need to be alive to this problem
of an indifference to the dignity of human life.
You shall not kill.
Sixth commandment:
“You shall not commit adultery.”
I know everyone and his brother thinks
the Church is obsessed with sex and all that.
Well, notice we don’t get to sexual matters till the sixth commandment.
So, if it was commandment number one . . .
but look, does anybody doubt
that adultery, that the breaking of the marriage vow,
being unfaithful to your spouse,
is a source of enormous mischief?
And I mean inside the people involved
and to those around them.
You have to be blind not to see
the deleterious effects of infidelity
and the breakdown of marriage and the family and all of that.
Don’t tell anyone who’s been involved in pastoral ministry
that this is a minor problem.
Well, the biblical authors knew that very well.
And if the family’s the building block of the society,
then our whole society suffers from adultery.
So, stop it, the Bible says.
Seventh:
“You shall not steal.”
I’ve talked to people, it’s never happened to me,
thank God, but whose homes have been ransacked.
They come home and they realize a thief has been there.
When something’s stolen from you,
there’s something that’s uniquely awful about that experience.
When something’s taken from you,
it’s such an aggressive, violent, invasive move.
It’s one of the, in that sense,
least loving things you can do.
If to love is to will the good of the other,
stealing is taking good from somebody.
That’s why it’s such a violation of love.
Now, there is that kind of direct stealing,
someone breaking in and committing a burglary.
But we know, fellow sinners,
there’s a lot of ways we steal things from people.
A lot of ways we rob them of good things.
Whether it’s their reputation.
Watch how we enhance life or take life from people.
Do we breathe life into a room
or do we suck life out of a room?
That’s a form of stealing, it seems to me.
Eight, I think is very important today:
“You shall not bear a false witness against your neighbor.”
Calumny, we call this.
A willful lie about someone whose purpose is to harm.
Why do we do it?
Well, it makes us feel better,
makes us feel more exalted.
I can drag you down, I seem higher.
Where is this flourishing?
We all know.
Online, right?
The social media culture has caused this to flourish,
to bear false witness against our neighbors,
to say all kinds of lying and calumnious things.
Could I urge everybody, especially during Lent,
to watch this tendency,
especially as you use social media.
When I’m saying something about a person,
is it true?
And why am I saying it in the first place?
To ask those two very good questions before you
post something online, I’d highly recommend it.
Bearing false witness.
Watch the eighth commandment.
I’ll bring nine and ten together:
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.”
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.”
It’s very interesting that word “covet.”
I’ve talked to you before about René Girard,
the great philosopher.
He talked about the triangular quality of desire,
that we rarely want something simply because it’s attractive to us.
Very often we want it because somebody else wants it.
So why is that object so appealing to me?
Well, because that person wants it,
and their desire of it awakens in me
a desire for it.
Watch this.
Most of advertising is based on that principle.
How come I want certain things?
Well, I discover some famous person wants them.
Watch two kids playing together.
One kid is indifferent to a toy until
his friend comes in and wants it.
Do you see what Girard uncovered was
the source of so much of our tension and violence
in our society is this triangular quality of desire.
Well, the Bible knew about it
a long time before René Girard.
See, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife
and don’t covet your neighbor’s goods.
Desire something for yourself, that’s fine.
But stop getting into these mimetic triangular conflicts.
Watch how we desire.
I like that the old word “covet” is good there
because it signals something fresh in our minds.
Watch how you covet things.
Why do you want the things you want?
Is it because someone else desires them?
If so, we’re on a short route to conflict and chaos.
Okay.
That’s a quick little tour, in about thirteen minutes,
through the Ten Commandments.
Could I urge you
—Lent’s a great time for it—
go back to the book of Exodus,
find this text,
walk through these Ten Commandments,
memorize them if you can,
use them next time you go to Confession.
If you go to Confession during Lent,
which you all should do,
use the Ten Commandments as a way of examining your conscience.
And God bless you.