It was in the fall of 1987 that The New York Times covered the appointment of a new faculty member at The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. It doesn’t usually make front news in The New York Times when a faculty member is appointed, but in this particular case it did. The person being appointed was none other than the very well known CBS reporter, Marvin Kalb. He was going to assume a new Chair, the Shorenstein Barone Chair of Press, Politics and Public Policy at The Kennedy School of Government. He was very well known. He had just completed a documentary on a very major theme, he was involved with Elie Wiesel, the great commentator on the Holocaust, and interviewed everyone from Presidents to criminals.
Four years later, I was privileged to take the Press, Politics course with Marvin Kalb. I sat there with a fellow Divinity student for the term. It was a rather peculiar feeling, for most of the students had come from The National Security Council, or had been working in the White House, or were reporters being trained by NBC or CBS or CNN. Many of the others were there to do graduate studies in either politics or the press, and they were there to further their careers with degrees that would open doors for them. My friend, Joe, and I were there because we were simply wanting to know more about the important subject.
We sat there feeling a little unworthy, to be quite honest. Marvin Kalb came in, and as professors do at the beginning of their courses, they outline the reading. There was everything from commentaries on the Tet Offensive and the famous book, A Bright Shining Lie. There were works on the Cuban missile crisis, a plethora of things that were to be read that would keep us busy for a whole academic term. But then, Marvin Kalb began his lecture. He said, “I want to tell you that I think the foundational text for this course is Exodus, Chapter 20 – The Ten Commandments.” Well, you can bet the two Divinity students in the back were laughing our heads off, nudging each other with our elbows: “You see, we are the most important people here!”
He went on to explain why The Ten Commandments were central to this course. Kalb said, “You see the freedom of a society, whether it is the press or the political realm, is predicated on the first and second commandments from the Book of Exodus. Those Commandments are ‘I am the Lord, your God, and you shall have no other gods before me.’” Marvin Kalb argued that law, that constitutions, that the nature of the framework of society, and a free society is predicated on the fact that there can be no idols, and that a free society is a free society given by God precisely because the press cannot become an idol, nor can politicians, the state, or even the law. Nothing can become an idol, because there is only one God, and it is that one God that sets people free. It was brilliant!
A few months later, I read a contrary opinion. It was the opinion also by a media mogul – Ted Turner, the founder of CNN. Ted Turner said the following: “We are living with outdated rules. The rules we are living under are The Ten Commandments, and I bet nobody here even pays much attention to them because they are too old. When Moses went up on the mountain, there were no nuclear weapons, and there was no poverty. Today, The Ten Commandments wouldn’t go over. Nobody around likes to be commanded. Commandments are out!” You see, he was reflecting a New Age attitude. The commandments, the notion of something that demands something of us from above, is contrary to the spirit of our age, and that the relativism of our time sees no place for the notion of something objective that commands us or requires of us to do something. The world has changed and moved beyond The Ten Commandments.
There we have it! Kalb on the one hand, a faithful Jew saying that the very freedom that we love and experience is predicated on commandments and Turner saying we are beyond them. Well, I want to take us beyond the stalemate of those two positions, which seem to characterize a lot of people’s attitudes towards The Ten Commandments. I want to suggest to you another way of looking at this: The Ten Commandments, sometimes called The Decalogue, are in fact a living thing. Maybe it was an ancient text, maybe it is thousands of years old, but it is a living document about the relationship between God and humanity. If we see it as a living relationship, if we see it as a dynamic thing, then it seems to me that it is as relevant and as vibrant and as meaningful as it ever was.
I suggest this because it was a living thing right from its origins. The Ten Commandments came from a specific people. And that group had just been impoverished, subjugated, and oppressed by the Egyptians. For years, the Jewish people had lived under the tyranny of the Pharaoh. Some had been given some freedom within that, like Moses, but others had been subjugated and turned into a slave class. What happened to these dislocated people? God intervenes and saves them. God liberates them. God sets them free. Once they are set free, they become a distinct people. I believe that The Ten Commandments actually begins, in metaphorical terms, when Moses went to Pharaoh and said, “Let my people go.” The moment he said that, a whole movement ensued that led to the liberation and the salvation of the People of Israel. The Ten Commandments came to a people who had just lived in the power and the oppression of a foreign power.
The Ten Commandments also go beyond that. They form these people and they turn them into a community. When the People of Israel left Egypt, they had no governance, they had no way of electing leaders, they had no courts, and they had no monarch. They had no document to suggest who they should be; rather they were a nomadic group who left a place of oppression. And now, they emerge with The Ten Commandments. As John Oswalt, the great Old Testament scholar said, “This is what made these people distinct.” It forms them as a people. It created them as a people. It made them unique within the world. The Ten Commandments become a response by the people to the God who set them free.
The law, The Ten Commandments, were never intended to save Israel. Only later on do we find that writers believed that the law saved – and the Apostle Paul of all people objected to that notion! No, it was never intended to save. After all, the people had been saved already when they were brought out of Egypt. The law doesn’t save; the law is a response of the people to the God who saved them. It is a living statement of gratitude and respect for the character of the God who has set them free. But it also sets the guidelines for them to worship. The People of Israel had a distinct form of worship. They had no other gods – that is the very first thing! Unlike the pagans around them who had a plethora of gods; the People of Israel were told not to make any graven images; there were no other gods. They were told quite plainly and distinctly that they must also adhere to a special day, and that special day, the Sabbath, was a response to the God who had set them free. It was to reflect the nature of creation. The Sabbath was there for them to distinctly worship God; to set them apart from all the other nations of the earth.
It was also a code through which they could live. The Ten Commandments become the domain and range of the covenant community. They become the guidelines for the covenant community. It defines who you are when you obey The Ten Commandments. As Gunther Plaut, the great rabbi who used to be at Holy Blossom and the Toronto writer and scholar, says, that is why the community must always read The Torah, must always read The Ten Commandments, because reading it informs and creates the very people themselves. I agree for it reminds them of who they are, and of the character of the God who made them. Therefore, when you disobey the Commandments, you have moved yourself outside the covenant community. You see what I mean when I say it is a living relationship? This is not a dead document of some boring, stuffy rules that you need to memorize; it is a living relationship with God. It is God who formed Israel. It is God who decided the nature of their worship. It is God who created the moral foundation for them to exist. It was God who had set them free, who is now giving them the means to stay free. This is the living relationship between Israel and The Ten Commandments.
The question I ask is: is this a living relationship now? I love that the very famous Rabbi Telushkin tells the story of when he had gone to a breakfast meeting with a Lutheran minister. On the way out, the Lutheran minister says to the rabbi, “Keep the faith!”
The rabbi turns towards him and says, “Keep the Commandments!”
And the two of them go off. Both, says Telushkin, are right. You keep the faith by keeping the Commandments. You keep the Commandments as a response of the faith that you have. After all, if there is no faith, then what would the Commandments mean? If, as I suggested last week, “What is the point of the Commandments if you don’t have the faith of Abraham?” Likewise, if you have the faith of Abraham, you want to keep the Commandments in response to the God in who you believe. It is a living relationship.
I know there is a great, big debate at the moment about whether The Ten Commandments are universal, particularly south of the border where they argue and debate about whether The Ten Commandments should be in courtrooms or schools or universities, whether The Ten Commandments are a public document or a private document of faith. This seems to me to be a rather strange argument to have, because The Ten Commandments are born out of faith. They are born out of a response to the living God, and the issue is not whether these Commandments should be up on the wall to remind everyone that there is a God looking over them, but rather the concern should be whether people have a living relationship with God in the first place. To suggest that the Commandments by themselves are going to make us holy and righteous and pure is nonsense! It is faith that drives us to fulfill the Commandments, not the other way around. The Commandments are a response.
If they are a response, then they should be a source of freedom too. No one talks about The Ten Commandments more than Jesus, believe it or not. He talked about them often in the context of the Sabbath, which by the way takes up most of the commentary you will notice in the passage that was read this morning. So much of the confrontation that Jesus had with the religious leaders was about the Sabbath and keeping it holy. It seems to me that rabbis at the time of Jesus were more interested in keeping people out of the Covenant than bringing them in. Jesus, on the other hand, was more interested in bringing them in to the Covenant than driving them out. You see that in Luke 13, where he heals a woman on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees are critical of him for doing so. Jesus heals the woman anyway and then he says, “You hypocrites, you let your donkeys and you let your cows go out and drink water on the Sabbath. You let them do the work. You unlock the door. You let them out, because you don’t want them to die. Well, God doesn’t want this woman to die either, and he is healing her on the Sabbath (paraphrase).” In other places, Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for humanity; not humanity the Sabbath.
In other words, the law is there for our protection. The law is there for our help. The law is there from the God who saves us in the first place. Jesus is being classically rabbinical. He is trying to bring the wayward people into the Covenant by healing and restoring and giving sight to the blind and giving the lame the ability to walk. He is healing people and bringing them in. He is taking sinners, who were outside the Covenant, and bringing them into the Covenant. Jesus spent time bringing people in, not pushing them out. That is the life-giving power of The Ten Commandments.
The Ten Commandments do something else. I read a wonderful piece by Charles Allen in a book I was given this week called, God’s Psychiatry. In it, he quotes Sholem Asch, a very noted Jewish writer who contributed to the book, The East River:
When a man labours for a livelihood, but not to accumulate wealth, then he is not a slave. Therefore, it is that God granted the Sabbath, for it is by the Sabbath that we know that we are not working animals, born to eat and to labour; we are people. It is the Sabbath that is man’s goal, not labour. But, the rest, which he earns from his labour, was because the Jews made the Sabbath holy to God that they were redeemed from slavery in Egypt. It was by the Sabbath that they were proclaimed that they were not slaves, but free people.
In other words, as Jesus said, the Sabbath was made for us; not us for the Sabbath. The nature of the law was not that labour be the goal of life, but that rest be the reward. To reflect creation, God’s redeeming power, and the people who are responsive to God, we keep a day that is holy. It doesn’t matter if it is a Saturday or a Sunday. Within the calendar that we have, we need to set a day aside to be free from all the demands and constraints that are out there in our world. I think a lot of the sickness, a lot of the breakdown in families, and in society as a whole can often be attributed to the fact that we don’t have enough rest. We are so driven by the notion of labour that we forget why God gave us the Sabbath in the first place. The Sabbath was made to restore us. The law is there to heal us and to restore us, just as God wanted to save the people from the grip of the Egyptians, so God wants to save us from any tyranny that makes us bound to it.
This raises the big challenge for you: What kind of world do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a world where it is actually wrong to murder somebody? Where marriage is sacred and there is trust? Where we are not spending all our time as covetous people, always anxious because we don’t have what someone else has? Where private property and the things that you own matter and people shouldn’t steal? Do you want a world that tells the truth and does not bear false witness? A world that has the very things that The Ten Commandments put in place?
I would also argue that whether it is Constitutional Law or the Common Law, so many of the notions of the good that we have actually derive from The 10 Commandments. I think Kalb is right. I think they constitute the foundation of the very thing that causes us to live in freedom. As John Stott, the great Christian writer, who I adore and who passed away a few years ago said, “Can you imagine a world where there are roads with no curbs and no lines or constraints? You can simply drive along those roads however you want. What kind of anarchy would you have? You need curbs and you need lines, and you need something to guide you’” He affirms this because there is a fundamental difference between licence and freedom. Licence is to say you have the liberty to do whatever you please; freedom is based on something that actually provides a framework through which we live freely.
Kalb had it right: The law is for our freedom, not our constraint. It is for our good, not our evil. It will never save us; God alone saves us. But being obedient to the law is our response in faith to the God who loves us. Jesus is imploring his followers to once again take seriously The Ten Commandments, not as a replacement for his grace and the Cross, but rather a reminder that the Cross brings us back into the Covenant of the Commander. Amen.