I have a challenge for you. Take a sheet of paper and down the left side, put the numbers one through 10. Then see how many of the Ten Commandments you can list from memory.
It’s an exercise I always do with confirmation classes here, as youth prepare to commit themselves to the Christian faith. (It’s always been youth in the classes, but adults are welcome too). In the Church of Ireland, someone being confirmed is supposed to memorise three things: the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. The youth are always nervous that on the day of the confirmation service, the Bishop will quiz them. He has never done it, but I want to make sure that the youth could list the Commandments if they had to.
So try it. See how you do.
Of course, listing the Ten Commandments is one thing. Obeying them is another. We read them in the space of what, a minute? Or the full version from the Bible, which was our first reading this morning, takes maybe a few minutes? But no matter how simple they may sound, or how easy to read, people have not been able to fulfil those Ten Commandments for the past few thousand years since they were first given.
The Ten Commandments were God’s instructions to a group of people wandering through the desert on their way to the Promised Land after escaping from slavery in Egypt. Moses was leading a motley band of thousands of people, and they needed some way of living together and not killing one another. I once heard someone say that the Ten Commandments are the basic instructions that a people need in order to exist as a society instead of tearing one another apart.
Except those people in the desert could not manage to live by them. Because they are really not very easy at all. For example, “You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbour.” Covet means desire, long for. So that means when you see that your neighbour, or your co-worker, has more money than you do, you don’t care at all. It doesn’t even enter your mind. Or, it means that when someone you dislike has a small bout of misfortune, you don’t have this wicked little feeling of satisfaction and triumph in the secret depths of your heart.
Even once the people reached the Promised Land, and life got better, they still could not follow these basic instructions. In the Bible, there is a line that shows up over and over again: “The people did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” So, people have had a hard time keeping these Commandments for a long time.
Jump forward a couple thousand years from the time of Moses to the time of Jesus. The people still can’t do it. Here in the Gospel today are the people and even the religious leaders in God’s Temple — the holy place — doing unholy things. Jesus accuses them of turning God’s house into a marketplace. Essentially, they are putting other things before God. They are disobeying one of those Ten Commandments.
Jump forward a couple more thousand years, and we still keep getting it wrong and having an awfully hard time following these simple commandments. Except they really are not that easy.
It’s not just the big sins we do badly at. In fact, many people in this world don’t do so badly at what we think of as the big sins: sex, money, and murder. Many people might read the Ten Commandments and think, I’m doing okay. But it’s all the subtle little ways where we go astray. So we may not have committed murder, but there are various little ways that we might kill a person’s spirit, such as by gossiping about them, or being disloyal to them, or saying hurtful things to them.
Even if we are doing okay with the big sins, I think we human beings recognise that something in us is not quite right, like our soul is out of joint. So we seek some easy way to fix our lives so that we can “get it right.”
For example, these days we have our own versions of the Ten Commandments to fit every need. If you just stand in a grocery store or a newsagent and scan the headlines on the magazines you can see them: 10 quick ways to lose weight and still eat all the foods you love; 7 easy techniques to make your special someone even more attracted to you; 5 investment methods guaranteed to triple your money practically overnight; 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Sometimes these lists might help in some way. But they never really work, and they just keep appearing on those magazine covers, because they don’t really work: they don’t affect the fundamental problem, which is that our soul is out of joint: we are somehow not quite in sync with God, with the Almighty who created the universe and who is the fundamental bedrock of reality and who offers us life abundant.
But here’s the thing: the way to grace, the way to peace, the way to God, the way of abundant life, the way to get our soul right, is not found in simply following instructions about how to behave. The only way to get it right is simply to throw ourselves on the cross of Christ. And that means letting everything that seems comfortable and easy just die.
The advice to throw ourselves on the cross of Christ has been around for 2,000 years. But people have always resisted it, beginning at the very beginning. It seems offensive, and silly. You can hear it in Paul’s Letter to the people in the city of Corinth. “The message about the cross,” he says, “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Paul goes on to say that one group wants signs, miracles, to know that Christ is the real thing. You can hear it in the Gospel, when the people say to Jesus after he has cleansed the Temple, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” They demand proof, some miraculous thing, for knowing Jesus is the Son of God. The Son of God being crucified was a scandal to them — a stumbling block they could get over. It was offensive.
Another group in Paul’s time — the Greeks — relied on philosophy, the life of the mind, we would call it. If something did not fit into their philosophical system, such as Christ being crucified, then it was foolishness. It was silly.
In our own time, we are not so far off from either of these groups. Demanding a “sign” is like looking for something that seems certain, you can’t go wrong, like those self-help lists in magazines: a technique you think will take you where you want to go.
Others in our time are like the Greeks: having some predetermined system about how things are supposed to be. Such as, God is supposed to be our friend and be nice to us, according to how I define “nice.” Or, I don’t like some of the things the Bible says; they’re offensive. So we reject the whole package.
And others simply immerse themselves in the life of the mind, thinking their intelligence will save them. It won’t.
And then there is the way of behaviour. If we just act right, then we will be right, some believe. But even if we could successfully follow the Ten Commandments to the letter, that does not earn us God’s favor.
No, the only way to God, to the abundant life, is to let go of what we think is the way, what we have worked out to be the comfortable, even easy, way, and to throw ourselves on God’s mercy in the way of the cross of Christ. It is to say, okay, God, I give up. Help me. Show me. You be my feet and my hands and my thoughts and my speech. It is to allow all our attempts to save ourselves, to make ourselves right — it is to let them die — and to let ourselves be reborn in Christ.