May 14, 2012   Brian Lewis, Ballarat, Australia   Brian's previous articles

 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS  

(Comments welcome here)

As a devout Jew, Jesus of course accepted and drew upon the moral teachings of the Old Testament, including both the law (literally the 'instruction of God') and the prophets. The Mosaic Law (which included much more than the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue) underwent many changes in Israel until, in about 500 it was finally committed to writing in the form in which we now have it in the five books of the Pentateuch. By literary convention it was given more force by being put into the mouth of Moses the great lawgiver and so ultimately became the word, the law, of God himself.  

In the Pentateuch the Covenant is at the root of Israel's relationship with God and of the law. In response to God's loving providence in their regard, the people are to obey the law as an expression of their love for God. Even more, they are to love God himself and to model their behaviour on God's love for them, by feeding the hungry and the poor, saving the oppressed and delivering those who are threatened.  

This is much more than what is set out in the second table of the Ten Commandments. In fact, it is doubtful whether the Decalogue functions as a moral code either in the Old or the New Testament. Even though as a whole it may be understood as a concentrate of the Mosaic Law, its moral precepts are not unique to Israel and certainly do not exhaust the moral demands laid upon the people in responding to God.  

No doubt our imagination has been greatly influenced by the vivid and dramatic biblical story of the giving by God of the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone to Moses amid thunder and lightning on Mt. Sinai and portrayals like the Cecil B. de Mille embellishment of this on the silver screen. We may have been led perhaps to accept without question that this is what literally happened. However, the Book of Exodus account does not put the Decalogue in the setting of this story at all and many of its provisions in fact come from a later period of Israel's history. As with many biblical stories, the literary embellishments are not meant to be taken literally. In this instance the point of the dramatic setting and the role of Moses the great Legislator was to emphasise that God's chosen people should be a moral people and that by living together in a moral way they were to serve Yahweh.  

It is a common misrepresentation of reality to begin citing Exodus 20:2 with the words 'I am the Lord your God' and immediately add the ten precepts before completing the verse, 'who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery', as this transforms what was intended to be a moral life lived in response to Yahweh's benevolence into an arbitrary set of commands unrelated to such a previous pattern of divine activity. The commands are important but certainly not in the sense that God directly revealed moral commandments according to a literal reading of the Bible. They are statements which encapsulate the human moral experience that is the common heritage of all peoples and that must be part of any truly moral system.  

For Jesus, the law remained significant and the Ten Commandments can express God's will and be an important guide to what God asks in a particular situation. However, only a fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture would ascribe to Jesus the role of legislator in the light of the Gospel story of the rich young man (Matt 19:16-29) and maintain that Jesus, as the new Moses, again promulgates the Ten Commandments. Such an interpretation misses the point of the story. The youth asks Jesus a stock rabbinical question, to which Jesus simply gives the stock rabbinical answer by listing some at least of the commandments. But for Jesus this is not enough. More is required by the Good News of the Kingdom – and this is the point of the story: the following of Jesus demands more than mere obedience to the law or to the commandments enshrined in it. Laws are necessary and good as far as they go, but a morality that is based on them and limited to them falls short of the demands of the Kingdom. Jesus makes larger claims on his followers, who must be prepared if required to sacrifice not only material possessions but home and family as well. The morality required by the Kingdom must take account of valid laws but it cannot be contained by them or restricted to them. By nature it transcends every legal system, which might  pretend to set limits to human responsibility. It must, in a word, be open-ended, knowing no boundaries beyond the needs of one's neighbour.  

Today some moral norms or laws said to be formal, because they define the form or the shape of moral living. They set forth the sort of person one should be, for example, 'loving', 'honest', 'fair minded', 'just'. Although these formal moral norms are expressed in a prescriptive way, either positively, for example, 'Love and do what is good, avoid what is evil', 'Honour your parents', 'Be loving', 'Be honest', 'Be just', 'Be respectful of others', or negatively, 'Do not murder', 'Do not steal', 'Do not commit adultery', 'Do not covet your neighbour's spouses or possessions', they express basic moral obligations in a general and exhortative way. They are very fundamental moral truths or principles.  

The Ten Commandments are good examples of formal norms. They are certainly not without content, but, like all formal norms for living, they do not give us specific information about what to do in order to be loving or honest or just or respectful of life. They simply put before us very important aspects of what we ought to be or become as human persons living in community with other people. As Pope John Paul II said, 'the different commandments of the Decalogue are really only so many reflections of the one commandment about the good of the human person, at the level of the many different goods which characterise his/her identity as a spiritual and bodily being in relationship with God, with neighbour and with the material world' (Veritatis Splendor, n.13). The Catechism of the Catholic Church goes on, 'At the same time, they teach us man's true humanity. They shed light on the essential duties, and so indirectly on the fundamental rights, inherent in the nature of the human person' (n.2070)  

Formal laws of this kind are always valid and permit of no exceptions. It can never be morally good to be unloving or dishonest or unjust or disrespectful of others in their persons or in their possessions. These formal laws are therefore absolutes. So we can and should use them in our teaching and preaching and discussions about morality without fear of contradiction, in order to motivate one another and our children to be morally good in so many different ways.