The recent shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, the 17 innocent lives lost, and the severely injured remain a focus of my prayer life. I have been reflecting a lot this Lent on how careless, violent actions and words can leave permanent scars on the hearts of God’s people and take a lifetime to repair and overcome. On this Third Sunday of Lent, I am drawn to the teachings of Exodus on the 10 Commandments. Like many of you, I became familiar with these commandments in my childhood through my parents and religious educators. I was taught that these 10 commandments were a foundation for building healthy relationships within myself, God and others. Israel’s ancient commandments address the very brokenness of our human nature that often compels us to “treat people like things and things like people.”
The 10 Commandments remain an integral part of our faith and a much larger narrative of the Exodus story. God’s chosen people are released from Egypt and freed from slavery. We hear these words prefacing the commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Observance of the Law becomes a healthy and appropriate human response to God’s all-encompassing love.
On any given day, you and I can find it difficult to observe God’s words, keeping both the letter and the spirit of what God is asking of us. In conscientiously trying to observe the commandments, we need to remember that these commandments were given to a people whom God had already saved and loved. St. Paul reminds us that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world. As St. Paul grew spiritually, he began to understand the power of Christ’s triumph on the cross and the problem of trying to earn God’s approval by merely “keeping” the commandments.
St. Paul acknowledged that the law, indeed, sets out God’s holy expectations of the way we should act towards Him and one another. Yet, the very way in which it redirects our attention and focus towards our own activity and away from God’s activity is the law’s weakness. In and of itself the law can’t lead to newness of life. It doesn’t resolve the inner conflict, the conflict within our soul. This insufficiency of the Law is a real issue in Jesus’ ministry and teaching. Jesus is a controversial teacher in John’s Gospel. Today’s Gospel narrative of how Jesus enters the Temple and chases out the money-changers and the animal-sellers is a good example. The confrontation between Jesus and the merchants is really a conflict over priorities. Who Jesus is and what he represents clashes with the values espoused by the religious institutional leaders. Jesus challenges them.
After chasing out those who had set up their businesses in the immediate Temple area, Jesus makes a mysterious reference to the destruction of the Temple and to its being “raised” up again. Generations later, you and I understand Jesus’ words to be an image of his own death and resurrection, whereas the Jewish authorities think he literally means the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus saw that this human construction of this Temple had become the object of devotion: an idol, an end in itself, rather than the living God. Despite all the good things the Temple was supposed to represent, Jesus knew that, in their misplaced devotion to a building, people had let their focus be redirected away from the divine to the human. Despite the Temple’s importance, people were giving to their rites, customs, holy places, even to their laws, the special devotion due only to God.
They missed entirely the spirit of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Our religious practices and preferences, too, can, and often do, become lesser gods, idols, for us if we make them the chief objects of our devotion. The universal temptation is to become so preoccupied with the desire to excel and to succeed as “Christians” that we begin to focus on what we think we should do, rather than on the fact that, as Paul says, “…Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24-25) has already spelled it out for us through his death and resurrection. The commandments are important words about what God intends for us. We and the society in which we live need to take them much more seriously than we do. That being said, the reality is that Christian faith and practice entails far more than rules and regulations. It has to do primarily with relationships. The commandments are observed by inner integrity and not by mere external compliance to a rule. That is why the entire Law can be contained in the injunction to love God and neighbor, because this is a religious observance that originates in the heart. Oscar Romero, the martyred Archbishop of El Salvador said it best: “Let us not measure the church by the numbers of its members or its material buildings. The church has built many houses of worship, many seminaries, many buildings that have been taken from her. They have been stolen and turned into libraries, and barracks and markets and other things. That doesn’t matter. The material walls here will be left behind in history. What matters is you, the people, your hearts, God’s grace giving you truth and life. Don’t measure yourselves by your numbers. Measure yourselves by the sincerity of heart with which you follow the truth and light of our divine Redeemer (December 19, 1977).