Ten Commandments: God’s gift to us

Fr. Vincent Hawkswell

This Sunday’s First Reading and Gospel Reading speak about the Ten Commandments that God gave Moses.

Human beings are created, not self-made; finite, not infinite. Accordingly, human nature has “insurmountable limits” which we “must freely recognize and respect with trust,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

We learn very early in life that we live in a world of laws: we discover that fire burns, rain wets, and objects fall toward the earth.

We may not like these laws, but no one is free from them. We can be free within them, but only if we know them. If we do not know them, or if we know them but ignore them, they damage us or even destroy us.

Coming to know them means discovering them, not inventing them. We find out what they are; we cannot create them or abolish them once we have found them.

Now just as there are laws that govern our bodies, so there are laws which govern our souls. In particular, there is the moral law, or the Law of Right and Wrong.

As with the material laws, we may not like these laws, but no one is free from them. We can be free within them, but only if we know them. If we do not know them, or if we know them but ignore them, they damage us or even destroy us, just like the material law.

As with the material laws, coming to know the moral laws means discovering them, not inventing them. We find out what they are; we cannot create them or abolish them once we have discovered them.

Law of freedom

From the beginning, God implanted the Law of Right and Wrong in our hearts, but when Adam and Eve fell, our wills became perverted and our reason obscured. In our fallen state we needed to be reminded of the moral law and have it fully explained to us. Accordingly, God gave us the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments were a gift from God. By highlighting the duties and the rights inherent in human nature, God taught us how to be fully human, preparing us to become friends with Him and to live in harmony with our neighbors.

Moreover, God gave us this gift while He was freeing the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, introducing it with the words, “I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The Ten Commandments describe the life of a person who is free from slavery to sin.

Finally, God gave us this gift as part of a covenant in which He swore that we would be His people and He would be our God. In obeying the commandments we live in the way which is imposed on us by our adoption into God’s family.

If we understand properly what the Ten Commandments are, we see that there can be no question of God’s changing them, for God Himself is unchangeable. Nor, for a good God Who loves His people, can there be any question of His mitigating them, for if we are to live the life of God we must keep them perfectly.

However, it proved impossible for fallen human beings to keep the commandments perfectly. The Israelites broke every one of the five Old Covenants that God made with them.

Law fulfilled

As God renewed His covenants with them, again and again, the Jewish scribes tried to help the people keep the law by prescribing exactly how it should be understood in all possible circumstances. By Jesus’s time they had elaborated the Law until it had become thousands upon thousands of rules and regulations, occupying more than 50 volumes. In order to even try to keep them all, the Pharisees had separated themselves from the ordinary activities of life. (The name “Pharisee” means “separated one.”)

In contrast, the scribe in the Gospel Reading realized that to love God with all one’s being and to love one’s neighbor as oneself “is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices”: all the rules and regulations. Accordingly, Jesus said that he was “not far from the Kingdom of God.”

However, Jesus did not abolish the Law. “I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill,” He said. He fulfilled the Law by keeping it Himself “in its all-embracing detail,” down to “the least of the commandments,” as no one could except the divine Lawgiver, born subject to the Law in the Person of God the Son.

In fact, He gave the Law its ultimate, divine interpretation. “You have heard the commandment imposed on your forefathers,” He said repeatedly. “What I say to you is....” and what He said made the commandment not only more simple, but also more demanding.

Finally, by dying on the cross, He took upon Himself “the curse of the Law” (the punishments or judgments or consequences) incurred by those who do not “abide by the things written in the book of the Law,” in order to redeem them “from the transgressions under the first covenant,” the Old Covenant.

By doing so, He became our great High Priest, “holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens,” but at the same time the Mediator between God and man, Who continuously offers the sacrifice of Himself to His Father for us. Only in Him can we offer “a pure sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins,” as we say in the Prayer Over the Gifts; and that is what we do when we offer the Mass.