“Then God spoke all these words: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”
Every wonder just how closely we listen when God speaks? Or even, if God still speaks at all? It seems like almost every day I find someone who will lament to me the loss of public prayer in schools, or the perception of a ‘liberal’ agenda that wants to – and I use their word – eliminate Christianity from the public sphere. But really, is public prayer and using the government to push a socially conservative agenda really what “listening to God” looks and sounds like?
It should be easy to hear God speaking, right? I mean, most of you have seen the movie The 10 Commandments with Charleton Heston: I always remember this one line: guns don’t kill people; apes with guns kill people!
Sorry, wrong movie.
Yet one thing we can generally agree on as Christians: when God speaks, we should be listening. And I mean, actively listening.
You have to wonder, though…what are all the words that God speaks? How can we know?
Probably, a good rule of thumb is that we know God’s word by anticipating the exact opposite of what we are thinking.
Then God spoke all these words: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the
The 10 Commandments are, without a doubt, an integral part of the religious life of at least three of the world’s great religions. Certainly, they are central to our lives as Christians, and as they form the first part of Luther’s Small Catechism, they are foundational to our Lutheran theological tradition. Sometimes they’re written in stone, - as they were on the tablets that Moses received – and maybe sometimes they’re written on the rock of our hearts.
And even though God reminded the Israelites that God brought them OUT of the land of slavery, we can turn a perceived obedience to the 10 commandments into just another kind of slavery.
Like clockwork someone can be counted on to refer to the 10 Commandments as justifying grounds for their own judgement of an issue: the 10 Commandments say…I remember once struggling to speak with someone who insisted that the 10 commandments included rules that forbade women pastors and said that homosexuals should be put to death.
On their surface, the 10 commandments are negative imperatives: you shall not…but in reality the ‘don’t’ part is only a little piece of what they mean. Taken as a whole, the 10 commandments are good, they’re comforting, and for the Israelites they form an identity, a purpose, and even a sense of security.
For Christians in the Lutheran tradition, our understanding of the 10 commandments is – or should be, rather – irreversibly tied to a juxtaposition: “we are to fear and love God so that we do not…but instead…” Fundamentally, the 10 commandments become about commitment to God and compassion for our neighbour. Rather than tying us down, they free us to be in relationship with each other and affirm God’s relationship to us.
To a people wandering in the wilderness when God speaks, God gives an identity, a rule, and words of comfort, life, and hope.
Then God spoke all these words: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the
God speaks often, even continuously. At the beginning of Genesis, it’s written that God spoke, and the world came into being. God is always speaking, and we try – try – to listen.
But what do we hear?
Most often, we hear the message that our sinful and self-centred hearts want us to hear: that the privilege of being spoken to is our right; rather than the responsibility of listening to the call to form a community.
In the gospel lesson today, Jesus is still answering the Pharisee’s question from last week: “by what authority do you do the things you do?” Having used the example of the two sons, Jesus today turns to a metaphor that his listeners would know: a vineyard. In particular, Jesus relates this vineyard to a song that the prophet Isaiah sings of another vineyard, one that bore bitter fruit.
The Pharisees know the story that Jesus refers to, but in his telling there’s something not-quite-right about it. Both parties in the story seem equally ludicrous – the folly of the owner, who twice sends slaves and once, his son. Having his slaves beaten, killed, and stoned, the owner reasons that the tenants will respect his son. The tenants themselves are right out of a comic opera: having beaten the servants, they believe that if they kill the son they will gain his inheritance. To the tenants, the vineyard has become their privilege rather than their responsibility.
When Jesus asks, “what will the owner do when he returns?” the Pharisees respond in a way that shows they understand themselves to be the owners of the vineyard: “he will put those wretches to a miserable death and put in responsible tenants!” Their response is to cry out for the death of the first tenants, and to give the vineyard to others.
Like us, they hear what they want to: what is going to give us power, or self-righteousness. The power of judgement, they believe, is theirs.
In the 10 commandments, we can’t ever really get past the first one: you shall have no other gods before me. We always know what’s best, or better, for everyone else. They just need to listen to us, right? We like to be the judge in God’s place.
But how does Jesus respond to his own question?
Then God spoke all these words…
Instead of answering his own question, Jesus turns instead to talking about architecture. It’s a bit of a tangent; but at other places Jesus refers to himself as the
The cornerstone – the incarnate Word of God – is far harder than the rock of our hearts. The Pharisees response (and ours) to the story of the tenants of the vineyard reveals their own hardness of heart. The Pharisees are aghast at the mercy of the landowner; so are we.
Because, beloved, the tenants are right: they will kill the Son, and collect his inheritance.
God will break our hearts until we see God’s own stubborn insistence on being merciful to us; because if the landowner condemns the tenants and puts them to death – after previously showing mercy – then the landowner becomes no different than the tenants, and their way of interacting with the world wins.
We are the tenants of the vineyard; we have received the inheritance of the son. We believe that we can keep the fruits of our lives and God’s gifts to ourselves. We reject those who may come to us in God’s name and ask us to share a portion of the vineyard’s harvest – to open our hearts. When the Son comes, we reject him, too.
We are dying for forgiveness. We are ready to kill others – to kill with words, with our actions in our communities, and even with weapons of war – we are ready to kill to show God how ready we are for forgiveness, for righteousness. What we miss is that forgiveness and life are offered freely, the whole time we are trying to gain it for ourselves.
And what does God say?
Then God spoke all these words:
“This is my body, given for you. This is my life, poured out for you.”
God’s word reveals God’s own stubborn insistence to show mercy to God’s chosen people. The word is not always good; too often it reveals what we thought to be right and good as wrong, and evil. It cracks and breaks the rock of our hearts, crushes our self-righteousness and self-centredness, stands in the midst of our brokenness as a model of what is whole – and holy.
The 10 commandments are some of the most enduring words given to us by God – but they also are a means of mercy to guide and direct us to a life centred on a radical commitment to God and lived out in compassion for those around us.
In the beginning, God spoke. And God still speaks, and the creative power of God’s word will bring about the new creation in our hearts and all around us. In our midst, God speaks to us, calls us to live lives that are centred around God’s healing and renewing mercy that breaks the rock of our hearts – but gives us life, and salvation.
Let the people of God say amen.
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