Lent is not just a time for self denial; I suggest it’s more helpfully a time for self-examination and a return to basics with a view to readying ourselves for the new life which we celebrate at Easter.
A couple of weeks ago, I thought that we should attempt that spiritual self-examination as individuals. But we are, of course, not just individuals; we are not islands, we are all part of the main, part of families, communities, wider society, a nation and international communities and it is the regulation of our behaviour in these that the Ten Commandments are mostly intended to achieve.
In our Gospel, Jesus, as he did at Cana in Galilee sets out a new scenario to replace the old Law; the ritual water in the huge jars and the traders selling sacrificial animals both represent the Old Law, the Old Testament. I hesitate to say our Lord misses the point in complaining about the temple as a market place or as the other Gospel writers have it, a den of thieves. I’m encouraged, however, by the observation that we do not know for certain anything that Jesus said; all we have is the record of what his followers thought he said or thought he should have said. The corruption and venality of the temple trading would, no doubt, have seemed to many observers and later commentators as the most objectionable aspect of its ritual.
The real point ,however, for clearing the temple was that with God’s intervention in the world in the form of Jesus, there was no more need for a temple and sacrifices. Jesus himself had become the mediation and propitiation between human and divine. As the disciples come to understand, three years later, in the crucifixion and resurrection we attain a new relationship with God, one which replaces Temple ritual and the crowd of arcane rules about purity, diet and behaviour, on which the Pharisees were so keen. These are replaced with a personal and communal commitment to God and the new creation, or kingdom, that Jesus brings.
The Temple was, however, not just a conduit between God and the individual; it was also the focus of the Jewish nation, where, as we hear vividly in the account of Pentecost in Acts, the disparate Jewish community met. It is that communal commitment, including, perhaps encapsulated in, the Ten Commandments that Jesus renews and redefines in the resurrection. Those Commandments are not arcane, but they do form part of the old Law which Jesus is seen as fulfilling or replacing and at very least reviewing.
The Commandments seek to enshrine the basic tenets regulating our relations with God and with one another, but like all such expressions of law, and especially such lapidary ones, they invite much qualification and many exclusions. For example: perhaps all parents should be loved, but not all should be honoured; while a weekly day of rest is desirable, that need not entail doing nothing on Saturday or Sunday; murder may never be justified, but few societies have thought all killing wrong; theft pre-supposes a concept of property which is far from universally accepted; while it’s inconceivable that lying to convict an innocent person could be justified, we do not think telling the truth is always right; and I have even known a case when a little judicious adultery saved a marriage.
Jesus sums up the underlying principles of these Commandments in his injunction that we should “Love the Lord God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself” Until I thought about it for this sermon, loving God always seemed a curious-indeed impossible- idea. The only way it seemed to me to love God was through loving one’s neighbour and the vast and intricate moral system which that implied. Loving God in a vacuum made no sense. I now think I see what it does or can mean and why, as in first few of the Ten Commandments, our relation to God provides the basis of our duty to our fellow creatures and creation itself.
It’s perhaps easier to see the logic if we take the second commandment-the prohibition on graven images- first. This is not meant as a prohibition on all figurative art, but it is a reminder that we are not God; we can (and should) work with creation but we are not above it and cannot replace it with our own work. The environmental crisis is the consequence of doing just that, but belief in a creating God and the respect that belief entails, is equally the basis for human ethics. It also implies that we have no other object of our worship (commandment number one) and that we treat God with respect (commandment number three). It is because we believe ourselves (and indeed all the creatures with whom we share this world) to be made in God’s image that we must respect and in the widest sense love them.
This is illustrated by the problem, that is the problem that I see, with humanism. Humanism places human beings above, or rather in place of God. Many, even most, humanists are certainly good people (and better than many Christians) but there is something arid and pointless (and even selfish) in a system which puts human beings at its centre. The concept of “Human rights” may be a useful portmanteau for our duties to our fellows but it’s essentially mistaken and potentially dangerous unless it sees in humanity an image of God, the creating and loving force in the world.
It is God’s intervention in the world in Jesus which shows us the full nature of that love, creating a new world which replaces or fulfils the rule laden world of the Old Testament, replacing the Temple as the focus or our religious life with a garden again, full of plants pleasant to sight and good for food, which will not fade or decay. A suitable task for Lent, is to examine, in all the communities and wider societies in which we live, how and by what principles we may ourselves become instruments of that love and thus become worthy inhabitants of the that garden. Amen.