3rd Sunday of Lent B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2009

Did you notice the first verse of today's Responsorial Psalm? It said: The law of the Lord is perfect, it revives the soul. It revives the soul..!! Is that how you would describe your attitude to the Ten Commandments? Equally pertinent, could it describe your experience of the Ten Commandments? For myself, it usen't to. But then, when I was first introduced to the commandments, I was only a young lad - and I learnt them as they were in the Catechism. Unfortunately, the Catechism gave only the abbreviated version. It was easier to learn them that way, but it made it almost inevitable to see them more like a lot of regulations. Regulations hardly revive the soul! However, when we see them in their original, unabbreviated version - as we have them in today's Reading - it is possible to get a different feel. Of course, as a young lad, even if I had the fuller version, I doubt that I could have experienced that different feel. I didn't have an ear for poetry; I tended to take things literally: and I hadn't matured enough to see the deeper truth behind the words.

We are dealing with ancient literature coming out of a culture that, in lots of ways, was still somewhat unsophisticated. Its insights into God were sometimes truly profound, but its language, its mindset, and its assumptions were often unsophisticated and unnuanced. 

Let's have a look at how the section starts. It is written in the First Person - as though God were actually speaking and someone was taking it down in writing. It starts off: I am the Lord, your God. For all their unsophistication, the early Hebrews developed a profound sense of God as mystery. Out of respect, they would never use the Name of God -  it was too sacred. So whenever the word occurred in a passage, they would say aloud the word “the Lord”. More accurately, the opening words would read: I am .... , your God. What was written was not the Lord, but a sort of name - that was not really a name at all. It was a verb; and it means: I am, or I am what I am, or I will be what I will be, or, simply, Being. Not a thing – one God among many, but simply, the act of being: unclassifiable, unnameable, so, beyond description, beyond comprehension: unknowable mystery. 

The next line (left out in the catechism) then added: ... your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The Hebrews had this profound insight that this essentially unknowable God was a liberating God,  a God who valued freedom - who led them out of the house of slavery. The rest of what follows needs to be read from that perspective - not as imposition from without (That would be slavery) but as the way  to grow towards freedom, to take hold of freedom, as individuals - but also as “individuals in community”. Human freedom, even before God, was so important, so non-negotiable, so essential to becoming truly human, that the only way they had - given the limitations of their culture, was to express that non-negotiability in terms of “you must” and “you must not” - that is, as commands. To confirm the necessity, they added the ideas of reward and punishment. 

As mature adults, we can recognise that that non-negotiability of the details that followed - the ten commandments - is derived not from externally and arbitrarily imposed and sanctioned regulations. Rather, it comes from our recognition of what sits harmoniously with, or, conversely, what compromises, our personal sense of who and what we really are - our sense of human dignity. That dignity finds its expression in what we call conscience: that mature sense of what's right and wrong, and the sense of being bound and obligated from within – from our own search of inner harmony. 

That's as far as I want to go this morning - but I hope that it is enough to open up or to confirm  a more nuanced insight into  what we call the Ten Commandments. To the extent that  we succeed, then perhaps we can claim with the Psalmist: The law of the Lord is perfect, it revives the soul.